Build an automated email sequence

What an email automation is

You want the same email to go out every time somebody joins your list, or three days before a trial ends, without anyone having to remember it. That is what an email automation does.

An automation is a trigger — the thing that starts it — followed by a chain of steps. Each subscriber travels through it on their own clock, so somebody who joins today gets the same sequence as somebody who joined last month, just shifted in time. Once you switch it on, it runs without you.

Yaplet has two features people confuse, and this is only one of them. These email sequences used to be called workflows. The word moved: Workflows now means the scripted conversations that run in chat, on Facebook and Instagram and on phone calls, and those live under Brand → Workflows. Email sequences are Email automations, under Newsletter. The web address did not change, so an old bookmark ending in /newsletter/workflows still opens the right page.

Before you start

Email automations are a paid add-on. In the add-on list the module still carries its old name — Newsletter workflows, $12 a month (3 790 Ft on forint accounts). Buying it is what puts Email automations into your menu.
You need a verified custom sending domain. Every email step has to pick a sender address, and only addresses on a verified custom domain are offered — Yaplet-hosted @yaplet.io addresses are not. See Verify your sending domain.
There is one fixed ceiling: 50 automations per account, the same on every plan. If you are already at it, Yaplet refuses to create another one and tells you so.

Create an automation

Go to Marketing → Newsletter → Email automations.
Click New automation.
Give it a name in the Create a new automation dialog and click Create.
The Automation builder opens with a trigger step already sitting on the canvas.

Until the trigger and every step on the canvas are fully filled in — and there is at least one step besides the trigger — the builder shows an Invalid automation warning and the activation switch stays greyed out.

Choose what starts it

Click the trigger step to set it up. Five triggers are available:

Trigger	When it fires
When a user subscribes	Somebody confirms a new subscription. The usual choice for a welcome series.
When a user unsubscribes	Somebody opts out — useful for a farewell note or an exit-feedback survey.
The exact match of a date/time	A date (or date-and-time) custom field, optionally offset: three days before `trial_expiry`, on the subscriber's `birthday`, thirty days after `signup_date`.
Manual trigger	You start it yourself, one subscriber at a time, from that subscriber's page.
API	Your own code enrols a subscriber with an HTTP call.

The subscribe trigger only counts confirmed sign-ups

It fires only after the subscriber clicks the link in a verification email. It does not fire for imported contacts, or for anyone marked verified without going through an opt-in step. If a welcome series never seems to send, this is almost always the reason — see Unsubscribes and double opt-in.

Setting up the date trigger

Recipients — pick at least one Group or Segment. Save stays disabled until you do.
Use this date field — a single field holding several controls side by side: the date (or date-and-time) custom field to watch, a number, a unit, and whether to fire Before, On or After the value stored in that field.
The unit choices are days, weeks, months or years for a plain date field. Minutes and hours appear only when the field stores a time as well.
When should it be triggered? (in UTC) — an hour picker (00–23) and a minute picker offering only 00, 15, 30 or 45. It appears only for plain date fields, because a date-and-time field already carries its own time. Every time you set here is read as UTC, and a note under the field says so.

Add steps

Click the + under any step to add the next one — under a Condition step you get two buttons instead, Yes and No, one per branch. The Add a next step to your automation dialog offers:

Email — send an email. Set the subject, preheader, sender name and sender address, then design the body in the drag-and-drop editor or load a saved template. Each email step keeps its own copy of the content.
Delay — wait before continuing. Subscribers queue at this step until the time is up. Each unit has its own maximum: 60 minutes, 24 hours, 31 days, 52 weeks, 12 months.
Action — change the subscriber without sending anything: Update custom field, Copy to group(s), Move to group(s), Remove from group(s) or Mark as unsubscribed.
Condition — split the path. Subscribers who match go one way and everyone else the other. The test can be any subscriber field or custom field, or whether the subscriber is in a given group or segment.
Webhook — POST a JSON body you define yourself (key/value pairs, which can include subscriber field tags) to a URL of yours, signed with the same Signature header as Data fetch, then carry on to the next step.
Data fetch — GET data from a URL of yours and make the values available to later Email and Webhook steps as {{key}} placeholders. Yaplet signs each request with a Signature header so your server can check it really came from us.
Other automation — hand the subscriber over to a different automation. The control reads Switch to another automation, the target has to be active, and the screen states it is meant for chaining MANUAL automations.

Build a welcome sequence (example)

Set the trigger to When a user subscribes.
Add an Email step: "Welcome to [your company]" — this one goes out as soon as they confirm.
Add a Delay step: 3 days.
Add an Email step: "Getting the most out of [your main feature]".
Add a Delay step: 4 days.
Add an Email step: "Any questions? We're here."

Turn it on and off

A new automation is inactive and sends nothing until you turn it on. The switch is in the builder's side panel, labelled Active, and it stays disabled while the automation is still invalid. The card on the list page shows an Active or Inactive badge, but that badge is only a label — clicking it does nothing.

Turning an automation off stops it for everyone, including the people part-way through. Anyone waiting at a Delay step is dropped from the queue and will not receive the remaining emails, and switching the automation back on later does not resume them — you would have to enrol them again.

Start an automation for one subscriber

Go to Marketing → Newsletter → Subscribers.
Open the subscriber.
Choose Actions → Trigger automation.
Pick one from the Automation list and click Start.

This enrols one person at a time. For anything bulk, use the API below.

Start an automation from your own code

Send a POST request to the enrolment endpoint with your API key in the Y-API-Key header. Any extra values you want to use inside the emails go in as ordinary top-level fields alongside email and workflow_id — they are not nested inside anything.

POST https://yaplet.com/api/newsletter/workflow/start
Y-API-Key: <your-api-key>
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "workflow_id": "<automation-uuid>",
  "plan": "pro",
  "city": "Berlin"
}

For the call to succeed, all of the following have to be true:

The address already belongs to a contact in your organisation whose state is Verified.
The automation is active and its trigger is set to API.
Your organisation has the Email automations add-on.
There are at most 20 extra fields, and every value is a piece of text or a number.

Those extra values become {{plan}} and {{city}} placeholders inside the automation's Email and Webhook steps. If the same subscriber already has a run of this automation waiting, a second call is ignored instead of starting a duplicate.

The endpoint address and the workflow_id field still use the old word. That is deliberate — renaming them would break every integration already calling them, so leave them exactly as they are.

Duplicate an automation

On the list page, click the Duplicate button in the automation card's footer row (the copy icon). Every step and every email body is copied into a new automation named "… (Copy)", switched off, which you can then change without touching the original.

What's next

Every email step uses the same editor as a campaign — see Use the drag-and-drop email editor. To reuse one design across several automations, save it as an email template.