Here is a short guide to help create your first omnichannel trigger automation on Batch following the 4 steps of the automation builder:
Set up entrance: which event triggers the campaign, its lifetime, its target, etc;
Manage the first delay and cancellation events: when to send the email and which event can cancel it;
Compose your message: the content of the campaign that will be sent to the user;
Add a second message sent after a delay.
First, go to Automations > New automation, start a new Omnichannel trigger, and name it:
Then, let's set up your trigger automation! 💪
Automation settings
It is time to define when to send your automation and who to send it to!
Entry event
By clicking on the Select trigger frame a new modal opens. There, you will be able to choose the right trigger event and all the orchestration settings:
After selecting the right event, there are 4 settings:
Capping
The capping is the limit on the total number of entrances followed by at least one message sent to the user.
If you put “2”, it means the user will not enter more than twice an automation that sent him at least a message.
🔎 More examples
If the capping is “2” in an automation that has 5 messages steps:
case 1: the person enters, waits in a delay step and ends up being excluded from the automation by a cancel event before being addressed by a message, it’s not counted for capping.
case 2: the person enters once and receives 5 messages, it counts as “+1”
case 3: the person enters and receives only 2 messages and then is excluded due to a cancel event, it counts as “+1".
By clicking the toggle button you will be able to define that limit 👇
Grace period
Use the grace period to set a delay in hours or days between entrance in an automation after exiting it. A user can exit an automation for two reasons:
Because of an exit event
He arrived at the end of the automation.
💡 Note that if a user enters the automation but exits it before receiving any messages, we do not apply the grace period. So he could re-enter the automation right after exiting it if he triggered the event again.
Parallel automations
By default, if the user fires the trigger event of the automation multiple times, it will be reset.
You may want to parallelize automation flows and allow the user to trigger several times the same automation. You can do that by activating the Parallel automations mode.
The Parallel automations mode allows you to trigger an automation each time the user fires the trigger event with a new event parameter (Ex: Trigger an email for each trip booked by the user based on the trip ID parameter). This ID must be one of the attributes attached to the event or the event label and can only be a String.
Click on the Continue button to continue to set up your automation!
Targeting
Click on the Targeting icon to display the targeting modal where you will define the segmentation of your campaign.
By default, Batch considers that you will target your entire audience. First, you can select a specific country or language.
Then, you can refine your segmentation by clicking:
'Add Condition': from then on, you will be able to select native targeting elements (Email domain, etc.), but also profile attributes (data specific to your app business and selected thanks to the tagging plan).
💡 You can add up as many conditions as you want, and create specific scenarios by clicking on 'AND/OR'.
'Use Segment': this will allow you to call Segments as blocks in the targeting and combine Segments (inclusions and/or exclusions) by calling up to 10 segments in your targeting. When a Segment is linked to an Orchestration, you can access/ view the segment by clicking on the eye icon 👀
You can also call segments in the targeting of Campaigns created by API.
'Use Audience': you can add a specific Custom Audience to your email (find how to create a Custom Audience here).
Also, note that if you focus sendings on opt-in contacts (which will happen for all non-transactional use cases), the opt-in status will be checked before each email sendings, to make sure the user is still opted-in. If, along with an automation, the person opt-out, it will continue its progress but not be messaged (until the user potentially re-optin).
When you are satisfied, click on the Continue button!
Timing
Click on the Timing icon to manage the lifetime of the automation by choosing specific starting and ending dates:
Quiet times
You can add Quiet times setting to specify either quiet hours or quiet days, during which the profiles in this automation won’t be messaged.
Click on the Quiet times icon to choose the right timeslot :
Delay and Exit events
Now that you have successfully set up your trigger event, you can manage when to send your automation and if you want to cancel the sending after the occurrence of chosen events:
Add delay
This is the time interval in minutes, hours, days, or a specific date to wait to send the automation. Batch will wait this amount of time from the chosen trigger date which can be either the date of the Trigger event or custom data attached to the event (ex: send an email 1h before or after said date):
The first delay can be conditional to a date passed in the event. For example, it’s possible to have in the event 1st January 2024 and set up a +3 days timer. Note that in that case, we’d not allow a longer than 64 days wait time as a default setup.
The first delay and all others can also be a simple delay of up to 30 days.
Exit event(s)
By clicking the toggle button you will be able to add one or several exit events:
Users who trigger one of the exit events will exit the automation. You can use a custom event and apply filters based on additional event data (Label, Attributes, Tag collection).
Compose your message
Now, you can compose and test your message using one of the following guides:
Add further messages and delays
Last but not least, you can add other automation steps with delays after your first message by clicking on the + icon!
Clicking on it will automatically add a delay step followed by an automation step. You can modify the delay and add a cancellation event by clicking on the timer button.
Note that it’s not possible to chain 2 automation steps or 2 delay steps. Also, the maximum number of automation steps is 10.
🔎 Point of attention:
Be careful of the behavior of the automation in the case of multiple steps. If no parallel automation mechanism applies, and if the trigger happens again for a user already in the automation, it will restart and the user will restart from the beginning. Then, the grace period and the capping will not applied.
This behavior will evolve shortly to treat this use case better.
How to test the automation
If you want to test your automation from start to end, you will have to use the Audiences condition.
First, create an Audience with all the Custom User IDs you want to target for your test. Once the audience is uploaded on the Settings > Audiences page, go back to your omnichannel trigger automation.
There, to add a condition in the Targeting > Segmentation part of the orchestration, choose Audiences and pick your audience:
You may now click 'Save and Run" your automation (to activate it or save it as a draft and come back later), and trigger the event on your app to enter the automation!
💡We recommend sending tests to different email clients (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, etc.) and mailbox providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) to make sure your message is well displayed on all of them.
Your first trigger email automation is now ready to be sent! ✨
This article belongs to Batch's FAQ. Need more help?