Automated email sequences

An automation is a sequence of steps that runs for one contact when something happens: a welcome email when someone joins your list, a thank-you after a payment, a reminder to leave a review three days later if they have not. You build the sequence in the dashboard; Ha Tang runs it for every contact, with the right waits in between.

Building and enabling automations needs the Manage level on the Email module.

How it starts: events

Every automation starts from an event, a named moment in your business such as order.paid or review.submitted.

• Built-in: hatang:contact.created fires whenever a contact is added, from the dashboard, a CSV import or the API. Use it for welcome series.
• Your own events are sent by your website or app, usually by your developer, through the API. A shop sends order.paid with the order number and total, for example.

To define your own events:

1. Open Email → Automations and go to Events.
2. Enter the event Name, for example order.paid.
3. Optionally describe its Payload: the fields that come with it and their type (string, number, boolean, date), such as order_id and total. Ha Tang then checks incoming values and converts them.
4. Click Add event.

Your developer finds how to send events in the automations guide of the developer hub.

Build the flow

1. Open Email → Automations, enter a name and click New automation.
2. Click Start from an event and pick the event.
3. Click + under a step to add the next one, and set it up in the panel on the right.
4. Click Save, then Enable.

Conditions can look at the event that started the run (event.total), the contact (contact.city, contact.tier…) and the event a Wait for event step received.

Inside Send email, template variables are filled from the event first, then from the contact, so a template with {{{order_id}}} receives the order number your shop sent with order.paid.

Ha Tang refuses to enable an automation without a starting event, with a template that is not published, or with an email that has no sender address.

Example: thank-you and review reminder

1. Start from an event: order.paid.
2. Send email: the "Thank you for your order" template.
3. Delay: 3 days.
4. Wait for event: review.submitted, Give up after 4 days.
5. On Timed out: Send email with the "How was your tea?" template.
6. On Event received: Condition event.stars at least 5, and on Yes, Add to segment "Loyal customers".

Test it

At the bottom of the flow, Send a test event sends the starting event for an address you type, with an optional payload. The contact is created if needed and the enabled automation runs for real, so use your own address.

Change a running automation

• The steps of an Enabled automation are locked. Click Disable to edit them, or Duplicate to build a new version beside it.
• Disabling cancels the runs still in progress.
• A run keeps the version of the flow it started with, even if you edit the automation later.

Follow the runs

Each time a contact enters the automation, Ha Tang creates a run. The Runs tab lists them by status:

Open a run to see each step, when it ran and its result. A contact who has unsubscribed from everything is not emailed: the Send email step shows Skipped. Emails sent by automations also appear under Email → Emails like any other email.