Automate your emails effortlessly
There are an infinite number of things you can automate when you use visual automations. Let's start creating yours!
What are visual automations?
Often called funnels, visual automations help you send well-timed, targeted content to your audience so you can stay focused on what matters most: growing your online business.
Visual automations are here to help you:
Create powerful, automated funnels
Customize a subscriber’s path based on their actions
Send targeted content to the right people at the right time
Easily segment your audience based on their customer journey
With visual automations, you can build custom paths for your subscribers. No matter what industry you are in, there’s always an automation that can serve you and your audience.
You can survey your audience, launch a product, host a webinar, sell a service, and so much more!
Create multiple points of entry
Part of the beauty of automations is that you don't have to stick with one entry point per automation. You can add an additional entry point by clicking the (+) next to your initial one.
TIP: You also have the option to select "Any form" as an entry point, if you want the automation to trigger when a subscriber joins any of your forms or landing pages!
NOTE: If your automation is initially wider than the allowed entry points, you can split it into multiple automations.
Another great option for adding multiple forms as entry points to an automation would be to group all of those forms to a tag, and then have that single tag become your automation’s entry point. You can learn how to do this here.
Visual automations glossary
Here’s a quick overview of what you can do with visual automations:
1. Actions
Actions are the backbone of automations. Actions are commonly used for connecting forms to sequences and automatically tagging subscribers when they opt in.
2. Events
Events pull subscribers forward in your visual automations. Events are commonly used to move subscribers on a certain date, when a product is purchased, or when a tag is added/removed.
3. Conditions and split paths
Conditions are the visual automation equivalent of a fork in the road. Conditions ask "yes" or "no" questions that direct your subscribers down the appropriate path based on the answer that applies to them.
Getting started with visual automations
If you're ready to build your first visual automation, these guides will help you:
How to create your first Kit visual automation: Learn how to start your very first visual automation in this tutorial.
Visual automations library: Easily create a visual automation with our collection of templates to use and share.
How to use visual automation templates in Kit : Check out this tutorial on how to create visual automations using our downloadable templates.
Become a visual automations pro
Ready for more advanced automation? Here are our top resources to get you going:
How to manually add subscribers to an automation: Set up an automation too late? Learn how to retroactively pull subscribers into an automation.
Viewing and removing subscribers in visual automations: Learn where to find your subscribers at each step in your automation, as well as manually remove them from the automation if needed.
How to remove a step from a visual automation: How to delete steps from your visual automations when you no longer need them.
Delay progress in a visual automation until a custom date: Learn how to customize the duration of a delay in your visual automation using custom fields!
Looping subscribers: Here's how to send subscribers back into an automation where they left off.
Remove purchasers from a sales sequence once they buy: Learn how to automatically remove customers from a sales sequence once they make a purchase.
Combine visual automation entry points into a tag: Reached the maximum number of entry points for your visual automation? Here’s how to merge them into a single tag!
Make changes to a visual automation without interrupting current subscribers: Want to edit your visual automation without interrupting its subscribers? Here’s how.
Adding notes to visual automations: Here's how to add internal notes for your own reference to your visual automation nodes.
Share a visual automation: Learn how to share a visual automation with your clients directly from your Kit account (perfect if you’re an affiliate or online educator!)
FAQs
"What's the difference between an automation and a sequence?"
Sequences are simply back-to-back emails. Each email has delays in between them, telling the system how long it should wait before sending out the next email in line.
Automations are much more powerful, and can hold a sequence inside of it—or even multiple sequences! Automations are a string of multiple actions, based on specific steps, all coming together to create your funnel.
"I created an automation with an entry point and an action step, but no one is in the automation. What did I do wrong?"
There are a few things you can check when this happens. Let's answer this question here:
"Why are subscribers getting unsubscribed from sequences in my visual automation?"
When a sequence is inside of a visual automation, as subscribers go through all of the published emails in the sequence, they are marked as having completed that sequence.
The visual automation unsubscribes them from that particular sequence once they've completed it, but does not unsubscribe them from your list altogether. The automation moves them forward to the next step.
On the other hand, if you have an automation rule that sends a subscriber to a sequence, the subscriber will not be unsubscribed from the sequence when they've made it through all of the published emails. They will still be an active subscriber in this sequence.
If you were to add an email to this sequence later on down the road, this subscriber who was added via the rule will get that new email you added.
For more information on keeping subscribers in sequences versus having them removed and marked complete, check out this article.