Automation Journeys

Automated emails—sometimes known as “drip campaigns”—are campaigns that are triggered to send automatically. Because they can be scheduled to respond to specific events and behaviors, like a subscriber signup, they can generate high open and click-through rates, while saving you time.

In Campaign Monitor, you can create journeys for your subscribers that contain one or more automated emails based on rules that you define.

When you select Create a new journey on the Automation page, you’ll see the option to Discover journeys. Some of the journeys that we can help you create are:

• anniversary offers, to automatically reward your customers on a special date
• first-purchase feedback, to share a customer survey after a purchase is made
• an educational series, to provide your readers with a timed series of lessons or other useful content

Using automation, you can put your email marketing on autopilot and see incredible engagement from your subscribers.

The most common type of journey is a welcome email series.

Welcome emails can be set up to immediately trigger after someone signs up for your list. While they can be used to just confirm the new subscription, it’s possible to schedule multiple emails over a period of time, say, to create a series of automated onboarding emails.

Let’s use the Journey Designer to create a new welcome email series.

To start, select Create a new journey. After you name your journey, you’ll choose a trigger. You can see a number of available triggers, including when someone joins a list, which is the action that kicks off a welcome email series.

Finally, select the subscriber list the journey will apply to.

Now it’s time to define the content in the first welcome email.

For a welcome series, you’ll typically send the initial email out with no time delay, so the first step will be to send an email.

We’ll name this step, give it a subject line and from name, then create the email content. You can view the video on using the Email Builder to learn more about this process.

Once the first email has been added, you can add subsequent emails to the journey. We can also include time delays between emails, as well as branching logic to deliver the most relevant messaging to your subscribers.

Once you have your journey looking the way you want, the final step is to make the journey live. Even after it’s live, you can still edit your email content or add extra emails.

While a welcome email series is the most common scenario that automation and Journeys are used for, there are many other ways you can use automation to create a successful email marketing strategy.