Build a workflow

Open Automations and start a new automation. The first decision is which list it belongs to.

This is not a small choice. An automation is bound to one list, every contact who moves through it comes from that list, and fields you reference in emails and conditions have to be fields on that list. If you pick the wrong list, you rebuild rather than repoint.

Pick the list people actually arrive on. If your signup form adds subscribers to a list called Newsletter, the welcome automation belongs on Newsletter, not on a broader list you sync into later.

Name it for what it does and who it targets, for example Newsletter welcome, 4 emails. In six months the name is the only thing you will read before deciding whether to touch it.

The trigger decides who enters and when. For a welcome sequence, the trigger is a contact being added to the list. Other triggers key off a field changing, a date stored on the contact, or activity such as opening or clicking. Triggers and timing covers the differences and the traps.

Set the trigger before you build any steps. Changing it later is possible, but every downstream delay is measured from entry, so a trigger change quietly changes what the sequence feels like to a recipient.

Add an email step. Write it the way you would write a campaign: subject line, preview text, sender, body. Personalization behaves identically here, so first name fallbacks matter as much as they do in Personalization tags.

Two things differ from a campaign. You are writing to one person who did something a moment ago, so reference what they did. And there is no send date, so avoid anything that dates the email: no "this week", no seasonal references, no pricing you plan to change. This email may still be sending in a year.

Leave the first email with no delay in front of it so it goes out immediately on entry.

Add a delay step after the first email. Two or three days is a reasonable default for a second touch.

The delay counts from the moment the contact reaches the delay step, not from when they entered the automation. Chained delays add up, so write the running total next to each step as you build: day 0, day 2, day 5, day 9.

Hours are the right unit right after signup. Days are the right unit for everything after that.

Add a condition step after the delay. A useful first condition is whether the contact opened the previous email. Contacts who opened continue to the next email in the main sequence. Contacts who did not open get a different subject line, or wait longer, or skip a step.

Keep the branches shallow. One condition with two outcomes is easy to read and easy to fix. Three nested conditions produce eight paths, and you will not test eight paths.

Send yourself each email step as a test and read it in a real inbox, on a phone. Check that personalization tags resolve, that links work, and that the unsubscribe link is present.

Then do a live end-to-end run. Add one contact you control to the list so the trigger fires for real, and follow that contact through the sequence. This is the only way to confirm that the trigger fires at all, that delays are the length you think, and that the condition sends you down the branch you expect.

If your delays are days long, shorten them to minutes for the test run, verify the whole path, then set them back. Write the final values down first so you cannot forget to restore them.

Activate only after the test contact has come out the other end.

Watch the first day. Check that sends are going out, that the entry rate matches the rate people join the list, and that nobody is receiving two emails at once.