About Classic Automations

With Mailchimp's classic automation feature you can create targeted emails that send when triggered by a specific date, event, or contact's activity. Our classic automation builder offers powerful segmenting, scheduling, and design tools, so you can send emails that inform, reward, and engage your contacts automatically.

In this article, you'll learn about classic automations and how you can use them in your email marketing plan.

Things to know

Here are some things to know.

• Classic Automations are only available to accounts that have previously created a classic automation.
• It's possible to change a Classic Automation into a Customer Journey. To learn more, check out Change a Classic Automation to a Customer Journey.

Definitions

Here's some terms you will come across as you build a classic automation.

• Automation
  An email or series of emails sent to a contact based on a specific trigger.
• Campaign
  Any distributed content that's created and measured in Mailchimp, including automations.
• Workflow
  The settings, schedule, and content for automated emails.
• Delay
  The period of time between a trigger event and a send.
• Queue
  A batch of contacts who have met an automation's criteria, and are waiting to receive the next email in a series.
• Trigger
  The event that starts an automation email or series. For example, someone subscribes to your marketing or purchases a particular product.

How classic automations work

A regular email campaign sends to your contacts at the time you choose. With classic automations, emails are sent automatically to specific contacts as they meet your trigger and sending criteria.

Create a classic automation, design your emails, and set your sending criteria. We'll use activity and contact data to determine who should receive your emails and when. After you set up a classic automation, we'll manage your queue and sends, so your emails get to the right people at the right time.

What you can do with classic automations

For marketers whose contacts have a clear path from signup to conversion or repeat engagement, classic automations can streamline communication. Depending on your business model, you might send a birthday coupon once a year or a series of solicitations every few days.

When you convert regularly sent campaigns to automations, you'll reduce the amount of time you spend on content creation and increase your ROI.

If you connect your store to Mailchimp, you can also use automations for transactional messages, like abandoned cart emails and order notifications. These automations will reach anyone who abandons a cart or places an order in your store, even if they haven't subscribed to your marketing emails.

About workflows

A workflow consists of all the customizable pieces that shape your recipient's experience with your classic automation. Classic automations include the schedule, trigger settings, and marketing emails.

Trigger settings cover a variety of different criteria, like a subscribed contact's birthday or signup date, or a customer’s purchase activity. Mailchimp offers many classic automation types with built-in triggers for common activities, but if those options don't fit your needs, you can modify them or create a custom automation from scratch. You can also pause and edit the settings of an active automation.

Classic automation emails will be sent sequentially. After a subscribed contact receives the first email in a classic automation series, they'll receive every email in the sequence, unless they don’t meet the trigger or segmenting conditions of an email, or if they are removed from the automation. Subscribers can only trigger and receive the emails in a classic automation one time, with the exception of date-based automations, abandoned cart emails, order notifications, and product retargeting emails.

To learn more about different automation workflows, read Classic Automation Types.

Automation performance

The Campaigns page in your account gives an overview of each classic automation, including sending status and performance trends.

Sending status

The Campaigns page gives you the option to view your campaigns based on their status. Click Draft to see only campaigns you are working on and haven't sent yet, or click Ongoing to view active and paused campaigns. You can find your archived automations in the Archived folder.

Next to the name of each classic automation, we'll display a label to indicate its sending status, so you can quickly tell whether things are working as expected.

Stats

On the Campaigns page, you'll be able to view open and click rates for each classic automation. Hover over the percentages of opens or clicks to see the total number.

If a classic automation uses e-commerce data, the revenue dollar amount will show here, too.

To see more information about your automation's ongoing performance, click the drop-down menu and choose View report.