Overview
An automation (also called a journey) is a flow that automatically does things for your contacts over time, without you having to do them by hand. A journey might send a welcome email the moment someone joins your list, wait a couple of days, check whether they opened it, and then either send a follow-up text or add them to a re-engagement list — all on its own, for every contact who qualifies. Automations turn a plan you'd otherwise repeat manually into something that just runs.
Automations live in their own section of the app, where you can see every journey you've built, its current status, and anything that needs your attention — a stuck run, a step waiting on your approval, or a draft that hasn't been turned on yet.
A row of filters across the top narrows the list: All, Active, Dry-run (a rehearsal a journey goes through when you publish it: it walks a stand-in contact down every branch to prove the flow holds together, without sending anything to anyone), Draft, Paused, Has failures, Approvals, and Routines. New journeys and routines are created with the New Automation and New Routine buttons.
What you can do here
- Build a journey visually on a canvas — drag on steps like "send a message," "wait," or "check a condition," and connect them in the order you want them to happen.
- Choose what starts a journey: a contact taking an action, a schedule, a manual trigger, or a broadcast to a whole segment.
- Watch a journey while it's live — how many contacts are moving through it, where they are, and whether anything has gone wrong.
- Pause a journey, fix a problem, and pick up where you left off.
- Review and approve steps that are set up to wait for a human decision before continuing.
- See failed runs in one place, and retry or stop them.
- Ask the AI assistant to help you build or adjust a journey by describing what you want in plain language.
The canvas, at a glance
Every journey is built on a canvas: a workspace where each step in the journey is a box (a "node"), and lines connect those boxes to show what happens next and in what order. You add steps from a palette on the side, connect them by drawing lines between them, and configure each step by clicking it and filling in its details in a panel alongside the canvas. Changes save automatically as you work; nothing goes live for your contacts until you explicitly publish the journey. See Building a journey for a step-by-step walkthrough.
From here, the other automation guides go deeper on specific parts of the canvas and the surrounding tools:
- Building a journey — opening the canvas, the step palette, connecting steps, and saving.
- Triggers — the different ways a journey can start.
- Actions — what a journey can do for a contact, like sending a message or updating their record.
- Branching and timing — splitting contacts down different paths and controlling waits and send windows.
- Approvals — reviewing steps that pause for a human decision.
- Monitoring and runs — watching live journeys and handling failed or stuck runs.
- Routines — scheduled automations that do a job for you rather than moving contacts through a flow.
Example scenarios
Scenario: Build a simple 3-step welcome journey
- From the Automations list, click to create a new automation.
- On the canvas, add an entry step that starts the journey when a contact joins your list or a chosen segment.
- Add a "send message" step after it, connect the two with a line, and write (or ask the assistant to draft) a welcome email.
- Add a "wait" step after the send, set it to wait a day or two, then add a second "send message" step for a follow-up, connecting it in order.
- Click a step to open its settings panel and fill in the details — who it's from, what it says, and any options specific to that step.
- When the journey looks right, publish it so it starts running for contacts who match the entry condition.
Scenario: Pause or fix a journey that's stuck
- Open the Automations list and look for a journey flagged with failures, or open its monitoring view directly.
- Check the run history to see where contacts are getting stuck and what error, if any, is showing.
- If you need to stop new activity while you investigate, pause the journey from its monitoring view.
- Fix the underlying issue — for example, a step with a missing setting or a broken link — directly on the canvas.
- Check the Failed runs list for any runs that hit the problem; from there you can retry a run once the fix is in place, or stop a run that shouldn't continue.
- Resume or republish the journey so contacts can keep moving through it.
FAQ
Q: What's the difference between an "automation" and a "journey"? A: They refer to the same thing in this product — a flow that acts on contacts automatically. You'll see both terms used; this guide mostly says "journey" when talking about the canvas itself and "automation" for the section of the app that lists them.
Q: What happens to contacts already in a journey if I change it? A: Editing a live journey is versioned behind the scenes, so changes don't simply overwrite what's already running. The exact behavior for contacts who are mid-journey when you publish a change can depend on what you changed — check with your team on the specifics for your situation, and consider testing significant changes on a small group first if you're unsure.
Q: Do I have to build a journey entirely by hand? A: No. You can describe what you want in the assistant rail next to the canvas and it will propose steps and connections for you to review and apply, or you can build everything yourself. See Building a journey.
Q: How do I know if a journey needs my attention? A: The Automations list surfaces journeys with failures, and a separate Approvals inbox collects any steps that are waiting on a human decision before they continue. Both are reachable from the main automations section.
Q: Can a journey run for a single contact, or only for groups? A: Both. Some journeys are triggered by an individual contact's action or a manual trigger for one contact at a time; others fire for an entire segment at once. See Triggers.
Q: What happens to a contact if a step in their journey fails? A: The run shows up in the Failed runs list, where you can see what happened and choose to retry it once you've addressed the cause, or stop it if it shouldn't continue.
Q: Can I test a journey before turning it on for everyone? A: The canvas checks your journey as you build it and blocks publishing while anything is incomplete or contradictory, so problems surface before contacts are involved. Publishing asks you to confirm, then activates the journey immediately — so review each step's settings first, and consider narrowing the entry condition to a small group for a first run if you're unsure.