Workflows are a core part of your email marketing efforts. They enable you to send automated emails when someone signs up to your freebie offer. Or when you want to greet new subscribers in a so called Welcome sequence.
But what if you want to do more than the basics? Then I have some really exciting news for you! New Flodesk workflow features have been released!
Let’s jump in right away and see what new suite of tools you have now in Flodesk to make your workflows even more powerful.
Time delays
What’s new in Time delay?
In your workflows you can now choose to wait for certain days of the week. This means that Flodesk will wait and move the subscriber to the next step on the specified date.
Another cool new feature here is to wait for a certain time of day. This comes in handy if you want your workflow emails to send at a specific time. E.g. you don’t want your subscribers to get your workflow emails during the dead of the night.
If you select 12:00 am in your time delay and someone subscribes and enters your workflow at 1:00 am, then Flodesk will wait for 12:00 am the next day to move the subscriber to the next step.
And the best of all is that you can even wait for a specific day of the year. If you have a customer data base where you collected birthdays or dates of a special life event, you can now trigger a workflow for that specific date with this feature.
Another example when you want to use this is to time your campaigns in advance.
- Do you have a promotion for Valentine’s Day?
- For Easter?
- Maybe for Black Friday?
You can set up those workflows right now and schedule them in advance!
Triggers
What’s new in Triggers?
You can trigger a workflow with more than one segment at a time. This means that your workflow is triggered when someone is in any of the segments you’ve selected. Either in this or in that.
However if your subscriber happens to be in both segments that you defined as the trigger events, it will still only trigger once. They won’t get your workflow emails duplicated.
Conditions
What’s new in Conditions?
You can base a condition on whether a Subscriber opened workflow email. For this to work you have to specify which email you’d like to check. Remember that it must be an email within your workflow. And of course above this condition step.
Always add a time delay before adding a condition whether an email was opened.
Why?
If you don’t add a time delay step first then Flodesk checks whether the email is opened immediately after the email is sent. You see this won’t give subscribers enough time to actually open your email.
As a best practice always add a minimum of 1 day time delay before an email opened condition. Not all of your subscribers may be in front of their inbox when you email them, but one day is a good treshold.
Another new feature addition is that you can define next steps in your workflow based on whether a Subscriber clicked a link. I was waiting for this since a while as I like to use this to segment my audience based on their engagement with my emails.
How does it work?
First you need to tell Flodesk which email in your workflow above this condition step to check and then the specific link within that email.
Just like mentioned above, make sure to add a time delay (preferably at least 1 day) before adding a link clicked condition. Flodesk checks then whether the email was opened and the link clicked after 24 hours.
An interesting addition is that you can now tell your workflow to take an action if a custom field matches certain criteria.
The Flodesk help center explains this as follows:
For example, if your subscribers have a “First name” custom field, you may use the condition to check if their first name is, say, “Rebecca”. Think of this condition as the Flodesk system asking a subscriber, “Does your First name custom field match the value Rebecca? If yes, do this…and if no, do this.”
Flodesk Help Center
Another practical usage of this is when for example, you want to segment subscribers based on location when sending an email. Let’s say you want to send future emails about local events.
With this new workflow feature update, you can create a condition based on a customer data field. Just be sure to map their locality in a data field when you upload your CSV. Then you can choose that field and the data it contains to send it to a targeted group.
Workflows in general
What’s new in Workflows?
A new feature is that you can add a subscriber or remove a subscriber from a workflow manually.
When would you use these options?
As you know Flodesk was built to prevent subscribers going through the same automation twice. Now you may add a subscriber who has already completed a workflow a second time to a workflow manually via the “Add subscribers to workflow” menu option. This will cause the subscriber to go through the workflow again, so use it with caution!
You can only add a subscriber this way if your workflow is in paused or published mode. You cannot add a subscriber when your workflow is a draft.
Similarly you only can remove a subscriber manually from your paused or published workflows. As soon as you click the remove button, this subscriber will be removed from your workflow entirely.
Be aware that you cannot remove a subscriber once they have completed the workflow. This feature only works while they’re still active in the workflow.
If you want to learn about even more tricks and trips in Flodesk then check out my earlier post addressing frequently asked questions.
If you love what you’ve seen in this post, and want to check out Flodesk, just click on my >invite link<. Or if you’ve already signed up for a free trial in Flodesk but want to get the discounted offer, use the code ARRADESIGNSTUDIO to get 50% off your subscription for a lifetime! Just add this code before you’d complete your membership purchase.
Should you have any questions about Flodesk, leave me a comment here under this blog post and I’ll get back to you.
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