Email automations are great for many reasons as they ensure that your new signups get on board and are immediately involved further without you having to actively do anything apart from the initial setup.

To set up an automated email, follow these steps:

Go to the emails section and select automated emails. There you can choose one of the templates or start from scratch.

From there, you are guided through the process step by step:

Here you can choose the sender, subject, and content. Furthermore, you can choose if you want to have an email sent to whoever triggered the email or to a static email address. Usually, for example, if you want to use it as a confirmation email, you want to choose "Send to trigger of the action." Sometimes you want to be notified when someone signs up. For example, if you use a contact form or an application form, in this case, choose "Send to the following static email address" and enter your email address.

This is where you can set when this email should be triggered. You can choose between external actions (such as webhooks from external tools or a website) and internal actions which take place in CamBuildr.

In most cases, you will use a CamBuildr internal trigger. These triggers can be chosen in the dropdown. There are options based on landing pages and apps, user behavior in emails, and also target audiences.

Tip: Combining target audiences and the trigger emails allows you to build more intricate email cascades. For example, if you want to send a triggered email to those who have participated in campaign A but not yet in campaign B, you would create a corresponding target audience and set the trigger to "Was added to a target audience." For anything with more than one step, a workflow is usually easier to build and easier to follow later.

Narrowing down a trigger. For internal triggers you can filter even further:

How often should the email fire? Under Repeated action you decide whether the email should fire every time the action happens (Send always – useful for donation confirmations) or only once per person, no matter how often they repeat the action (Send once – useful for welcome emails).

At sending options, you can choose a delay. This allows you to set up cascades that span over a longer period of time. We highly recommend doing so to ensure multiple touchpoints with your users.

When you enable a delay you also pick a specific time of day. Setting "2 days" + "09:00" means the email goes out at 9:00 in the morning, two days after the trigger condition was met – no more emails arriving at awkward hours.

Be aware that even if you set a delay, emails will only be sent from the time the email is set to "Active." No emails are triggered to users who have exhibited certain behavior in the past.

Chaining several delayed emails? A delay per email works, but once a cascade has more than one or two steps a workflow is the better tool: the waits and the branches live on one canvas, and you can see exactly where each person currently is.

Once the email is configured, switch it to Active using the Activate / Deactivate button in the editor header. While the trigger is inactive no emails are sent – including those that were already waiting on a delay. You can deactivate at any time.

An automated email knows who it is going to and what they just did, so it can say more than "Hello". Three ways, easiest first:

The menu in step 2 writes the same {% if %} syntax as step 3, so the three are one feature at three levels of effort. All of them work in automated emails exactly as they do in campaign emails. For the full picture see Personalizing an email: names, fallbacks and conditions.

One thing to expect when testing. Test sends fill every field with sample data, so a test email shows both sides of a condition at once. To see what one particular person receives, send the real email to a target audience containing only them.

Want to test which subject line, sender or email content works best? Add variants to your automated email.

Every automated email starts with a single variant. To add another, open the email and use the variant switcher at the top of the editor – click Add variant and CamBuildr creates a new version, copying the previous variant's content as a starting point so you don't begin from scratch.

Each variant has its own:

The trigger condition, recipient settings, delay and "Send once" rule are shared across all variants.

How variants are sent. Whenever the trigger fires, CamBuildr randomly picks one of the published variants. All published variants have equal probability – two variants means roughly a 50/50 split, three means roughly 33/33/33, and so on. Unpublished variants are never sent, so you can use that state to draft a new test version without disrupting the one already running.

Managing variants. On the trigger detail page you'll see a table listing each variant's trigger count, opens and clicks. Each row has a publish/unpublish toggle (eye icon) and a delete button. A trigger always needs at least one published variant, so you can't unpublish or delete the last one.

Reading the results. Every variant tracks its own opens, clicks, open rate and click-through rate. Compare them side by side, and once a winner emerges, simply unpublish the others – only the winning variant will be sent from then on.

A/B testing is available on the Advocate plan and above. On the Campaigner plan you'll be prompted to upgrade when you try to add a variant.

Open an active automated email to see how it's performing: total Triggered, Opened and Clicked counts, plus a 30-day activity chart that visualises sends over time. If you've added A/B variants, you also get the same metrics broken down per variant.

Inside the email editor the AI assistant lives in a sidebar. You can ask it to rewrite a section, change the tone, generate subject line ideas or shorten copy. It produces a "working version" you can review and either keep or discard. It can also add the personalization above for you — "greet people by first name and fall back to Hi there" is enough of an instruction.

For everything the assistant can do — building whole emails, configuring blocks, adding images and writing subject lines — see What Cora can do — the full feature guide.