Marketing Automation — Staff Guide

Marketing Automation — Staff Guide

The Marketing Automation module runs your nurture and outreach on a schedule. Where TDS Automations reacts to operational events, Marketing Automation works on audiences and time: you group contacts into a segment, build a campaign as a step-by-step workflow of emails and delays, publish it, and the system drips the messages out over hours, days, or weeks on its own. It is how leads and customers get welcome sequences, education series, and long-run follow-up without anyone sending each message by hand.

1. How a campaign is built

Every campaign has three building blocks, in this order:

1. Segment — the audience. A saved group of leads or customers that a campaign sends to.
2. Templates — the content. The emails (and optional SMS) each step will send, plus any downloadable assets.
3. Workflow — the sequence. A visual flow that starts from the segment and moves through email steps with timing between them.

Read it as a sentence: Send [templates] to [this segment] on [this schedule].

2. Segments — building the audience

1. Go to Segments in the module menu and click New Segment.
2. Give it a clear name and choose whether it holds Leads or Customers.
3. Define membership by filters (for example lead status, source, or custom field), or build it from a saved list.
4. Save. The segment can then be selected as the starting point of a campaign workflow.

A segment is reusable — more than one campaign can target the same segment, and a contact can be in several segments at once.

3. Templates and assets — the content

• Email templates: built in the drag-and-drop email editor. Each has a name, subject, and body, and can include an optional preview text shown in the inbox after the subject.
• SMS templates: short text messages for campaigns that include an SMS step (where an SMS gateway is configured).
• Assets: downloadable files (for example a PDF guide) you can attach and track. Downloads are logged against the recipient.

Build your templates before wiring the workflow, so each step has content to point at.

4. Building the workflow

1. Go to Campaigns, click New Campaign, name it, set a start date and end date, and leave it unpublished while you build.
2. Open the Workflow tab and use the Builder to lay out the flow.
3. The flow begins at Flow Start, where you pick the data type (Lead or Customer) and the Segment the campaign draws from.
4. Add email steps and connect them in order. Each email step has a Complete action that sets its timing:
   • Right away — send as soon as the previous step completes.
   • After — wait a set number of minutes, hours, or days first (for example "After 14 Days").
   • Exact time / Exact time and date — hold until a specific clock time or calendar moment.
5. Point each step at the email template it should send.
6. Save the workflow.

The connections define the path: Flow Start → Email #1 → (wait) → Email #2 → (wait) → Email #3, and so on. Timing is what turns a list of emails into a drip.

5. Configs — sending identity and pace

On the campaign's Configs tab, two settings control how it sends:

• SMTP Config — which sending identity the campaign uses. Each config defines the from-address and send method. The send method may be standard SMTP or the Mailgun HTTP API (used when the host blocks outbound SMTP). Pick the config whose domain and sender match this campaign.
• Email Limit Config — the throttle. It sets how many emails go out per interval (for example 100 every 5 minutes). A large audience is released in batches at this rate, so a big send drips out rather than firing all at once.

Both are set up once under Settings (Email configuration and Email sending limit) and then chosen per campaign here.

6. Publishing and running

1. Set the campaign to Published once the workflow, templates, and configs are ready.
2. The system builds the send queue for everyone in the segment and releases messages on each background run, at the rate the Email Limit Config allows.
3. Sending happens on a schedule, not instantly — the queue drains batch by batch until the audience is complete.

Because sending is throttled, a large campaign finishes over time. To send faster, raise the Email Limit Config; to slow it down, lower it.

7. Testing before you launch

Use the Test Campaign tab to send the campaign's emails to a single test recipient so you can check content, formatting, and links before the real audience receives anything. This does not affect real recipients or campaign statistics. Always send a test — and confirm it actually arrives in the inbox — before publishing.

8. Checking that a campaign is sending

• Campaign progress: the campaign and the Email sending limit view show Total Emails, Email was sent, and Email waiting sent, plus a percentage. A climbing "sent" count and shrinking "waiting" count means the drip is flowing.
• Statistics: the Statistics tab charts deliveries, opens, and clicks over time.
• Stuck at 0? If nothing sends, the usual causes are: the campaign is not Published; the Email Limit Config is missing or set to zero; the SMTP/Mailgun config is wrong for that campaign; or the background schedule (cron) is not running. Check those in that order.

9. Practical examples

• Welcome series: Flow Start on the "New Leads" segment → Email #1 (Right away) → Email #2 (After 3 Days) → Email #3 (After 7 Days), sending from the Mailgun config at 100 per 5 minutes.
• Long-run nurture: Flow Start on a sourced-leads segment → a series of educational emails spaced two weeks apart, running until an end date years out, so contacts are touched steadily over months.
• Content offer: an email step that links a tracked asset (a PDF guide), so downloads are recorded per recipient for follow-up.

10. Good to know

• Order and timing matter. Steps run along the connections in the workflow; the Complete action on each step is what spaces them out.
• Build content first. Create segments and templates before the workflow so each step has something to point at.
• Match the config to the campaign. The SMTP/Mailgun config sets the sender and send method; the Email Limit Config sets the pace. Both are chosen on the Configs tab.
• Unpublish to pause. Setting a campaign to unpublished stops it sending without deleting it or losing its progress.
• Test every time. Send a Test Campaign and confirm delivery before publishing to a real audience.