If this happens, then do that
☝️ That’s how Automation Rules in Kit work, in a nutshell. Also known as "Rules," they help you automatically take certain actions within your email setup when certain events occur.
For example, you can set up Automation Rules to automatically:
Add Tags to subscribers who click certain links
Set a custom field value to subscribers who complete an email sequence
Unsubscribe subscribers from a Sequence when they purchase a product
A single Automation Rule can have multiple triggers and actions. For instance, you can have an Automation Rule that works like this:
"When Trigger 1 or Trigger 2 happens: carry out Action 1, Action 2, and Action 3."
When to use an Automation Rule instead of a Visual Automation
Apart from Automation Rules, we also have a Visual Automations feature for helping you automate your email workflows. Between the two, Visual Automations are generally easier to set up and manage.
Visual Automations are also more powerful, letting you do more things than you can do with automation rules.
👉 Therefore if you have the option of automating an email workflow using either a Visual Automation or an Automation Rule, we’d recommend using Visual Automations.
That said, there are a small number of workflows that you can automate only using Automation Rules and not Visual Automations.
Primarily, this is where you’re setting up Link Triggers to trigger an action when subscribers click certain links. The other somewhat common situation is when you want to unsubscribe someone from a Form (which is currently not possible in Visual Automations).
In these two situations, we recommend using an Automation Rule instead of a Visual Automation.
We have a dedicated guide to setting up Link Triggers if that's what you need. Otherwise, the article below shows you how to set up an Automation Rule for other purposes 👇