What is a Workflow?

Workflows are like little programs that automate you and your team. Learn what all they can do!

Video

Transcript

00:00 All right. Now, it's time to talk about the fun stuff and start creating automation for your business with workflows. So if you're not in the workflow section, what you're going to do is on the navigation panel.

00:12 You're going to look for the icon that looks like this and says automation and click that. And on this, this is where we house.

00:19 What we call our workflow. Section workflows are our ways to automate tasks like notifications, uh, email and text follow-up. You can create marketing campaigns.

00:32 You can have dynamic campaigns that, you know, when a customer does this action, it automatically does. This. Workflows are absolutely amazing and allow you to replicate yourself and your team and ensure that they're following up correctly.

00:47 Um, you know, that they're getting good support and so forth. You can create awesome automations that really save a ton of time.

00:55 You can create really complex workflows that just absolutely will, will blow you away. So let me show you a quick example here.

01:06 Let's say we have a landing page where we have a web form on it, and you know, someone goes to our page and they fill it out and they click our button to submit well, normally you might have an email autoresponder follow up with them saying, Hey, here's your free voucher for this?

01:24 Well, you can build that in a workflow to where you don't have to lift a finger. You know, if you did this manually to respond to this customer, Hey, here's your voucher.

01:31 That would take a lot of time. So what you can do is actually build a workflow that can automate this for you.

01:38 It can automatically reach out and respond, sending text emails, ringless voicemails, it could send notifications to your staff members. Um, it can follow up with them for years, if you want to all automatically without you having to lift a finger.

01:55 So let's dive back into workflows. And what we're going to do is I'm going to showcase, uh, the workflow system here.

02:02 So as you can see, we've got a couple of options. We've got, all of our workflows will be displayed. When you first click on the automation tab, uh, appear, we have a folder, so you can create folders for your workflows to help organize them.

02:15 Maybe you want to have a folder for all of your opt-ins. Maybe you want to have a folder for current clients for their campaigns, so you can build some amazing campaigns and workflows.

02:29 Now on here, we also have a button that says create workflow. So you can create a brand new workflow. If you click this and down here, you've got all the ones that you have listed.

02:38 Uh, you may not have anything here if you're just starting out, but if you do, you'll have them there and you've got a couple of options.

02:45 You can edit your workflow, you can delete it, or you can clone it. So let's dive into a workflow here and just show you a sample of what I'm talking about.

02:54 So this is a support workflow. We have a support site that, uh, we've set up under this account and we have a form that they fill out where they can fill out a ticket.

03:02 Like, you know, they have this web form. They can fill out and say, Hey, I've got this issue. I need help.

03:08 And so when they fill out that form, here's the workflow that happens all automatically without me having to lift a finger.

03:14 So the first thing it does is it adds them to a pipeline. So it creates this opportunity that, Hey, this person needs help.

03:21 Then it's going to notify our team. And so what it's going to do is send an email to all users on this account.

03:27 And it's gonna say, Hey, you just received a support request. Here's their contact information. Here's the issue they're having. Here's all their information.

03:35 Please respond to them. So it's sending this notification without us even having to check our system or anything like that, then it's going to add a task.

03:44 So we have it set up to where it automatically adds a task to the right person to, you know, go and help this person out.

03:52 This is all without us lifting a finger, they just filled out a form and did this all completely on its own.

03:58 Now, next it's going to send a text message to the person that filled out the form. So we have it sending out a text message says, Hey, you know, we saw that you had, uh, this is an automated message from our team to let you know, we've received your report support request, and we're going to respond to you shortly.

04:14 And then it sends out an email at the same time. So it says, Hey, here's a quick message to let you know, we've received your request.

04:20 In the meantime, please check out our support portal, uh, helpful videos. So what you can do with these is you can automate and send out broadcasts notifications and do a whole lot in workflows to really automate.

04:34 I mean, you think about this. What would you have to do if you didn't have something like this? Well, once this, uh, form came in, that's going to go and maybe it goes to an email address.

04:44 So then you got to forward it over to your support staff, you know, and you got to notify them and say, Hey, this person needs help.

04:54 You know, to add a task, you'd have to open up your CRM and type in a task. It did this all automatically without us having to do it.

05:01 We just have it programmed in to where it's ready to go. And then it automatically texted and emailed the customer to say, Hey, we've got this under control.

05:10 We've got your support requests. We're going to follow up with you shortly. So you can build these workflows to automate all of this tasks for you.

05:20 And these can get really intricate. They can wait for time periods. They can be dynamic that if a customer responds, it sends this thing.

05:28 If a customer doesn't respond, it sends this message. They can get really, really complicated and awesome through the process. So let's dive in and I'm going to show you how to set up a workflow.

05:42 So the first thing we're going to want to do is we're going to want to create a folder for our workflow.

05:46 So let's call this one. Opt-ins how about that? So we've, we've created a folder just to help us stay organized.

05:57 As you build out a lot of these, which once you start using this, I'm sure you will want to build out a lot of these in the future.

06:03 And so you want to create a folder. And then what you're going to do is create a workflow. So hit create workflow, and you can do a couple of different things.

06:14 So you can import from a campaign. If you already have campaigns set up, uh, you can start from scratch where you're just starting out with your own stuff.

06:23 And you also have recipes down here that are already set up. I mean, look at some of these, we've got an appointment confirmation reminder survey and review request.

06:32 So we have a whole program set up for appointments that Hey, for every appointment that gets booked, we're going to send out a confirmation.

06:39 We're going to send them reminders. We're going to survey what happens after it. And if it was positive, then Hey, we're going to send them a review request to, uh, send out a, to leave us a review on Google my business.

06:51 I mean, how awesome is that that all gets done without you having to lift a finger. These are already created.

06:57 Um, we have a recipe for Google, my business that if somebody sends in a message, you can send an auto reply to them.

07:04 We have a text to call back, uh, for when, when somebody misses a call on the system, it can automatically text them and say, Hey, sorry, we missed her call.

07:13 Uh, what can we help you with? So all of these recipes are great to look into, um, you know, here's one for birthdays.

07:20 Uh, you can do birthday promotions to automatically send out, uh, email specials on their birthday can actually check the, uh, CRM and find out whose birthday it is and then send them a birthday message.

07:32 So these are absolutely incredible. You're going to love these, uh, once you dive in and learn how to do it now for our purposes, what we're going to do is we're going to start from scratch.

07:43 So you'll select start from scratch and create new workflow. Now, when you first get in here, the screen, there's a couple of different options.

07:52 We've got actions. That's the tab that we're on. We've got settings, we've got history and status. So the one thing that we want to do is change our name of our workflow.

08:05 So let's do one for opt-ins. So we're going to call this one opt-in. So now we've got the name saved and we're going to change the time window.

08:15 Now think about this. When you're sending out text messages and emails, you might want to define a specific time to run those actions and you can actually do that.

08:25 So if we want it to run it at specific times, we can set up, okay, we want this to run from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

08:31 Maybe we don't want to hit people with emails and texts during dinner. And so what it can do is it'll wait and delay, you know, communication to send on the next day, if need be, you can also set up your cinder address, you know, where do you want your email to come from?

08:45 So let's type in, uh, David Bussel, David gmail.com, right? And so then you can have contact management. Do you want to have multiple contacts, contacts enter the workflow more than once you might want to do that?

09:03 Uh, you also have an option to stop on response. You know, if you're sending out text messages and they reply back, Hey, uh, I'm interested.

09:11 You might want to stop marketing to hum with follow-up messages saying, Hey, do this do this right? So you can stop on response.

09:19 You can auto mark as read if you want, uh, this, you know, kind of helps things get smooth. If, uh, you want to auto mark them as read, uh, you can do an event start date.

09:30 So if you want to have, uh, everybody's started a specific time, you can do that as well. So these are just some basic settings and the back end of a workflow that you're going to want to set up every single time to make sure that it's coming from the right emails and it's coming at the right times, right?

09:46 So let's jump back over to actions and let's start working on our workflow. So the first thing we need is we need a trigger.

09:54 We need some kind of event that's going to set off our workflow. You know, if we have an opt-in page, that event would be them filling out the form.

10:03 So what we would do is we first start with our workflow trigger. And so what we want to do is we want to select this and what would be our trigger?

10:12 Well, let's say they filled out a form. So forms submitted. Now, what form did they fill out? Obviously we've got to select the form that we created.

10:23 So form is, and it'll look at our forms. So we have a free comic form that we set up. So let's select that one.

10:31 So what this is going to do is when they've fill out this form, it's going to run this workflow. So maybe, you know, they're opting in for a free comic.

10:40 So let's look at this. They're opting in to get something for free. So let's dive back into our workflows here and let's add action.

10:49 That's going to happen. So the first thing we might want to do is to send an email to the customer.

10:53 So let's say we automatically send an email. So we have a firm name here, we'll do our name, our email, Let's do Subject three comment voucher, right?

11:16 If you have a template already set up, you could use a save template here, and then maybe you type out a template, you know, Hey, First name, Thanks for grabbing a free comic voucher.

11:41 Here is your promo code. So maybe I have a promo code in there or something bring by the, to redeem, you know, so you have some kind of message in there.

11:57 I wouldn't recommend that as I'm just typing in some gobbledy goop to give us some, some context here. So you can see kind of what it might look like, and then you'll save the action.

12:06 So what's going to happen is customer goes to the website, they click the button, they fill out the form and then automatically what's going to happen is it's going to go in here, form submitted, it'll add it to the CRM.

12:19 And then what it'll do is it'll send them this automated email. And let's say we wanted this email to wait a day.

12:27 What we could do is we could add a trigger before and we could scroll down. And as you can see, you've got lots of options here.

12:35 So you could wait, maybe want to wait. Uh, so let's wait seven days. If we want, just to be silly, you wait days or minutes from this, we save actions.

12:50 So now what would happen? Somebody fills out the form at wait seven days and then emails them. That'd be a terrible follow-up system.

12:56 But just to show you that you can wait specific amounts of time, uh, to send other things. Now, maybe you want to send a text message.

13:04 So we click plus add a new action and we can send a text message. Did you get your free comment?

13:19 You know, you could send something like that. So we'll save that. So you can build these really intricate out and automate your business in a lot of different ways.

13:29 You can add people from the CRM to workflows, you can import lists and automatically add them to campaigns like this, and really build them out to where they really do a ton for your business.

13:42 So that's an overview for all workflows. Uh, I'm going to go ahead and, uh, just exit out of this. I don't want to save this silly, uh, workflow here, but just wanted to give you an example of what one might look like.