Podia’s email campaigns allow simple but elegant automation.
While they don’t support the finer-grain logic or conditional branching of some email platforms, you can still do a lot using just entrance conditions, exit conditions and tags.
But if you, like me, want a deeper understanding of Podia’s automation capabilities, you might have questions the help docs won’t answer.
That’s why I set up my “Podia Lab” — a test site where I can run experiments to discover exactly how Podia works under the hood.
Here are some specific questions I had, and the answers I discovered.
1) What time of day are campaign emails sent?
When you create an email campaign within Podia, you set a delay on each of the separate emails within that campaign.
So a delay of 0 means that the email will be sent immediately that a user enters the campaign. A delay of 1 means the next day, a delay of 2 means the day after, and so on.
But what about the timing of each email? Podia doesn’t allow you to specify a preferred sending time, so what happens in practice?
Here’s what I’ve discovered in my “Podia Lab”:
The Day 0 email is sent soon after the user enters that campaign, exactly as you would expect.
But the timing of that first email also sets the schedule for subsequent days.
So if your Day 0 email is sent at 8:00am, the Day 1, 2 and 3 emails will also be sent at that time on those days.
Note: there’s usually a small delay between the campaign being triggered and the “Day 0” email being sent. Usually less than five minutes, but sometimes a little longer. The same short delay is baked into the subsequent emails.
2) Can users re-enter a campaign they’ve entered before?
If you’ve created a welcome email campaign, you may have various ways that users can end up in that campaign. For example:
- One path could be signing up for your email newsletter.
- Another path could be signing up for a free digital download.
Either of those actions could legitimately enter a user into your welcome campaign.
However, if someone signs up for your newsletter and then a couple of days later signs up for your freebie, you wouldn’t want them to start receiving the Welcome campaign emails all over again.
Fortunately, it looks like Podia will not add a user to a campaign they’re already in.
Which is a useful safety net. You wouldn’t want one user to be at two different stages in the same campaign.
However, I discovered something else, which is perhaps less obvious.
A user can never enter the same campaign twice, even if they’ve fully exited.
So even if they meet a new entrance condition in the future, they will not enter the campaign again. In fact, I could not find a way to make a user go through the same campaign twice.
In most cases, that’ll be exactly what you want. But sometimes it won’t be, so this is useful to know.
For instance, let’s say you have a short series of Black Friday emails to promote your main product that you tweak and resend each year. You wouldn’t want to set those up as a campaign because users would only be able to go through it one time.
3) What if a user already meets the exit conditions?
Email campaign behaviour is primarily controlled by two sets of conditions:
- Entrance conditions which determine what needs to happen for a user to enter the campaign
- Exit conditions which determine what needs to happen for a user to exit the campaign
Simple enough on the surface, right?
But I was curious to find out what happens if a user meets an entrance condition (e.g., signing up for a product) but already meets one of its exit conditions.
Do they never enter the campaign, or enter it and then immediately exit?
What’s the difference, you might ask?
Well, since exiting one campaign can be used as the entrance condition for another, entering and immediately exiting would still kick-off the second campaign.
However, it turns out that the user never enters the campaign at all, so they won’t trigger any later campaigns.
Logical but not immediately obvious and good to know.
4) What actually happens when you pause a campaign?
Once an email campaign is up and running, you have the option to pause it.
In fact, you have to pause it if you want to make any changes to it.
There are other reasons you might want to pause it too.
For example, you might want to stop campaign emails being sent out on a public holiday when they might get missed. Or to reduce the noise during a flash sale.
But I was curious what actually happens when you pause and then subsequently “unpause” a campaign. How does it affect the timing of the emails?
Well, here’s what I discovered:
- When you pause and then unpause a campaign, any emails that were due to be sent in that paused “window” are sent immediately after unpausing (i.e., they’ll be sent a little late, not delayed until the next day at the original time).
- If you pause a campaign for more that 24 hours, emails won’t “back up”. The first overdue email will be sent immediately, others will be pushed back so as to maintain the original spacing between emails.
- Except for the situations above, pausing does not affect email timing. So, pausing a campaign for an hour doesn’t push all emails in the campaign back one hour (i.e., Podia tries to maintain the original schedule as far as possible.)
Again, Podia handles it in a commonsense way that makes sense for most scenarios.
But again, it’s useful to know how it will behave in advance!
Congratulations! You Just Levelled Up!
Most Podia users won’t need to understand email automation to this level of detail.
But if you’re making heavy use of campaigns, or just want to push the platform to its limits, this stuff is useful to know.
These four discoveries should help you level-up your understanding of how Podia email campaigns actually work.