📍 Automations are here

You've been asking, and we've been listening. I'm incredibly excited to announce one of our biggest feature releases to date: Automations.

Best in class newsletters like Morning Brew, theSkimm, and The Hustle have dozens of automated journeys running behind the scenes, ensuring that users are getting triggered emails at the right time with the right message.

And now you can too...

What is it?

With Automations, you can create multi-step email journeys based on different triggers. You can think of a trigger as an action that a subscriber takes—like signing up for your newsletter or upgrading to your premium offering.

Using our brand new grid builder, you simply:

• Select a trigger

• Add a step

  • Choose a time delay

  • Create your email

• Repeat

You'll be able to track the progress of subscribers moving through your automations, along with the individual performance of each constituent email.

Triggers

We are launching Automations v1 with just two simple triggers:

1. Signup

2. Upgrade

And for some inspiration on how to leverage these...

Welcome series

A welcome series is a sequence of emails you send out to new subscribers in order to establish brand awareness and to educate them on your product or service. This can take many different shapes, pending your content and audience.

You can check out our blog post here to jumpstart some ideas.

Upgrade series

Once a reader takes out their credit card and decides to become a paying subscriber of yours, this is a tremendous opportunity to thank them and prime them on what's to come. Perhaps the automated upgrade series is full of valuable content and part of the upsell itself.

Content series

A content series would be an example of where the drip of automated emails IS the value of signing up (or upgrading).

An example of this could be a 30 day email course about stock trading. All new subscribers who signup would enter this automation and receive a single pre-built email, in order, every day for 30 days.

Coming soon...

• Trigger filters: provides the ability to narrow the scope of the automation by only accepting subscribers who meet certain criteria. For example, perhaps a Signup trigger with a filter for subscribers whose acquisition channel = referral.

• Additional triggers

  • Segments

  • Milestones

  • API

Actions

Automations v1 is launching with just a single action: Send Email.

Which is exactly what it sounds like—subscribers who reach this step will automatically be sent the accompanying email.

Coming soon, we'll be launching a bunch of additional actions for you to take advantage of:

• Add or update custom fields

• Add subscriber to segment

• Unsubscribe

• Send webhook

...to name just a few.

And more...

We surveyed dozens of users to understand what types of automated journeys they wanted to build. And while this is only v1, we're confident that this will unlock considerable opportunities for you to better engage and leverage your readers.

And more is on the way! You can expect a barrage of updates to ensue over the next 6+ weeks as we look to rapidly expand the capabilities of this feature. Our goal is to build a world-class set of automation tools to help take your newsletter to the next level.

Think: fully automated re-engagement campaigns, special offers to your top readers, exclusive content at select referral milestones, etc.

Note: Automations are only available on our Scale plan. To learn more about our plans and upgrade, visit here to take advantage of all beehiiv has to offer.

To get started, check out our full video tutorial below 👇🏽

If you have any additional feedback about anything, please hit reply and let us know. All of these improvements featured above came from user feedback.

And be sure to follow us here on Twitter for real-time product updates and announcements.