Workflow Automation Overview Video

Introduction

Welcome to the world of marketing and sales automation! My Local Ads' Workflow automations can help you automate Actions within your CRM account and external applications. Each set of Action steps within a Workflow automation are triggered by a set of Triggers. In other words, the Triggers that are set up in your Workflow automation determine how and when a Workflow automation is fired off to complete its set of Actions.

Businesses that understand and properly implement Workflow automations experience the benefit of streamlining sales and marketing processes to reduce labor and increase effectiveness of their activities.

Here are some example Workflow Triggers:

• Trigger when a Contact Replied (across any channel)
• Trigger when a Tag is added to a Contact
• Trigger when a new Form gets submitted
• Trigger when a new Survey gets submitted
• Trigger when a new Appointment is booked
• Trigger when an Appointment status changes
• Trigger when an Opportunity is placed in a specific Pipeline Stage
• Trigger when the status of an Opportunity changes
• Trigger when a Custom Field of a Contact changes
• Trigger when a Task is due
• Trigger when an Invoice is completed
• Trigger when a Purchase is made
• Trigger when a Birthday is due
• Trigger when an outbound Webhook is received (to integrate with 3rd party applications)

Here are some example Workflow Actions:

• Send Internal Notifications (via In-App, SMS, Email)
• Send an SMS
• Send an Email
• Send a Facebook Messenger response
• Send a Instagram Direct Message response
• Send a Google Business Profile Message response
• Create or update a Contact Note
• Initiate Phone Call to Contact
• Add or remove Contact Tag
• Add to or remove from a Workflow automation
• Create a new Opportunity in a Pipeline
• Request a Customer Review Request
• Assign a Contact to a User (Team member)
• Send a voice recording to a voice mailbox
• Set Contact to DND (Do Not Disturbe)
• Update Appointment status
• Add to Google Adwords (for API conversion tracking)
• Add to Google Analytics (for API conversion tracking)
• Add to or remove from Facebook Custom Audience
• Add to Facebook Conversion API (for API conversion tracking)
• Wait
• Math Operation
• Number Formatting
• Webhook (to integrate with 3rd party applications)

Hypothetical Scenario For Workflow Automation

Let's assume your goal is 1. to track your Leads coming from a specific marketing activity by using your Pipelines for the activity and Opportunities for the Leads, and 2. to create Follow Up tasks for your team members. Let's also assume that in your marketing activity, you receive new Leads via 'Form Fills' (leads inquiring about your service by filling out a form on your landing page) and 'Phone Calls' (leads that use the tracking phone number on your landing page to call you).

In order to create this Workflow automation, you would need your Pipeline and Pipeline stages set up together with your Form and Phone Call Tracking numbers.

To automate the workflows of 1. and 2. in this scenario, you can create a Workflow automation that uses the 'Form Submitted' and 'Call Status' Triggers for your Form Fills and your Incoming Phone Calls to trigger the automation. Then, in your Action steps, you can use the 'Create New Opportunity' action to create a new Opportunity in your specified Pipeline whenever a new Form is submitted or whenever a new Phone Call is received. In addition, you can add the 'Create Task' action and the 'Assign User' action, to create a new Task whenever a new lead is received and to automatically assign the Contact (along with its Opportunity) to your Team member.

Beware: Make sure to adjust your Settings to allow multiple contacts to be added to this campaign, or not if you choose to only allow contacts to pass once through this automation. Use your Status and History overview to troubleshoot your Workflow automation and to see how Contacts flow through your automation.

The Workflow automation would look something like this:

What You Don't Need To Automate (Because We Already Did It For You)!

Here is a list of out-of-the-box automations that we do not recommend you to create new Workflow Automations for:

• Notifications when new conversations (e.g. SMS/Email/Phone Calls/FB Messenger etc.) are initiated with the CRM. Please use your Notification settings under Settings > My Profile > Notifications for this.
  
  
• Notifications for new leads received through My Local Ads' managed services [managed via Google Local Services / Google Ads / Google My Business / Website Organic Pipelines].
  
  
• Automated Review Request when a Lead gets dragged and dropped into the 'Review Requested' Pipeline stage of any My Local Ads' managed pipeline [e.g. Google Local Services / Google Ads / Google My Business / Website Organic Pipelines].
  
  
• Automated Form Fill confirmation emails to Contacts/Leads of any My Local Ads' managed landing page [e.g. Roofers & Contractor Forms and Roofers & Contractors Landing Page].
  
  
• Missed-Call-Text-Back automation feature for automated SMS/MMS responses for missed calls coming through your CRM Tracking Phone Numbers. Please use your Business settings under Settings > Business Profile > Enable Missed-Call-Text-Back feature for this. Beware when changing the default Missed-call-text-message feature response text: (This is not legal advice) Promotional missed-call-text-back messages are not GDPR and A2P compliant because sending promotional text messages requires express consent from the contact, which is not provided via a Phone Call. Tip(s): Avoid including web links in your response message to your products or services. Avoid including promotional offers or descriptions of your products or services. Avoid assuming in your text response that the contact is interested in your products or services.

Build More Complex Workflow Automation Logic With The 'If/Else' Action Step

Within your Workflow automation Action steps, you are able to introduce logic by creating an 'If/Else' Action step that allows you to segment your Workflow automations into Branches. Considering the 'Hypothetical Scenario For Workflow Automation' example (as seen above), let's say you wanted to introduce another Action Step to your Workflow automation to send a confirmation email to the Contact that submitted your Form (but not to Incoming Phone Calls). Since we are dealing with two Triggers in this example, 1. Form Submission 2. Incoming Phone calls, we need to segment the Form Submissions from the Incoming Phone Calls in our Workflow automation.

The Workflow automation with built-in logic would look something like this:

FAQs

Why did my workflow automation only work once and now it's not working?

By default, Workflow automations do not allow contacts to pass through the automation more than once. Make sure that your Workflow Settings are set to 'Allow Multiple' if you'd like to add the same contact multiple times to your Workflow automation.

How do I connect Workflow automations with API Integration tools such as Make, Zapier, Pabbly, and similar?

To connect your Workflow automations with API integration tools you need to complete the following steps:

1. Create a new webhook in your API integration tool to catch a webhook. Copy the new webhook URL.

2. In your Workflow automation, set the trigger of your choice and add a 'Webhook' action step to your workflow and paste the copied 'Webhook URL' into your action step.

3. If properly setup, your Workflow automation should be able fire-off the Webhook and send the payload (information) to your API Integration tool. In your 3rd party API Integration tool you can then use the information to integrate with other 3rd party applications.

Can I set a schedule for my Workflow automations?

Yes, visit the Settings of your Workflow automation and add a schedule to specify at what times your Workflow automation should be active. When adding a schedule to your Workflow automations, any automations that get fired off outside of the schedule will be queued for when the schedule resumes again.

Where can I see the contacts that triggered the Workflow automation?

To review the Contacts that have triggered your Workflow automation, check out the 'History' and the 'Status' tab in your Workflow automation. The 'History' tab provides a log of all Contacts and the associated actions that have taken place inside your Workflow automation. The 'Status' tab provides a quick overview of the current status (e.g. if the Automation has finished yet) for all Contacts that have passed through your Workflow automation.