How to set up push automations: welcome, abandoned-cart & drip

Welcome series, abandoned-cart reminders, weekly messages, and RSS-to-push.

What it is

Messages that send themselves. Pick a goal and relaybell sets it up with ready-made messages you can edit.

When to use it

For anything you’d otherwise send by hand again and again: a welcome for new subscribers, cart reminders, new blog posts or a weekly message.

Find it at: Automations

Before you start

relaybell on your website and some subscribers — automations only send to people who have subscribed.
Store alerts need your website to report what shoppers do. On WooCommerce, our WordPress plugin (version 1.2.2 or newer — older versions sent no WooCommerce events at all, because of a loading bug) reports carts and purchases for shoppers who are logged in, plus restocks and price drops. On Shopify, install the relaybell app from the Shopify App Store: it reports carts, orders, restocks and price drops for you, and links shoppers who are signed in to a customer account. Other websites need a developer.

Set it up

1In Automations, click a ready-made one: Welcome series, Abandoned cart, Back in stock, Price drop, Welcome back, New blog posts or Weekly message. Custom journey and Custom trigger start from scratch.
2Welcome series: a two-message journey opens — one right away, one a day later. Edit the wording and click Activate.
3Abandoned cart: a reminder opens that waits 1 hour and is skipped if the shopper buys first. Edit it and click Activate.
4Back in stock and Price drop: edit the ready-made message and click Activate. A back-in-stock alert goes to everyone who tapped “Notify me when back in stock” on that product, or on the specific size/colour they picked (our WordPress plugin adds the button to sold-out WooCommerce products); they’re then taken off its list. A price-drop alert goes to subscribers who viewed the product in the last 30 days, logged-in shoppers who added it to their cart, and anyone on its back-in-stock list — at most one price-drop alert per product every 10 minutes. The price-drop message can use {product}, {oldPrice}, {newPrice} and {percentOff} — prices are plain numbers, without a currency symbol.
5New blog posts: check your blog’s feed address (we fill it in for WordPress and Shopify when we can), choose who gets new posts and click Add feed.
6Weekly message: a repeating message opens, in your time zone. Choose every hour, day or week, the time and the text, then click Create.
7Click an automation that’s already set up to see or change it, or to pause it.

Every setting, explained

Message series: Several messages spaced out over minutes, hours or days. A series starts when someone subscribes, or when your website reports an action you name. “Stop the series early if this happens” ends it for a person when that action happens, like a purchase. + Add condition lets only matching people continue (by country, browser language, last page visited or label); everyone else leaves the series there.
Who gets a series: A welcome series only reaches people who subscribe while it’s on — not your existing subscribers. Each person goes through a series once. While a series is paused, nobody new starts it and people already in it get no messages from it. Turn it back on and they carry on from where they stopped — only their next message is sent, not everything they missed.
When something happens on your store: One notification, sent a set time after your website reports an action. “Cancel if … happens first” skips it if your website reports that action during the wait, like a purchase. “Only once per subscriber” means nobody gets it twice. Words in curly brackets, like {product}, are filled in from the details your website sends — add backup words like {product|this item}. Cart reminders can also show the cart itself: {cart.items} (like “Blue mug, Tea set and 2 more”), {cart.total}, {cart.count}, and {cart.image} as the picture.
Back-in-stock and price-drop alerts: Product alerts go to everyone interested in the product, so “Cancel if” and “Only once per subscriber” don’t apply and are hidden for them. Back-in-stock alerts reach each person once, because they come off the list. For price drops, at most one alert per product is sent every 10 minutes. Quiet hours and the wait you set still apply.
New blog posts: Each new post is sent with its title, summary and link. We check every 15 minutes. When you add a feed, only its newest post is sent; older ones are skipped.
Weekly message (repeating messages): The same message every hour, day or week, at a time in the time zone you choose (written like Europe/London). It keeps sending until you pause it.
On / Paused and counters: Click On or Paused on any item to switch it. Each series shows how many people are in progress, finished and stopped early; store automations show how many were sent.

Tips

Start with a Welcome series — every website should have one.
On WordPress, use either New blog posts or the plugin’s Send on publish setting — not both, or subscribers get each post twice.
You can change wording and wait times at any time, even while people are partway through a series.

Watch out for

A store alert goes only to the shopper the action belongs to (on WooCommerce and Shopify, the subscriber whose User ID matches their email). Back-in-stock and price-drop alerts are the exception: they go to everyone interested in that product. None of them is ever sent to your whole list.
Back-in-stock and price-drop alerts work automatically on WooCommerce with our WordPress plugin (version 1.2.2 or newer — older versions sent no WooCommerce events at all, because of a loading bug). On Shopify, the relaybell app handles them on its own; other sites need a developer to report them.
Price-drop alerts only reach people we know were interested. On WooCommerce, a product view counts only if the visitor was already subscribed, and adding to the cart counts only for logged-in shoppers.
Without “Cancel if purchase”, shoppers who buy can still get the cart reminder.
While people are partway through a series, you can’t remove or reorder its steps — and clearing a message’s title counts as removing it. Add steps at the end, or create a new series.
If a repeating message says “not scheduled — check the time zone”, the time zone name wasn’t recognised.

More setup guides

New to relaybell? Start with the full setup guide.

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