Automations

Automations are email workflows that run themselves: a trigger starts them, optional conditions decide who qualifies, and a sequence of steps does the work — sending emails, managing tags, waiting, and updating contact data. Set one up once and every matching contact goes through it automatically.

Find them under Send Emails → Automations.

Anatomy of an automation

Trigger: Form submitted (Newsletter signup)
Condition: Doesn't have tag "customer"
Steps:
  1. Send email — "Welcome! Here's your guide"
  2. Wait — 2 days
  3. Send email — "Did you get a chance to read it?"
  4. Add tag — "nurture-done"

Triggers

An automation starts when its trigger fires for a contact:

• Form submitted — a form integration captured a submission; optionally limited to a specific integration.
• Tag added — a tag (optionally a specific one) was assigned to a contact, by any means.
• Contact created — a new contact entered your list from any source.
• Contact subscribed — a contact’s status changed to subscribed.
• User registered — a new WordPress user account was created.
• Order placed / First purchase / Product purchased — store events from the WooCommerce & EDD integrations.
• Birthday — fires on each contact’s date of birth (Pro).

Conditions

Conditions filter who proceeds; all of them must match (AND):

• Has tag / doesn’t have tag
• Field equals — match a contact field against a value.
• Subscription status — for example, only run for subscribed contacts.

Steps

Steps execute top to bottom:

• Send email — subject and body with full merge tag support. Sent through the same mailer as everything else, so it appears in the logs with open/click tracking.
• Add tag / Remove tag — move the contact between segments (and potentially fire other automations via tag added).
• Wait — pause the contact’s journey for minutes, hours, or days before the next step.
• Update contact field — write a value to a contact field.

Building and managing automations

Click Add Automation, name it, pick the trigger, and stack condition and step cards in the vertical editor. New automations start inactive — build safely, then flip the toggle when ready. Deactivating later stops new entries; it doesn’t retroactively affect emails already sent.

The run log

Each automation keeps a per-contact run log: who entered, which step they’re on, whether they’re waiting (and until when), and whether the run completed or failed with a reason. It’s the first place to look when you’re wondering “did my welcome series actually go out?”.

How waits work behind the scenes

A waiting contact is parked with a resume time and woken by WP-Cron. On hosts with broken cron, an admin-request fallback sweeps up due runs — so delayed steps eventually run everywhere, exactly on time on healthy hosts.

Recipes to steal

• Welcome series — form submitted → send welcome → wait 2 days → send follow-up → add tag.
• Customer onboarding — first purchase → send thank-you → wait 7 days → send tips email.
• Segment router — form submitted (interest form) → add interest tag — then target that tag with campaigns.
• Win-back seed — order placed → remove “prospect”, add “customer” — keeping lifecycle tags accurate for future targeting.

Pro’s visual builder with branching if/else paths is on the roadmap; today’s free engine covers linear sequences, which handle the vast majority of real-world flows.