Best practices & things to know

Automation is triggered by lead behavior, not bulk edits or imports.

This is to prevent imports from accidentally triggering multiple automation workflows simultaneously. Imports and bulk edits in the Contact Manager will not trigger Workflows, Action Groups or List memberships (except of course the list that you import into). Changes made through the Contact Manager to an individual contact, information submitted through forms, or changes made via the API (and thus also integrations using Zapier or PieSync) will all be able to trigger Workflows.

Changes or additions to workflow branches will not affect contacts who are already in it

When a contact is added to a workflow branch, all actions in it will be immediately scheduled. So if you add or remove an action from it, those actions will not be added to the contact. Emails in Action Groups are also immediately scheduled, so if you change the contents of the email after a contact has been added, the edits will not be reflected when the email is sent to the contacts. And if you have merge variables in your emails, then their values will be whatever they were at the time of scheduling, not at the time of sending.

(You can bypass this by creating an Action Group for each send, and including those action groups within the original action group. We can show you how to do that.)

Note that this works differently when you schedule an email to a list directly (not using an Action Group). When you schedule an email to a list, the email that is sent will be the how it looks at the time of sending (not at the time that you originally scheduled it). Any merge variables used will contain the contact's fields at the time of sending, not the time of scheduling. Everyone in the list at the time the email is actually sent will receive it, even if they were not in the list when the email was scheduled.

Avoid removing contacts from workflows more than twice.

FunnelBud gives you the ability to remove a contact from an Action Group whether it be manually from the contact profile, or automatically from a Workflow. However, a contact can only be added and removed from a Workflow twice before that contact becomes excluded from that Action Group. When a contact is excluded from an Action Group, he or she cannot be added to that Action Group again.

If you're testing a workflow but nothing happens, you probably forgot to set it as "repeatable"