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An automation is a sequence of steps that runs for one contact at a time, started by something that contact did. Someone joins a list, abandons a cart, places an order, or hits a date on their profile, and the automation takes it from there: send an email, wait two days, check a condition, send an SMS. You will see it called an automation everywhere in the product. The URL and the API still say flows, and the two words mean the same thing. Automations reuse the same delivery machinery as a campaign. Suppression, consent, frequency caps, quiet hours, Shabbat and the SMS credit wallet all run at send time, on every message an automation produces. There is no separate, looser path.

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The four parts

Triggers

What starts the automation, how often the same person can re-enter, and which events qualify.

Steps

The twelve blocks you can place: messages, data actions and logic. Live versus draft steps, waits, splits and per-step settings.

Audience and exit

Who is allowed in, who is dropped mid-journey, and how the filter builder works.

Publish and monitor

Publish checks, test runs, adding past profiles, version history and the per-step and per-automation reports.

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Set up the trigger first, then build

This is the part that surprises people coming from other tools. Picking a trigger does not immediately arm the automation. It opens a draft setup.
1

Pick a trigger

On a new automation the canvas shows Select a trigger to start and the note Steps unlock after the trigger is set. Choose a trigger from the left panel.
2

Configure it

The Set up trigger panel opens. Here you add more triggers, choose how often the same contact can enter, add trigger filters on the event’s own properties, and set the profile filters that decide who is allowed in.
3

Save

Nothing is committed until you press Save. Until then the action palette, the ”+” on each connector and drag-and-drop are all locked.
4

Build the rest

With the trigger saved, the palette unlocks and you can add steps.
You can change the trigger later. Senderz asks you to confirm first, because changing it clears the current setup and you pick a new trigger and save again before adding more actions.
Starting from a recommended template or from an AI proposal skips this. Both arrive with the trigger already set up, so the palette is unlocked the moment the canvas opens. You can still open Set up trigger and change anything.

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Creating an automation

Three ways in, all from the Automations page.
Press New automation. Give it a name, then Start from scratch for an empty canvas. You pick your own trigger and steps. Names are capped at 80 characters and you can rename it any time.
Until you have your first automation, the page shows a short overview and the recommended-flow gallery instead of a list.

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The canvas at a glance

The trigger card sits at the top. Every step hangs below it, connected top to bottom.

Adding a step

Drag a block from the palette, press the + on a connector to splice a step between two existing ones, or click the connector under a step to pick from a menu.

Connecting steps

Drag from a step’s bottom connector to another step. A step can only lead to one next step, and a path cannot loop back on itself. Invalid targets are refused with a message rather than silently accepted.

Tidy and undo

Tidy re-lays out the whole canvas. Undo and redo sit in the header, next to version history.

The end marker

Senderz draws an end marker under every last step and under any branch you have not wired up yet. It is drawn for you. There is nothing to add or delete.
The palette holds twelve blocks in three groups. Some are locked until a prerequisite is in place. SMS needs an approved sender ID. Grant points needs a loyalty app connected. WhatsApp and Push run on infrastructure our team switches on for your workspace, so the dialog tells you to contact support rather than sending you to a settings page.
Message steps are created as drafts. A draft step is skipped at send time. This is the single most common way an automation ends up enrolling people and delivering nothing. See Steps for how to set a step live.

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Draft, live and paused

An automation is Draft until you publish it, then Live. You can pause a live automation and resume it later. While an automation is paused it stops enrolling new contacts and stops delivering. Contacts already part-way through stay exactly where they are. When you publish it again they carry on from the step they were parked on. Pausing does not empty the automation. Publishing runs a set of checks first, including that every step is reachable from the trigger and that at least one message step is live if the automation has message steps at all. A message step is not required. An automation that only tags a profile, updates a list, notifies your team or calls a webhook is publishable on its own. Publish and monitor has the full list of checks.

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The automations list

List view

A sortable table: name, trigger, channels, status, steps, enrolled, conversions, conversion rate, revenue and when it was last updated.

Analytics view

Workspace totals over a period you choose: active automations, total enrolled, average conversion and revenue generated, plus a ranking of your top automations by enrolled, conversion rate or revenue.
The status tabs are All, Live, Paused and Draft, plus a Sender problems tab. That last one collects automations that hit a sender setup problem in the last 24 hours, such as an unverified sending inbox or a sender ID that is not approved. It is the fastest way to find an automation that is enrolling people but failing to send. Search filters by name. The period picker in analytics view offers last 7, 30 and 90 days, month to date, quarter to date and year to date. Options in the page header exports the analytics you are looking at as CSV or Excel, and opens the archived and deleted list. The export contains exactly the rows and the sort order currently on screen.

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Folders

Folders group automations without moving anything. A pill bar above the list shows All, Unfiled and each folder with a count.
  • New folder in the toolbar creates one.
  • Each folder pill has rename and delete.
  • Each row’s menu has Move to folder.
Deleting a folder does not delete its automations. They stay in the list, just unfiled. Filing an automation deliberately does not change its Updated timestamp and does not create a version. Moving something between folders says nothing about what it sends.

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Row actions

Each row’s menu offers Edit, Pause or Resume, Duplicate, Move to folder, Archive and Delete. Select several rows and a bar appears with bulk Pause, Resume and Delete. Duplicate copies the whole automation, including its audience and exit rules, as a new draft named after the original with (copy) appended. The copy never inherits Live status.

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Archiving and deleting

Both are reversible. Neither destroys enrollment or message history.

Archive

Hides the automation from the main list and keeps everything. There is no time limit and no countdown.

Delete

A soft delete. The automation is kept for 90 days, then permanently removed. The list shows how many days are left.
Archiving or deleting a live automation pauses it in the same action, so it cannot keep enrolling and sending from behind the scenes. Both live under Options → Archived and deleted automations, split into an Archived tab and a Deleted tab.
Restore always returns an automation to Paused, never to Live. Senderz does not remember whether it was live before. Restoring is meant to be safe: it never resumes real sends to real customers on a single click. Review the automation, then publish it yourself.

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Transactional automations

Order confirmations, receipts and shipping notices are operational messages, not marketing. Israeli anti-spam law regulates marketing, so Senderz has one automation-level switch for the difference. This is a transactional automation lives in the trigger setup panel, in its own section. Turning it on:
  • lets its messages reach contacts who never opted in to marketing
  • sends no unsubscribe link
  • skips frequency caps
  • skips quiet hours and Shabbat
  • skips the automatic exit that would otherwise drop someone who unsubscribed
A spam complaint still removes the contact. Suppression and the SMS credit wallet still apply.
Only a workspace owner or admin can turn this on, and it asks you to confirm first. Sending advertising this way breaks Israeli anti-spam law. Turning it back off is open to anyone who can edit the automation, because that direction only ever narrows what the automation may send.

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Audience and exit, in one line each

  • Audience filter decides who is allowed to enter. It lives in the trigger setup panel. Leave it empty and everyone who fires the trigger enters. It is also re-checked before each action step, and a contact who no longer matches has that step skipped rather than being thrown out.
  • Exit rules decide who leaves early.
Unsubscribes and spam complaints are not per-automation toggles. They stop marketing sends across the whole workspace, always, and a transactional automation is the only exception. The exit rules you actually set are a time limit on how long someone may stay in the automation, which is off by default, and an optional exit filter with segments. Full detail in Audience and exit.
Exit is checked on every step, and separately every two minutes for contacts parked in a wait, so someone who becomes eligible to leave mid-wait leaves within a couple of minutes rather than waiting out the timer. One behaviour worth knowing without reading further: placing an order immediately removes the contact from cart and checkout automations, so a customer who buys stops getting abandonment reminders.

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Personalization from the triggering event

Email and SMS steps can use the triggering event’s own data as merge tags: {{amount}}, {{currency}}, {{orderId}}, {{externalId}}, {{recoveryUrl}}, {{sourceName}}, and any property you send on a custom event. Order line items are available for loops as {{item.name}}, {{item.quantity}}, {{item.price}} and {{item.sku}}, up to 100 items. {{amount}} is a plain major-unit number taken straight from the event, for example 249.90. It is not currency-formatted. Identity and compliance tags are reserved and event data can never overwrite them: {{firstName}}, {{lastName}}, {{email}}, {{phone}} and {{unsubscribeUrl}}.

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How it runs

The engine advances one step per contact per tick. Every send claims an idempotency key before it happens, so a retry can never send the same message twice. A single journey is capped at 200 steps, which bounds any accidental loop. Enrollment is idempotent per event, so a webhook redelivery does not enroll the same person twice for the same order.

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Practical advice

Cart and checkout automations already drop a contact the moment they order. For anything else, add an exit filter so converters leave instead of getting the rest of the sequence.
Message steps start as drafts. If every one of them is still a draft, the automation enrolls people and sends nothing. Publishing offers to set them all live for you.
The legal Israeli overnight window and Shabbat block marketing SMS and push. Marketing email is exempt from that legal block by product decision, though it still honours your workspace’s own quiet-hours setting. Do not assume an email step will hold overnight. See Quiet hours and Shabbat.
A conditional split inside a single automation is easier to maintain than three near-identical automations per segment, and the reporting stays in one place.
Folders cost nothing, do not change what an automation sends, and make the Sender problems tab far easier to act on.