Scheduled automations let you perform actions automatically at the date and time you choose. Whether you want to schedule an email, send a text message, or send customer data to an integration or webhook, you can configure automations to run exactly when they’re needed. You can schedule an automation to occur once or set it to repeat on a recurring schedule, giving you the flexibility to automate routine tasks and keep your workflows running smoothly.
You can set scheduled automations based on your contact data. For example, you can schedule an email to be sent to contacts in a specific contact list. Or schedule an email to be sent to contacts with a specific contact property value.
In this article, we’ll walk you through how to create a scheduled automation that sends an email to contacts based on a specific contact property value. We’ll use an example of a hair care company. They’ve created a custom contact property called Hair Type in their contact database and want to schedule an email to all contacts whose Hair Type value is Dry Hair.
What you’ll need:
- A Typeform account on the Plus, Business, Talent, Growth Flow, Growth Custom, or Enterprise plan.
- The Contact & Automations add-on (included at no extra cost if you’re on the Growth Flow plan).
- If you’re sending email through automations, you’ll need to set up a custom email domain.
Create a scheduled automation
- Log in to your Typeform account and click the Automations tab.
- Click + Create automation.
- Select Scheduled as the trigger.
- Give your automation a name by clicking the default name in the top left corner.
- Enter the date and time of day you would like your automation to run.
Click on the date and select the day from the calendar. Enter the time of day using the 12 hour clock. The time of day will be in the same timezone that is set on your device.
- In the recurrence dropdown, select how you want the automation repeated.
If you’ve selected Custom recurrence, enter the when you want it repeated and select when you want it to end.
- Add any contact lists or contact property filter.
In our example, we’ll add a contact property filter as we want to send the scheduled email only to contacts whose Hair Type property is set to Dry Hair.
- Next, we’ll add an action. Click the + icon in the middle.
- Select which action you would like to happen.
- Send email
- Send text (SMS)
- Webhook
- Send to integration
We’ll select Send email.
- In the right side menu, you can select who you want to send your email to, Contact or Your team.
- Contact - sends the email to the person whose details are stored in the contact record (e.g. your customer or lead).
- Your team - sends email to you or your teammate as an internal notification.
We’ll select Contact.
- Edit the subject line for the email and click Create email.
Then create and design your automation email.
- Enter the email address you want to send your automation email from.
You’ll need to configure a DNS record to set up a custom email domain to send emails through Typeform’s automations.
- Optionally, add a Sender name and Reply to email address.
The sender name is what recipients will see as your display name in their inbox. If you leave the sender name blank, it’ll default to the company name used in your billing details.
The reply to email is the email address used when a recipient replies to the email sent. If the reply to email is left blank, it’ll default to a no reply inbox.
- When you’re done setting up your automation, click Schedule.
Now when a contact has the Hair Type value of Dry Hair, they’ll be sent an email on the date and time scheduled.
You can also click Cancel automation to stop it at any time.
Once the scheduled automation occurs and has finished, the status of the automation will update from Scheduled to Stopped.