How to Set Up an Automation on Beehiiv

If you don’t already have a Beehiiv account set up, this short video will walk you through it. If you’re already up and running on Beehiiv, skip down the page for a step-by-step guide on how to set up an automation.

The automation feature is not available on the free plan, so you’ll need to upgrade to the Scale Plan to get started. You can test it out on the free trial of Scale, but if you want it as a permanent feature, you’ll need to upgrade to paid at the end of the trial.

Setting up an automation

You’ll find the automation tool in the menu on the left-hand side of your Beehiiv dashboard under the “Audience” dropdown.

Click the “New Automation” button at the top right of the page, give your automation a name and (optional) description, then click “Save Automation” and you’ll be ready to build your sequence.

This is how your page will look:

You can add your trigger at the start or you can go back and add it once you’ve built the automation. It won’t be activated until you switch it on so it doesn’t really matter which way around you do it.

When you select “Add Trigger", the menu on the left will change and you’ll be able to choose your trigger. This is the thing that your subscribers will do to start the automation.

You have several options including:

• Signed up

• Email entered

• Survey submitted

• Poll response

• Referral action

• Segment action

• Upgraded (paid subscription)

• Downgraded (paid subscription)

• Add by API

• Manual

• Unengaged

Depending on which trigger you select, you’ll get some additional options.

For example, if you choose “Email entered” it will ask you which subscribe form. If you select “Poll response, it will ask which poll. If you select “Unengaged”, you can select how many days. And so on.

Once you have set up your trigger, you can add the next step in the sequence. Click on the little plus icon below the first step and select the item you want.

Or drag and drop the action you want from the list on the left to the plus icon.

Once you have selected an action, you’ll see it in the sequence but it will be greyed out and marked as inactive. Click the icon at the top right of the box to configure the action and activate it. .

Actions

There are a number of different action you can add to your automation so we’ll look at each of them in turn.

Send Email: pretty self-explanatory. If you select this action then an email will be sent to anyone who triggers the automation. Click through to the configuration, select “Create New Email” and create your email.

Update Subscription: allows you to keep subscription status as active or change to inactive. You can also add tags and conditions.

Send Webhook: allows you to send a webhook when subscribers get to this stage of your automation.

Wait Until: decide when subscribers will be moved to the next step in your automation. For example, you might want an email to go out on a certain day or at a specific time.

Time Delay: if you are creating an email sequence, you can add time delays between emails.

True/False branch: allows you to move subscribers into different branches of your automation based on whether they meet the conditions you set.

Enroll in Automation: move subscribers into a new automation sequence.

Saving and activating an action

Once you have set up an action, you need to “Activate” it. When you turn on activate, you’ll be asked to confirm. You then also need to click save to save the action.

If I have one criticism about the automation tool, it’s that there is a lot of unnecessary clicking.

You have to individually activate each step in the automation rather than being able to activate the whole sequence in one go. And you have to go into each step to activate which means if you forget to do it when you configure the action, you have to go back into it.

None of your automation will be activated until you’ve set and activated the first trigger, so I recommend activating all the other steps as you build them and then activating the trigger at the end once you are happy everything is correct.

Deleting an action

If you accidentally add a step, go into the configuration and locate the delete button at the bottom left.

An example sequence

I have a 14-part email course called Get Copy Confident. Each email contains a lesson and subscribers get one email a day for 14 days. I’m going to use this to show you how to create a simple email sequence.

The first thing I needed to do was to create a separate subscribe form for this course. To set up a subscribe form, go to the menu on the left-hand side and find “Subscribe Forms” under the “Audience” dropdown. Then hit “Create New Form” at the top right of the page.

Fill in the details, customise your form and save the details. You can then use this to trigger your automation using the “Email Submitted” trigger. When you configure the action, select the correct subscribe form from the dropdown.

My first step is to send the welcome email, and then after five minutes send the first lesson. This is what it looks like:

I then added a 24-hour time delay between each email so that subscribers receive one lesson per day.

This is a basic sequence. There are 30 steps in the workflow, but they alternate between email and time delay so there’s nothing complicated.

Once you get the hang of the automation tool, you can go back to your automation and change parts of the sequence, add additional conditions, or create branches based on how interactive subscribers are.

You can also go back and edit the email content. Just find the relevant step and go into the settings/configuration by clicking the icon at the top right.

Then select the little edit icon to edit the content.

Once your automation is live, you can go back into it at any time and see how many subscribers have completed each stage and how many are at each stage.

I tested my automation by subscribing myself, so the “1” in the above screenshot is actually me. But you can see that it is showing me as having received the second lesson and now I’m in the time delay waiting for the next email.

Once you have lots of subscribers in your sequence, you’ll be able to keep track of how many are at each stage.

You can also view your stats on the overview page:

And you can track open rates and click-through rates to determine whether there are steps in your automation where people are consistently losing interest or if certain call to actions are getting higher clicks.

You can also add feedback polls or surveys to your emails to help gather data.

All you need to do first is get people into your automation in the first place.

And you’re off

That’s it. That’s the basics of automation. Of course, there are plenty of other features and options to explore. But hopefully, this article has given you the very basics so you can get started.

I’m learning as I go and I’m sharing those learnings in my weekly emails, so if you haven’t already subscribed, hit that subscribe button now.

Thanks for reading.