Create and send emails via a workflow

Hi. In this video I will explain how you can send en email through a workflow. We will be creating a workflow that will send our monthly newsletter. In order to create this workflow, I will need to navigate to the marketing activities. You can do this if you’re on the home screen through the marketing activity card or if you’re anywhere else in Adobe Campaign through the top navigation.

Here you see the list of all the marketing activities available. Programs, campaigns, deliveries, landing pages as well as workflows. In this case I actually would like to create a new workflow and not modify an existing one. In order to do this, click on the create button on the top right and then select the marketing activity you would like to create. In our case of course it’s a workflow.

Select the workflow type.

Give your workflow a name. You can modify the ID. It is not necessary to change the ID but you can do so should your organization for example have separate naming conventions. You can also add this workflow to one of your campaigns and you can add a description. Once you’re done setting up the properties, click on the create button.

We’re now on the workflow canvas. I will need to schedule the workflow. Define which audience I am targeting with this email as well as create the email itself. First I will need to choose the execution activity which will be the scheduler. I’ll drag and drop it onto the canvas. I will schedule the workflow to run monthly, on every first Monday of the month.

So I’ll set it to monthly.

I would like the newsletter to go out at 8.00 a.m.

First Monday of the month and I’m going to start it next month February 1st and no expiration date and I’ll change the name of the scheduler to month. If you’re executing an email directly from the marketing activities you will define the target audience when you setup the email. Here, because it’s running via a workflow, I actually have to run a query through which I segment my audience. That’s a big difference that you have between a workflow and sending a standard load of emails. So I will have to edit the query activity. Here I can define the query in order to segment my audience, but in this case I already have a predefined audience which we will use for our purposes. I’m targeting all profiles that have subscribed to the newsletter, so we’ll use this. The next step is to define the email delivery. So I’ll go to the channel activities, select the email activity and drop it onto the canvas. I’ll open the activity.

Next I’ll choose recurring email as we will be sending it monthly and I’m changing my reporting options to by month as well.

I will select the send via email template.

I will give the delivery a name and I also have the option to add it to a campaign.

Click next and select the email designer.

You can create your newsletter from scratch or you can select a template. I do have a template here which unfortunately does not have a thumbnail, so lets take a quick look.

Okay, so this template is fine. I will select it and now I can modify it. For example add some more personalization fields should I need to. We will have to add the subject line and then I’ll close and save.

So the delivery has been configured and here again you see the difference between a standalone delivery and one that is setup within a workflow. So you can see the target audience as well as the schedule are actually configured upstream in the workflow.

So lets go back to the workflow.

You can start the workflow by hitting the start button. It will then activate the scheduler is now waiting and our first email will be sent on the first Monday at 8.00 a.m. next month.

Thank you for watching.