This page is part of the Customer.io documentation. For the complete documentation index, see llms.txt.

10

Automation concepts & settings

Automations are automated workflows you set up to send profiles messages and perform other actions when they meet your criteria. They’re the most flexible, robust automation offered by Customer.io. This page introduces the concepts behind automations to help you get started.

If you’re new to Customer.io, checkout automations, broadcasts, and transactional messages to make sure you’re creating the right kind of automation.

How it works

An automation is a workflow to send messages and manipulate data in Customer.io. It consists of four major components:

1. Trigger: this determines who enters your automation (trigger and filter conditions) and when (frequency setting). Filters are optional.
2. Goals: the outcome you want your customers to achieve through the automation. You don’t need to define a goal, but it can be helpful to gauge the success and health of your automations.
3. Exit criteria: these determine if profiles should leave your automation early or not.
4. Workflows: the messages you want to send and other actions you want to perform for profiles that enter your automation.

Your automation starts when someone (or some data) matches your trigger condition. Then your customers move through the workflow—we call this a journeyTypically, a person’s path through your automation. If the automation is triggered by a webhook, then a journey captures the webhook’s path, not a person’s.—until they meet your goal or exit criteria.

Automation setup

Automation triggers

Your automation trigger determines who enters your automation and when. Most triggers are based around profiles, like when they match certain criteria. Typically, these profiles are the subject of your automation—you’ll send them messages, set their attributes, and so on.

Trigger options

Goals

A goal helps you track the success of an automation based on whether a profile performs an event, enters a segment, or exits a segment.

If a profile achieves your goal, we mark the messageThe instance of a message sent to a person. When you set up a message, you determine an audience for your message. Each individual “send”—the version of a message sent to a single member of your audience—is a delivery. and journeyTypically, a person’s path through your automation. If the automation is triggered by a webhook, then a journey captures the webhook’s path, not a person’s. as converted. Then you can track conversion rates over time to improve your messaging strategies.

We track conversions for the following message/delivery types:

Slack and Create or update profile actions are often internal or used for analytics purposes; they don’t always send messages to end-users. For that reason, we don’t attach conversions to them. You can enable webhook conversions on individual webhook actions.

Exit conditions

Exit conditions determine if or when a profile should exit your automation. For example, imagine that you have an automation to re-engage users if they haven’t logged into your platform for a week; your goal is for profiles to log back into your service. When profiles do log in, you probably want them to exit the automation so you stop sending them messages after they achieve your goal.

Message settings

Subscription preferences

If you use our subscription center feature, you’ll set your automation’s topicA category of message, set within your workspace’s subscription center, that people can subscribe to or unsubscribe from. Topics let your audience determine the kinds of messages they want to get from you. in the Subscription preferences setting. Keep in mind, subscription preferences only affect whether profiles receive certain messages, not whether they enter your automation or go through other actions like an attribute update.

• If profiles are unsubscribed from the topic, they won’t get messages from the automation. They would, however, continue to receive in-app messages; subscription preferences apply to email, SMS, and push.
• If your automation includes non-message actions (like Create or Update Profile), those actions will still apply to profiles that aren’t subscribed to the topic.

If you don’t want to set a topic, you can use the All subscribed and unsubscribed preference. You should use this setting sparingly—for things like transactional-style automations and important notices. Sending messages to unsubscribed profiles can violate their trust—or even violate local laws and regulations (GDPR, CAN-SPAM, etc)!

If you don’t use our subscription center, your automation will send to all subscribed by default.

Message limit

If you’ve set a message limit in your workspace settings, you can determine whether your automation, or individual messages in your automation, count towards your message limit. A message limit determines the maximum number of messages you can send to a profile within a time period.

Workflow builder

You’ll craft your workflow—the messages and actions profiles move through during their journey—using our Add menu.

You can add a variety of items—messages, webhooks, attribute updates, time delays, and more-to set up your automation.

Individual message settings

Select a message in your workflow, and the settings will appear in the right-hand panel:

Settings change based on the kind of message or action you select, but common settings include:

• Tracking opens and clicks: whether or not to track opens and clicks for a message; this is on by default
• Sending behavior: whether or not the message sends automatically, queues a draft, or doesn’t send at all; we queue drafts by default
• Subscription preference setting: whether or not to use automation settings or override them; this respects automation settings by default
• Holdout test: a type of A/B test. Check out how to Create a conclusive A/B test result and how to Understand A/B test results for help.

Subscription preference

By default, your messages inherit your automation settings. But you can change this within a message’s settings:

• If you enabled the subscription center for your workspace, you can change this message to send to profiles subscribed to a different topic or all profiles in the automation regardless of their subscription status.
• If you have not enabled the subscription center, you can change this to send to all subscribed or all profiles regardless of their subscription status.

Liquid and customer data in automations

You can personalize data in messages using liquidA syntax that supports variables, letting you personalize messages for your audience. For example, if you want to reference a person’s first name, you might use the variable {{customer.first_name}}.. Reference profile attributes in this format:

{{customer.<attribute_name>}}

For example, if you’re sending us a customer’s name using the attribute full_name, you can utilize it like this:

Hi, {{customer.full_name}}!

You can also perform more complex operations using the data you send; we have more comprehensive information here.

Event attributes

A few things to remember when using event attributes:

1. They can be used in message content You can use all of the data you send with an event in your messages. For example, if you send us a purchase event with the following data: {"name":"purchase","data":{"price": "9.99", "product": "socks", "color":"blue"}} then you can send a receipt email (or push notification, or SMS, or any other action) with the product’s name, price, and color in it. Whatever you send in the event attributes is available to you; you can learn more about using event data here.
2. They can override certain email headers If you send any of these attributes as part of your event, they will override your automation settings: from_address, recipient, reply_to For example: If a purchase event triggers an email to send, but that purchase event contains recipient = wile.e.coyote@example.com as an attribute, then all emails triggered by that automation will go to wile.e.coyote@example.com, no matter the settings in the automation itself.

Activate your automation

Check out this tutorial on activating an automation:

After you’ve set up your automation, you’ll click Review items if you have setup left to do then Start automation when you’re ready to review the entirety of your setup.

Current vs future additions

You can decide whether current profiles and future additions or only future additions should trigger your automation. This applies to automations triggered by segments, attributes, objects, or relationships:

• Current profiles and future additions: Profiles that match your automation criteria after you start it will enter the automation. And profiles that already match your trigger criteria will immediately enter your automation.
• Future additions only: This only includes profiles that match your trigger criteria after you start the automation. Learn about when backfilled profiles data can trigger automations.

Date-triggered automations always trigger for both current matches and future additions.

For event-triggered automations, profiles enter the automation when they perform the event after you start the automation. Learn about when backfilled event data can trigger automations.

You can create an automation triggered by a segment based on a specific event so you can include current matches, but keep in mind, you won’t be able to include any event attributes in the content of the workflow.

Schedule your automation

You can schedule your automation to start or stop at a specific date and time. This gives your team the flexibility to plan and execute time-bound marketing initiatives with fewer manual steps. For instance, you might have a seasonal automation or limited-time offers that you want to make sure are only available during the relevant time period.

Automation metrics & reporting

Once an automation is running, you can view reports and export them to CSV from the Metrics tab.

The export will reflect the dropdown selection:

• All-time metric totals
• Message metrics
• Journey metrics or
• Tracked responses for in-app messages

It will also include any filters you selected. For instance, if you select “Email” for the “Last 30 days” under Delivery Metrics, your export will only include the filtered data. You can learn more about how we define each metric in Automation and Broadcast Metrics.

We can also send reporting webhooks with performance data to a URL you specify so you can receive information about events as they occur in real-time. Customer.io sends the information as JSON in an HTTP POST. Read more about setup here.

Check out our Data-out integrations overview for more options.