Automations
Automations in the Marketing area (Acquisition) — route /marketing/automations.
Automations lives in the Marketing area of the dashboard, under Acquisition.
At a glance#
| Dashboard route | /marketing/automations |
| Area | Marketing (marketing) |
| Group | Acquisition |
| Platforms | Available for every app platform. |
What it does#
Automations is a trigger layer over the existing Engage send engine. An automation references a reusable message — an Engage push campaign — and an audience — a behavioural cohort — and fires it on behaviour: an event occurring, or someone entering the cohort, optionally after a delay.
It does not send anything itself. It decides who and when, and invokes the send engine. That separation is the point: the message is authored once in Engage and reused by any number of automations.
When to use it#
For anything that should happen without someone remembering to do it. A welcome message on first open, a nudge when a cart is abandoned, a re-engagement attempt when a user enters an at-risk cohort.
Behaviour-triggered messages substantially outperform scheduled ones, for an obvious reason: they arrive when the user is thinking about the thing.
For multi-step sequences with branches and waits, use Journeys, which orchestrates over the same runtime.
Workflow#
Author the message in Engage first
Automations reference messages; they do not contain them.
Pick the trigger carefully
An event trigger fires per occurrence. A cohort-entry trigger fires when someone joins. Those produce very different volumes, and the difference is the most common surprise here.
Add a delay unless immediacy is the point
Immediate is right for a welcome and wrong for almost everything else. A delay makes the message feel considered rather than automated.
Test on a small cohort, then widen
An automation is a message you send repeatedly without watching. Getting it wrong compounds.
Permissions and prerequisites#
Requires an Engage push campaign to reference and a cohort to target. Push delivery requires configured push providers — see Integrations.
Limits and edge cases#
A high-frequency event trigger means high-frequency messages. Verify the event's volume in Events before wiring it to a send.
Cohort membership is materialised, so cohort-entry triggers fire on refresh rather than the instant behaviour changes.
Suppression still applies. Suppressed users are not messaged regardless of the trigger.
Editing the referenced message changes every automation using it.
Troubleshooting#
Automation never fires. The event is not arriving, the cohort is empty, or the automation is disabled. Check in that order.
Users receiving too many messages. Trigger frequency. Move from an event trigger to a cohort-entry trigger, or add a delay and a cap.
Fires but nothing is delivered. Push providers are not configured, or the users have no push token.
Where the data comes from#
Served by
Lifecycle automation