Automations

The automations module lets you create automated workflows in your CRM, removing the need for laborious data input and tedious repetitive tasks, streamlining your business processes and improving productivity. You can also automate your marketing activity with automated campaigns and Lead Scoring to maximise your customer potential. Please note, you will need to be a system Administrator to create Automations.

In this article you will read about:

• Automations examples
• Create an automation

Automations examples

Workflow automations

Automations can be used for a wide variety of processes in your CRM, saving you time, minimising human error, reducing costs and increasing efficiency. How you use Automations will depend on your business and the processes you run.

Here we have listed a few examples of how you might use Automations to create CRM workflows:

• Automatically set a follow up Task for your sales team when a new lead is created.
• When an Opportunity is set to “Won”, automatically send an email to your finance team to raise an invoice.
• If a discount offered exceeds X%, notify the authorising manager for approval.
• Schedule an email to send every day at 9 am reminding a user of their open Cases or Tasks.
• If a Customer Support Case is set to “waiting for customer response” and there is no reply after a week, automatically send a chaser email.
• When a new Account is created, send an email to different users depending on the Account demographics.

Marketing Automation Examples

As well as automating your sales workflows, you can use Automations in your marketing to streamline your lead nurturing process. Using Automations alongside our Web Forms and Drip Campaigns, you’ll be able to capture leads directly to your CRM, send a series of emails to qualify their interest and score each lead before allocating them to your sales team. Here’s a few examples of Marketing Automation:

• Filter and score new leads according to the data recorded, for example, location, product interest, value, company size.
• Add new leads to a campaign, filtered by demographics.
• When an email link is clicked, or a webinar attended, add a value to the Lead Score.
• When a Lead Score reaches a defined target remove the account from one campaign, add them to a new campaign, and create a task to follow up.
• Use data formatting to correct the data collected, e.g. applying sentence case, date formats etc.

Create an automation

Steps to take to create an automation: 

• Add a new automation
• Select a trigger
• Create actions

Add a new automation

To create an Automation click on the Add-button. A window to enter the name of the automation will appear. Fill in the name and click Add.

Select Trigger Options

You will see the Trigger options you can select. 

• Event:
  This might be an “Event” i.e. when something changes in your CRM – maybe this is when a new Account, Contact, Opportunity, Case etc. has been created, or maybe an update to an existing record.
• Schedule:
  A Trigger can also be a scheduled date, if you want something to happen to a schedule, for example, send a reminder email at the same time each day.
  
• Tagged: you can tag contacts or accounts automatically with this option.

Clicking on the Triggers will open further options, if relevant, to filter your data. In this example, the Event trigger has been used and a filter set for the Automation to be activated when an Opportunity is updated and the status changed to Won. Click CONFIRM to confirm the trigger.

Create actions (what do you want to happen?)

To add your Next Step, click the +-icon.

In the Next Step you can set what you want to happen with the Automation. It might be an action to be taken, for example, create a Task or send an email, or you could add further filters, searches and formatting. In this example, the next step of Action has been selected which offers up different options relevant to the Trigger you have set.

N.B. In this example, because the Trigger has been set for the Opportunity, the Contact option is not available to select. However, if your Automation requires data to be passed to/from the Contact record in an Account you can use Dynamic values to filter on this.

The Send Email option lets you set up an email to go to one or more people in your team when the trigger is activated. Here the email is set to notify the sales manager of a Won Opportunity and the fields are added to show the account fields as required.

Use the dropdowns to select recipients and relevant fields for your message. 

Add more steps or branches

You can add further steps (or nodes) to your Automation or insert steps between those already created.

You may also want to create a “branch” that will add a simultaneous action or determine a conditional path, that will enable you to set an Automation where if one set of criteria is matched – do this, and if another is matched – do that.

You can insert a 'node' or add a branch, to your Automation by clicking the +-icon.

In this example, when a new Account is created, send an email to education@spotleruk.com if the Account.Country = United Kingdom, and send an email to education@spotleraus.com if the Account.Country = Australia.

You can add as many stages as you like to build your Automation.