Automations (Beta)

Intro

Automations empowers marketers to create sophisticated personalized customer journeys with an easy-to-use visual drag & drop interface.

Easily design automated marketing workflows: Build multi-step journeys with a user-friendly drag and drop interface.
Boost engagement: Deliver timely, targeted content and messages based on subscriber: behavior, engagement, real-time interactions, updates, conversions, interests and preferences.
Save time and resources: Automate repetitive tasks and focus on strategic marketing initiatives.

Quick Start Guide

Create a basic automated welcome series

For basic illustration purposes, here’s a simple welcome series, made up of two email messages to new contacts that were just added, with a 1 day wait, in-between the two messages. Similarly you can choose to send SMS/Text messages instead (or as well).

Click on the Automations menu item.
Click on the the New workflow button (on the upper right-hand corner), and from the Workflow Gallery click on “Start from a blank template”.
Select the Contact Created trigger.
Edit the workflow name (this step can be done at any time).
Clicking on the Contact Created Trigger will provide several trigger configuration options. For this quick start guide we’ll stick with the default configurations.
Once the contact is created you can choose to either send a message immediately (Email or SMS), or wait a an X amount of time. For this quick start guide we’ll send it immediately.
Drag the Send Email action into the workflow (in the case of sending an SMS, use the SMS action).
Configure the Send Email action by clicking on it in the workflow
Though you will get in-workflow stats (see Automation Stats below), it’s recommended to setup a Transactional campaign for each workflow, or for each Send Email action in order to view those stats in the other Ongage Analytic reports.
Add and configure a Delay element and configure the amount of time you want to wait till the next action occurs, in this case Send Email.
Drag and Configure another Send Email Element as described above in steps 6 & 7.
Save as Draft (for later editing) or Publish to switch-on the workflow. Ongage automatically saves your workflow changes while editing.

Automation stats

Once you publish the workflow, you’ll be able to view live stats, right in the workflow.

Moreover Send Email stats (total sends, opens, clicks, etc.), you’ll be able to view in all of the Ongage Aggregated Stats Report under the Transactional campaign(s) you selected for those Send Email actions.

Open and Click follow-up actions

The Ongage Send Email Action has built-in Follow-up Actions for Open/Not opened and Click/Not clicked, enabling marketers to create different workflow paths, based on contact engagement to that send email action.

For Illustration purposes, let’s say we want to create a workflow, where we send an additional email the following day to anyone who clicked on the original welcome email, while anyone who did not click, will not be sent an additional email (this BTW is good for building up welcome email reputation, by retargeting clickers).

Select the When Clicked radio button and enter the amount of time to wait for the click. If not click within that time-frame, contacts will go down the Not Clicked path.
1. Once set – you’ll get a decision split in your workflow for Clicked and Not Clicked
2. Note: Clickers will continue immediately to the next workflow action as soon as they click, so in order not to send another email immediately after the click, in the next step we'll add a Wait action.
Drag & Drop the Wait action.
1. Configure the amount of time to wait.
Drag and Configure a Send Email Action Element as described at the top of this guide in steps 6 & 7, and you you now have an Automated welcome workflow that retargets engaged welcome email clickers.

How to delete a workflow element

Simply click on the workflow element you’d like to delete, when clicked the element configuration panel will appear on the left-hand part of the workflow canvas, and click on the Delete trash can icon.

The Split and Multi split elements

Ongage Automation offers two types of decision workflow elements – Split and Multi split.

Let’s look at two example workflows to illustrated their usage.

The Split condition

Let’s say your registration process has two options:

Register with a Credit Card.
Register without a Credit Card.

And let’s say you’d want to send different welcome emails for each condition. For that you can use the basic 2-path Split element. Here’s how that workflow would look like:

And here’s how that Split condition is configured.

You first need to setup a List field that at the time of registration will get populated with a value indicating whether a credit card was entered or not.
Click on the Split element, select the list field containing credit card entered value, and split on that binary value.

The Multi split condition

Let’s say your welcome email goes out in 4 major languages: English, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish. And let’s say you keep each contact’s language in a list field – here’s how that multi split workflow would look like:

And here’s how to configure that Multi split

Click on the Multi split condition element. By default you’ll have 1 branch and 1 default branch (for all other values that don’t match the branch condition). Select the list field, and value for that 1st branch.
Click on the Add New Branch button to add another branch condition path and enter the corresponding name and value for that branch. Repeat for as many splits branches you need.

Additional Features and Use Cases

Template Workflows

When clicking on the New workflow button (on the upper right-hand corner of the Automations dashboard), a Workflow Gallery will pop-up, with ready-to-use workflow templates, designed to help users kickstart their customer journeys with a few common marketing automation scenarios. Users can choose one of those, and edit according to need, or click on the “Start from blank template” option and create a workflow from scratch.

Contact Updated Trigger

There’s a wide variety of use-cases for workflows that can be based on when a list field value of a contact is updated. Here are a few:

Contact signed-up for a webinar and the workflow will send a confirmation email.
1. See the Event Confirmation example workflow, which you can find in the template gallery.
Contact reached a new membership level and you send them a message welcoming them to the new membership level.
Contact updated their personal details via a preference center, and you send them a confirmation email regarding the update

Event Confirmation Example

Let’s look at how one would configure the Event Confirmation workflow.

Simply choose the custom list field that tracks contact registrations and gets updated whenever a contact registers for the event.

Then when that field gets updated (from the event registration page for example) it will trigger the confirmation email.

Remarketing with Email Opened and Clicked Triggers

Remarketing to email openers and clickers with triggered messages is an essential and widely used strategy for increasing engagement and driving conversions. With Ongage’s automated triggers based on user actions of email opened or clicked—you can send timely and personalized follow-ups messages that keep your audience moving through the marketing funnel.

Real-Time Outbound Webhook

Automations Webhook action enables marketers to update their back-end CRM/Data Warehouse/CDP/BI platforms with real-time contact data updates of opens/clicks/unsubscribes/bounces and more.

Select the behavioral trigger data you’d like to push to your back-end.
1. When configuring the trigger you can choose frequency: Always, Once, Once per campaign along with other filters.
Configure the Webhook action:
1. Enter the listening URL end point.
2. Select the email address and additional associated custom list fields you’d like to include in the accompanying JSON (see: Appendix below, for JSON structure details).

Automations FAQ

How to edit a Live workflow

If you’d like to make changes to a live workflow (aka running, published), follow these steps:

From the Actions Kebab Menu associated with the workflow choose the Freeze option
Click on the workflow row you’d like to edit.
Edit changes in workflow.
Then from within the workflow or from the Automations dashboard click Republish.

Appendix

The Automations Webhook JSON

Below are examples demonstrating the structure of the Ongage Automations webhook.

Webhook based on trigger contact opened

{
  "event": {
    "id": "cb22fd24-c971-483b-a109-69d24c5da5d2",
    "contact_id": "-8230757546041807194",
    "account_id": 11111,
    "list_id": 11111,
    "email": "johndoe@domain.com",
    "created_at": "2024-09-30T10:00:13Z",
    "action": "email_opened"
  },
  "contact": {
    "list_fields": {
      "first_name": "John",
      "last_name": "Doe"
    },
    "system_fields": {
      "ocx_resubscribe_date": null,
      "ocx_unsubscribe_date": null,
      "ocx_created_date": "2024-09-03T07:13:08Z"
    }
  }
}

Webhook based on trigger contact clicked

{
  "event": {
    "id": "c2e7bb32-f5c5-45e2-8651-8ec5465f249a",
    "contact_id": "-8230757546041807194",
    "account_id": 1111,
    "list_id": 1111,
    "email": "johndoe@domain.com",
    "created_at": "2024-09-30T10:00:13Z",
    "action": "email_clicked"
  },
  "contact": {
    "list_fields": {
      "first_name": "John",
      "last_name": "Doe"
    },
    "system_fields": {
      "ocx_unsubscribe_date": null,
      "ocx_created_date": "2024-09-03T07:13:08Z",
      "ocx_resubscribe_date": null
    }
  }
}

Explanation of JSON key fields

id: Automation workflow ID
contact_id: Ongage’s unique universal id for each contact in the system
account_id: Ongage’s unique account id.
list_id: Ongage’s unique id of the list in Ongage
email: the email address of the contact
created_at:
action: this is the Automation Trigger of the workflow.
contact: related custom and system list fields of the contact.
- first_name: list field that was selected in the Webhook action UI to push along with the contact’s email address.
- last_name: list field that was selected in the Webhook action UI to push along with the contact’s email address.
- system_fields: the contacts accompanying system fields if selected in UI to be pushed along with the contact’s email address.
  - ocx_unsubscribe_date: system unsubscribe date.
  - ocx_create_date: the original system create date of the contact, the first time it was added to this Ongage list.
  - ocx_resubscribe_date: system re-unsubscribe date