Marketing Campaigns - How to Edit an Automation – SendGrid

Getting Started With Automation

There is currently no option to set an automation live to an existing list with previously existing contacts. The work around for this would be to create a new empty list within your account, set the automation to live and with the criteria to send the mail the first time a contact is added to a list.

Once this is set to live, export a CSV of the existing target audience and re-upload them into this newly created, empty list. This will prompt the automation to send to these contacts and work around that limited ability of the automation

Editing an Automation

About editing an automation, you can edit certain aspects of an already live automation, such as the subject lines, email content, and sender identity.

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You are also able to make changes to your in-progress automations, but it is important to keep in mind that there are some things that you cannot edit while an automation is live. Below is a list of what you can and cannot edit while an automation is live:

Once an Automation is set live, you CANNOT edit:

Entry Criteria
Exit Criteria
List/Segment associated to the automation
Intervals between emails
Cannot modify the order of the emails
Cannot add emails to the series
Cannot delete emails from the series

In order to make changes to any of the items listed in the section above, you will first have to disable the automation. Within your live automation, navigate to the automation options dropdown and select disable automation. This step will not delete all the work you spent creating your automation, but will allow you to make necessary edits and changes to your automation.

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While the automation is disabled, you are able to make edits to the entry/exit criteria, the list associated with the automation, the order of the mails, and anything else you could otherwise not edit while the automation is live.

It is important to note that any changes made to an automation will only take effect to newly added contacts in the series. If you have made changes to an email within your automation series that a contact has not received yet, they will receive the updated versions.

Other Aspects - Duplicate a Campaign

If you need to edit unsubscribe lists, categories, number of emails in a series, trigger events, or other aspects of the Automation, you can “duplicate” a campaign, and make changes from there. Note that this will be a new Automation and existing contacts in the previous automation might not carry over.

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Additional Resources

When it comes to the "Automation" feature it is very important to follow the steps accordingly. First and foremost it's important to create an empty contact list. Don't use a list created previously from where you've removed the contacts or a list that already has contacts in it. The next step is to create the Automation and to link it to the brand new list created (with 0 contacts) and also to set the entry criteria, exit criteria, the templates you desire to use how many emails you wish to send. Once you've made all the changes\updates needed, the Automation can be set "Live". Once the Automation is live you can start adding contacts to the list and you'll see that as the contacts are processed and added to the list, the emails will start to be processed and delivered.

From the process described above, it is important to keep in mind that you will have to create a brand new contact list to use and that no contact needs to be added to that list until the Automation is set Live.