Events

Event Flows are a premium tool in SendPro used to follow up on events. Use Event Flows when you want to follow up an event with a message, such as an SMS or another email. For example, you can notify a department when a recipient opens an email or clicks on a specific link. 

To view, create, and design an Event Flow, navigate to Events under Design.

In this article:

• Overview
• Creating an Event Flow
• Parent Event Flows
• Examples Event Flows

Overview

In the overview, your current Event Flows are displayed. Conditions are checked from top to bottom, and once matched, the event will pass through the flow. 

From this overview you can:

• Edit: Edit your Event Flow by clicking on the name of the Event Flow. You can delete your Event Flow by first editing the flow and then click Delete below the page.
• Change/Save order: To change the order of the Event Flows. Drag and drop them in the interface using the three dots on the left side of each Event Flow.
• Create Event Flow: Create a new Event flow. Read more about this under heading: Creating an Event Flow.
• Reset: With this button you can reset your order actions.

Creating an Event Flow

To create a new Event Flow, click the Create Event Flow button. You will be directed to a page where you can configure the flow.

You will be directed to the following page:

Event Flow

• Description:This description will be shown in the Event Flows overview. We suggest using a flow that summarizes the use of the event flow for easy management.
• Parent Event Flow: You have the option to link the event flow you are creating to a Parent Event Flow. This option can be used to let this parent event flow “catch” all events for set conditions. Once this parent Event Flow is finished, the normal Event Flow will follow-up. Read more about this under the heading: Parent Event flows.

Conditions

Conditions in SendPro are always AND AND, meaning all conditions must be met for the event to proceed. Be aware of this when setting up the conditions. In other words if two conditions are set, the event must meet both conditions in order to end up in this event flow.

• Event type: Choose an event type such as opened, clicked, or undelivered. You can select one of these options or choose for any in case it does not matter why you want to trigger an event flow. In practice you might want to follow up a undelivered message in a different way compared to a opened message. 
  

  

Advanced conditions
When you click on advanced condition. More options will be shown:

• Link url: When the event type is clicked, you might only want to trigger the event for certain clicks. Use the field link url if you want to do it based on the URL of the link.
• Link name: In the HTML of your email, you can add the property data-name to the <a></a> tags. The value of this data name (example: data-name=”testUrl”) can be the input of this field. Once someone has clicked on the link containing this data-name. The event flow will be triggered.
• Message Flow: Select a specific message flow if you want to only trigger your event flow if the event comes from a message that went through a specific message flow.
• Header name: If you want to trigger the event flow based on a message header, enter the header name and the value it should match.
• Data name: If you want to trigger the event flow based on a datafield of the message you can fill in the name and the value it should match. This data is often the data from your source system or gained during the normale message flow (external data flowstep).

Do you want to know which special variables can be found to be used in the data name condition? Read this article: What are Special Functions for templates?

Templates

You can also apply JSON templates to the event flow.

These templates can be used for fetching message data for example. Which is useful if you want to parse the data in Flowsteps or new messages that you would like to submit. More information on this subject can be found in the article: Templates.

Steps

Once conditions are set, finalize the Event Flow. The available FlowSteps include:

• Discard: Stop processing the message. Often used in test-cases or under certain conditions.
• External Content: Retrieve content from an external source. Sometimes reusing content published elsewhere can be a very efficient way of keeping your e-mails up to date. You can easily retrieve this content from any HTTP(s) location using this FlowStep and assign it a variable name for use in your templates.
• External Data: Perform an API request to a given endpoint to push event data or gain more data from the endpoint. 
• Schedule: Schedule your event to be finished at a specific date or later time. Use the max messages per hour option to manage the output.
• Spotler Contact: This FlowStep allows you to retrieve contact information from a Spotler Mail+ account using the Spotler REST API, using the recipient address as the key. That contact information can then be used in templates.
• Submit New Message: Trigger a new message by selecting a flow that is already created.

Parent Event Flows

Parent Event Flows can be setup if you want further specify behavior after an event. Let’s say you send a quotation to a customer and you offer the customer two options: click to accept the quotation or click to deny the quotation. If you give those links a different value or a specific data-name you can use that as a condition of your event flow. In the children of these parent flows you can further customize what you want to happen after this event.

For example let’s take a look at the image above.

1. The first parent flow catches any event for messages that have gone through the *API to Event Flow.
2. If a click is registered it will automatically trigger the first child of the parent flow due to the conditions.
3. If the click is registered for the URL it will also trigger the second child.
4. If you setup a flowstep in the parent event flow. That one will also be executed by the child.

This is how it looks in the interface:

The two grey Flowsteps are inherited from the parent flows and will be executed before the blue flowstep in the last child. So in this scenario a JSON template is applied to fetch additional message data. An external data flowstep is executed to push the event to an external endpoint. At last a new message is submitted to trigger a new email.

Examples of Event flows

We have different step-by-step plans how to create an Event flow:

• Reuse data for a follow up message
• Submitting a new message based on the recipient's behaviour
• Pushing Message Events to your Webhook