Fully automate your email marketing by creating rules and conditions that subscribe new prospects and customers to follow-up and nurture sequences.

Contacts can be subscribed to a sequence with two types of automation:

  1. Starting rule – a condition set at the beginning of the sequence. It tells Kartra to add a person to the sequence as soon as they meet the criteria to start.
  2. External automation – a basic or advanced automation rule created outside the sequence, triggered by a variety of events or lead behaviors.

Both methods are effective and the best option will depend on your preferences or specific use case. Whichever method you use, however, it is best to avoid redundancy. 

For example, if your sequence has a starting rule based on a contact being assigned a tag, don’t create an additional automation that subscribes leads to the sequence if they are assigned the same tag.

Subscribe with a starting rule

Starting rules are the beginning of the sequence steps

  1. Go to Marketing > Sequences
  2. Open the sequence for editing
  3. Add rule(s) in the Starting Rules module
    • Click the + in the module to add the very first rule
    • Hover over an existing rule to edit or delete it (shown in the previous image)
  4. In the configuration window, select one or more conditions:
    Select lead or customer actions that will subscribe them to the sequence
    • Opt-in: Contact is added when they complete an opt-in form
    • Tag: Contact is added when they are assigned a tag
    • List: Contact is added when they subscribe to a list
    • Order: Contact is added when they buy a product
    • Page visit: Contact is added when they visit a Kartra page or an external page with a tracking code on it
    • Sequence: Contact is added when they are subscribed to a different sequence
    • Basic automation: Contact is added when they do something that triggers the automation rule configured in this module.
  5. Save the starting rules window.

When the starting rule(s) are saved, any contact who meets the criteria will be automatically subscribed to the sequence.

Note: Starting rules are not retroactive. For example, if the rule is based on tag assignment, contacts who already have the tag when you create this configuration will not be added. Only new tag assignments will trigger the rule.

Subscribe with automation rules

Automations can be used in many other places in your account to subscribe people to a sequence.

In the settings for most assets, do this at the Basic automations step. Select the sequence and entry step from the drop-downs:

Add sequence subscription to the configuration of another asset

To trigger sequence subscriptions when other events happen, use Marketing > Automations for maximum flexibility.

Use IF and THEN conditions to subscribe a lead when they do a certain action

In the example above, a customer will be subscribed to a cancel save sequence if they request cancelation of a recurring billing subscription.