Marketing Campaigns - How to Edit an Automation, and Limitations – SendGrid

Getting Started With Automation

This article will cover the process of editing an Automation, a feature of the Advanced Marketing Campaigns Package. To access this feature, please upgrade to Advanced Marketing Campaigns.

Currently, there is no option to set an Automation to "live" when associating that Automation with an existing contact list with pre-loaded contacts. The workaround for this would be to create a new, empty list within your account. From that point, you will add the relevant entry/exist criteria and set the automation to "Live", at which point you will see the Automation sent the first time a contact is added to the associated list.

If your contact list already exists, once the Automation is set to live you can export a CSV of your 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

When editing a Live Automation, you can edit select aspects, such as the Subject Line, Email Pre-header, From Sender, and Email Content.

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While you can make changes to your in-progress Automations, it is important to keep in mind that there are some features cannot be edited once an Automation is set to "Live". Below is a list of what you cannot edit while an automation is live.

Limitations - 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
Unsubscribe Groups
Categories
IP Pool

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 erase progress spent on the creation of the Automation, but will allow you to make necessary edits and changes to your Automation.

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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 the order of the emails, the "Select Send Time" or delete any email already created or other aspects of the Automation, you can “duplicate” a campaign, and make changes from there. Note: this will be a new Automation and existing contacts in the previous automation may not carry over.

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Conclusions & 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. It is recommended that you do not use a list previously created list that has has contacts removed, nor should you use a list that already has contacts in it. The next step is to create the Automation and to link it to the newly created list and to set the entry criteria, exit criteria, the templates you wish to use, and how many emails you wish to send. Once all the updates have been made, the Automation can be set to "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.