Workflow Builder Overview

I’m going to give you a quick overview of your platform’s workflow builder.

When you open the workflow builder, by default you'll be on the actions tab, where you can build your flows. But let's first take a look at some of the other tabs before we get started with the building.

Navigating Workflow

Click the “Settings” tab.

 You've got a few options here, and the first is a sending window. 

Setting a sending window means that the outgoing messages within your workflow will only go out during this window. You can build your window by day of the week, and by time frame as well.

This is a great way to prevent people from getting a text message in the middle of the night.

Next up is the allow multiple toggle. 

If you turn this on, it means that any single contact can go through this workflow more than once

If it's disabled, they can only go into the workflow once, and if a trigger tries to add them a second time, nothing will happen.

Then, you have the stop on response toggle.

If you turn this on, and a contact in this workflow replies to any of the messages that have gone out, or books an appointment, the rest of the workflow will shut down.

This is excellent for nurture campaigns, because you eliminate the possibility of annoying somebody by continually asking them to do something, like book an appointment, when they’ve already done it.

Next up is the auto mark as read toggle.

Normally, outbound messages from a workflow will show up in the Recents tab of conversations. If you want messages to go straight to the All tab, you can just enable this toggle.

Event Start Dates

Lastly, event start dates are a good option if you're running a webinar on a future date and want to do appointment reminders leading up to that date and time.

Let's say we have a webinar coming up on the 14th at 10 o'clock. We can set that date and time here. Then, in our workflow, we can use wait steps that wait until a specified amount of time before the webinar date and time.

Next, click the “Status Tab” and let's take a look.

The status tab shows you an overview of everybody who's been in this workflow, and where they're currently at in the workflow - some have finished the workflow and some are still at wait steps

You can see which step a contact is at in the CURRENT STEP column, as well as when the next action will happen for them in the NEXT EXECUTION column. 

If you click a contact’s execution log, it will take you to an overview of that contact’s progression through the workflow.

This is a top-to-bottom report of everything that's happened since the contact entered the workflow.

In this case, we can see that this person was added to the workflow. Then, we tried to send them an email, but there was an error and then they hit a wait step. And that's where they are right now.

Error

To get more information about an error or other workflow event, you can click the “Clipboard” under “More Details”.

For this contact, we can see that the error status was because the contact’s email address was invalid.

Moving on, click the “History Tab”. 

Here, we have a complete listing of every event that has happened in the workflow, including all contacts. The list is arranged in chronological order, and if we want more details about an event, we can click the clipboard as before.

Let’s click the “Clipboard” to check out the details for John Smith’s removal from the workflow event.

In this situation, the contact, John Smith, was removed because he had reached the end of the workflow.

However, information from event details can be very useful. Imagine if the reason for the removal was due to a reply - this could indicate that a Stopped on Reply toggle is accidentally enabled.

In addition, you can also click the “icon” next to a contact’s name from the History tab.

Unlike an execution log that shows all of a contact’s events since they’ve been added to the workflow, clicking the icon will show events for EVERY time the contact has been in the workflow. Entering a workflow multiple times is possible with the Allowed Multiple toggle.

This is a more complete view, and can be helpful in troubleshooting issues with your workflows.

Actions

 Now, let’s click the “Actions tab”.

The Actions tab is where you actually build your workflows.

All workflows start by adding a workflow trigger. In this case, the trigger is when a contact books an appointment on Test calendar. 

Please note that you can add multiple workflow triggers to add contacts from different sources or situations.

For example, let’s say you wanted to add contacts who also made an appointment on your Booked calendar.

You would simply click “Add New Workflow Trigger”, choose the same Customer booked appointment option from the workflow trigger dropdown, and use an “In calendar” filter for your Booked Calendar.

Now, our workflow has changed and has two triggers - anyone who makes an appointment on the Test or Booked calendars will be added to the workflow.

Events

Once you have at least one workflow trigger, you can start to add your workflow events.

We can see that the first event in this workflow is a confirmation email. When a new appointment is booked, the confirmation email is sent. If you click a workflow event, the details will be shown to the right.

If we click the “Statistics Tab”, we can get information about delivery rates, open rates, clicks, and other important metrics.

As you can see, this workflow uses wait steps to specify a certain time that an event will trigger. This is useful for sending appointment reminders at preset intervals.

If we continue down in this workflow, we'll see that the contact will get an email and SMS reminder 5 minutes before the appointment starts time.

Workflows are about building a chain of events that you want to happen, and your platform has many different event types to choose from, including membership and conditional actions.

In other articles, we’ll talk about how to use these powerful events.