What are Automation Triggers
Automation Triggers are the situations which cause an Automation Action to run. Automations are incredibly powerful when used the correct way. They are also an ever-growing collection of triggers and actions (depending on which extensions you use).
Default Triggers
The default triggers that are available in the Automations extension are the following
- New Contact
- New Quote
- New Invoice
- New Transaction
This means that whenever a new contact (or quote, etc) is added to your CRM, you can trigger automations to do an action for you. This is powerful stuff.
Automation Conditions
Triggers are great, but when combined with a condition then the triggers become really powerful. A condition is something which will prevent the automation from running its action unless the condition is met.
New Contact Conditions
The most popular trigger to run actions on is the new contact trigger. When a contact is added to your CRM you may do a lot of things manually. Automations lets you set up your trigger and condition so you can remove the manual part and do this automatically. The conditions available are
- Has Status
- Has Tag
- Field Contains
This means you can setup an Automation to run an action if a certain condition is met. Lets have a look at how this would work with Field contains
So you can choose any of your contact fields (including custom fields) and set them up so that the automation will run if a condition is met.
For example, I could set up the following automation triggers.
- On new contact, if Country = “UK” then..
- On new contact, if Country = “India” then…
This is the start of what an automation is, with conditions (you can do the same with status, and tag), e.g.
- On new contact, if tagged “VIP” then..
- On new contact, if status = “Customer” then…
Automation Actions
This is where the bang for the buck hits. You can configure your rules to run on certain scenarios as above, and now it’s time to look at what actions you can take. The default actions are
- Assign to
- Choose a CRM Team Member
- Send email to
- Site Admin
- Contact owner
- Contact
- Custom email
- Distribute to
- CRM Role
Now, this is pretty powerful, when combined with the example above, you can now see how
- On new contact, if Country = “UK” then.. becomes
- On new contact, if Country = “UK” then Assign to “Mike”
Or,
- On new contact, if Country = “UK” then send email to the Contact about UK events
- On new contact, if Country = “UK” then send an email to Admin.
What’s even more powerful is you can chain the automations up once you’ve set them up so you can do the following:-
- On new contact, if Country = “UK” then assign to “Mike”
- On new contact, if Country = “UK” then send email to “Contact owner”
What happens in the above example is that the new contact is assigned to Mike, and then Mike is sent an email about the contact.
Managing Automations
You can set up as many automations as you like and choose the order of them on the Automations page
On that page, you can manage whether the automation is running or not (i.e. the ON / OFF switch) and also the order in which they fire.
The order is important because in the example above, if your first step is to assign to a contact THEN send an email, this won’t work if you have the order as Send Email, then Assign to Contact.
Extensions and Automations
There are extensions which will add additional Automation triggers and actions to the available list. These are growing all the time and the best place to see what is available is through our Automations extension product page. The following additional automations are available through extensions
Additional Extension Triggers
- Stripe Event Triggers – coming soon – (requires Stripe Sync)
Additional Extension Actions
- Send SMS (if using Twilio Connector)
- Add ConvertKit tag (if using ConvertKit)