Workflows, also called automations, are an excellent tool in your email marketing strategy. They let you send an automated email or a series of emails to your subscribers.
Workflows are best used when you want to
- deliver a freebie right away upon their signup to your email list;
- guide new subscribers through a series of welcome emails to introduce you and your business;
- warm then up via a nurture sequence before you make them an offer;
- just to name a few.
When creating workflows, the best practice is to look at the end goal. What do you want your subscribers to feel or do at the end of the workflow. What action do you want them to take? Then reverse engineer the workflow by including emails and any other steps (conditions, actions, time delays) that help you achieve this goal.
And I get it. Sometimes you may need more time to finish your workflow, and it’s not feasible to set it up with all the steps right away.
So what can you do?
Glad you asked, and let me show you!
How to keep adding new steps to your existing workflow in Flodesk?
The short answer:
End the workflow with a dummy Time delay and Email Step
What does it mean?
If you decide not to set up the whole workflow at once, then you need to add a placeholder/dummy ‘Time delay’ and ‘Email step’ at the end of it.
This ensures that for, e.g. 1000 days, people won’t reach the last step in your workflow and won’t complete it—giving you time to work on the new emails for the workflow.
You can also add a ‘wait 30 days’ step to the workflow, it doesn’t have to be 1000 days as in this example below.
Then when the time comes to add the real email:
Follow these steps if you only want to add one last/final email to the workflow:
- Click on the Placeholder email and update/edit it to be your Real Email to send out with the workflow.
- When you finished editing the email, add a new time delay below the dummy ‘Wait 1000 days’ step.
This should be the real time delay that you want people to wait until getting the actual email.
E.g. ‘Wait 1 day’ or ‘Wait 30 minutes’.
See below example.
- Save and Publish the workflow.
- Then go back to the workflow, delete the dummy ‘Wait 1000 days’ step and save & publish the workflow again. See this mini-guide as reference.
Important note: If you use specific dates and times as your Time delay anywhere in the workflow, it won’t let you re-publish it if any of those Time delays are in the past.
Your options are:
- Update any time delays that are in the past.
- Don’t use specific dates and times as your Time delays, and you’re good to go.
Follow these steps if you want to keep adding more emails still to the workflow later:
First of all, add another set of dummy Time delay and Email step to the workflow, so that it looks similar to the below screenshot example.
Then click on the first Placeholder email and update/edit it to be your Real Email to send out with the workflow.
When you finished editing the email, add a new time delay step below the first dummy ‘Wait 1000 days’ step.
This should be the real time delay that you want people to wait until getting the email.
E.g. ‘Wait 1 day’ or ‘Wait 30 minutes’.
Save and Publish the workflow.
Go back to the workflow and delete the first dummy ‘Wait 1000 days’ step and save & publish the workflow.
You will now have:
- a valid, real Time delay,
- a valid Real email, and
- as last steps still a dummy placeholder Time delay of ‘Wait 1000 days’ & a placeholder email.
This ensures people won’t complete the workflow just yet.
Repeat these steps when you want to add a valid, real email again.
Conclusion
As you see, it’s a bit time consuming to edit workflows this way. And you need to be careful when editing the dummy time delays and emails. That’s why I highly recommend planning ahead and creating your workflow in one go.
Also, bear in mind the following:
While you’re editing an already published workflow, subscribers in the workflow will get frozen where they are—and no emails will be sent to them during this time. However, once you finished editing the workflow and re-published it, they will continue from where they were left off.
And new subscribers who enter the workflow’s trigger segment(s) when a workflow is paused for editing, will be added to the workflow as soon as the workflow is re-published. (Source: Flodesk Help Center)
