We've created a series of articles to help you discover Marketing Automation. In this article, we will introduce you to the basic features of Marketing Automation available in Brevo.

• Part 1: What is Marketing Automation?
• Part 2: Basic features - YOU ARE HERE
• Part 3: Advanced features

If you’re still new to Marketing Automation, we recommend you start by learning more about our basic features. Once you’re confident with the basics you can move onto more advanced features and workflows, such as visitor tracking or abandoned cart workflows.

Basic workflows

Brevo Automation is designed to meet everybody’s needs. You can start off with workflow templates and customize them according to your needs, or you can create your own custom templates and define your own entry points, actions and conditions.

Here are a few examples of basic workflows that you can easily build in Brevo:

• Welcome message: send a series of emails after a subscription
• Anniversary date: send a special offer on a contact's birthday or on the anniversary of the date they subscribed to your website
• Campaign interaction: interact with the contacts who opened or clicked your campaign
• Inactivity reminder: send an email reminder after X days of inactivity

Targeted communication using email and contact data

To be able to build basic workflows, personalize your email templates, and segment your contacts, you will need to collect information about the individuals making up your audience. This data will allow you to tailor the content of your automated campaigns to each contact's needs and avoid messaging coming across as generic.

Here is the basic data that you can easily collect from your contacts:

Email activity data

Your email activity data corresponds to the interactions your contacts have with the emails you send them through Brevo. For example, you can send a reminder to contacts who opened your email containing a special offer but did not purchase anything.

As Brevo Automation is fully integrated into your email campaigns and transactional emails (SMTP), this data is automatically uploaded when a contact interacts with one of your emails.

Contact attributes

Your contact attributes correspond to information that you have stored in your Brevo contact database. For example, you can use a contact’s date of birth as a condition to send a special birthday email to them at the right time.

You can retrieve this data by:

• embedding a Brevo subscription form on your website or landing page,
• using one of our Brevo plugins to synchronize the data from your website,
• manually uploading a contact import file to Brevo,
• creating a direct API integration to synchronize the data automatically from your system (only available for BrevoPlus plans).

Contact segmentation

You can use Marketing Automation to easily manage your contact lists by setting up a workflow that will automatically add, move, or remove contacts from your lists based on different criteria like their behavior or interests. For example, you can decide to move contacts from the "Visitors" to "Shoppers" list after their first purchase, and later move them to the "Regular shoppers" list once they've ordered from your website 3 times.

Reporting and analytics

Thanks to the comprehensive, real-time statistics available on your sent messages and workflow entries and exits, you can constantly improve your communication strategy and evaluate performance.

After creating a workflow, you can check its logs and statistics:

• Automation statistics correspond to the statistics of a specific workflow over a period of time that you defined. By clicking View Stats under a workflow name, you will be able to see the percentage of contacts in each step, and the opening, clicking and unsubscribing statistics when an email template is sent.
• Automation logs
  • Workflow logs correspond to the path of a contact within a workflow: the entry, waiting and exit stages.
    
  • Event logs correspond to the actions performed by your contacts on your automation and transactional mailings, or their behavior on your website.
  • The Contacts in Workflows tab allows you to see the contacts that are currently in one or more workflows.
• Transactional statistics correspond to the metrics of the emails sent via your marketing automation workflows. You can easily filter your transactional statistics over a period of time, by sender, and by tag.
• Transactional logs correspond to the actions performed on the emails sent via your marketing automation workflows. You can easily filter your transactional logs over a period of time, by sender, by tag, and by event (sent, opened, unsubscribed).

⏩ What's next?

• Part 3: Advanced features