A workflow is an automation you draw on a canvas. Something happens — someone donates, signs up, clicks a link, has a birthday — and CamBuildr takes over from there: send an email, wait three days, check whether they opened it, tag them, send a different email, tell your CRM about it.

You build it once. It then runs for every single person who qualifies, forever, without anyone touching it.

In the left sidebar under Database > Workflows. The overview shows your pinned and recent workflows; All Workflows gives you the full, searchable list with an active / inactive filter.

Creating one gives you an empty, switched-off workflow. Nothing runs until you have set a start condition, drawn the steps and switched it on.

Every workflow is made of four kinds of step, connected by arrows.

Only a Condition may split into two paths. Every other step continues to exactly one next step. When a step has nothing after it, the person is simply finished.

Click the Start step and pick the action that lets people in. This is the same catalogue you already know from automated emails, so nearly anything CamBuildr records about a person can open the door:

Then narrow it down. Depending on the action you can restrict the start to a specific source (this landing page, this email, this survey), a specific detail, particular products, and a value range — so "donated between 100 and 500 €" is a start condition, not something you have to check afterwards.

Start from other automations. This switch is off by default, and that is deliberate: it stops one automation from setting off another in a chain nobody intended. Turn it on only when you actually want actions performed by another automation to open this door too — not just things people do themselves.

You do not have to prepare the emails somewhere else first. On a Send email step, click Create automated email and you go straight into the normal email editor, with a banner reminding you which workflow you are building for. Save it and you land back on the canvas with the mail already selected.

An email used this way is owned by the workflow: it has no sending condition of its own, and it switches on and off together with the workflow. That is what stops the classic double-send, where a mail fires both on its own trigger and from an automation. For standalone automated emails that fire on their own trigger, see Email Automation Basics.

If you attach a tag that represents a consent requiring double opt-in, CamBuildr will tell you so on the step. A workflow cannot give consent on somebody's behalf. Everyone who does not already hold that consent gets a confirmation email instead, and the tag is only added once they click the link in it.

A Condition asks a question about the person and splits the path in two. You build the question in exactly the same rule builder you use for target audiences — everything you can filter an audience on, you can branch on here: tags, donations, past emails, survey answers, custom fields, where they came from.

Each condition has a yes branch and a no branch, and you can connect one next step to each. You do not have to use both. Leave a branch unconnected and the run simply ends there — that is the normal way of saying "and if not, do nothing".

Acquisition source is available here too, so you can branch on which ad, newsletter or post brought the person in — see Tracking campaign sources with UTM parameters.

A Wait step parks the person until it is time to continue. Two modes:

Waits are spread out over a few minutes rather than firing everyone at the same second, so a thousand people leaving a wait step do not all get an email in the same instant.

Each workflow has a re-enrollment setting:

Even on Every time, a person is never in the same workflow twice at once. If they are still somewhere in the middle of a run, a new trigger does not start a second one.

A workflow can belong to a campaign. When it does, it only lets people in while that campaign is live — before the start date, after the end date, or while the campaign is still a draft or already archived, the workflow enrols nobody, even if it is switched on. The workflow's page tells you plainly when this is why nothing is happening, with a link straight to the campaign.

People already inside the workflow are not thrown out; they finish their run as normal.

This choice is permanent. A workflow keeps the first campaign it is added to, so pick deliberately.

The Call a webhook action pushes data out of CamBuildr at exactly the right moment in the journey — into your CRM, a Zapier or Make scenario, or your own application.

You can test before you go live. Send test request fires one real request using the step's current settings — saved or not — filled with sample data and your own contact record, and shows you both what was sent and what came back. Copy example request gives you a ready-to-run command to hand to whoever maintains the receiving system. Both are marked with a special header so the other side can tell a test apart from the real thing.

Wherever you can type a value, the placeholder picker shows you what is available: the person's own fields, plus details about this particular run — the workflow's name, the action that started it, its source and value, and the moment the step happened. Useful for webhooks and for writing meaningful values into person fields.

The editor checks your work as you go and lists anything unfinished — a step with no action type chosen, a tag not selected, a step that branches when it should not. You cannot save a workflow that could not run.

Once saved, switch the workflow on from its page. From then on the workflow's page shows you:

Each person carries a status: Active (moving through the steps), Waiting (parked on a wait step), Completed, Exited (left early) or Errored (a step could not be completed).

Any of these is one sentence to Cora away.