Workflow
An automated sequence that reacts to contact data and behaviour, one contact at a time
A workflow is an automation: a trigger, then a sequence of steps that runs for each contact who enters it. Wait three days. If they have not opened anything, send this. If they have, send that instead. Others call the same idea a journey, an automation, or a drip.
The difference from a campaign is time and cardinality. A campaign is one send to many people at one moment. A workflow is a path each person walks separately, starting whenever they qualify.
What can trigger one
- A contact joining a list or matching a segment.
- A tracked event recorded from your own product — a plan change, an abandoned setup, a feature used for the first time.
- A change to a contact's own fields.
The thing to be careful about
A workflow keeps sending on its own, long after whoever enabled it stopped thinking about it. That is the whole value and also the whole risk: an enabled workflow with a mistake in it makes that mistake repeatedly, to everyone who enters.
Sendly treats it accordingly. workflows:write is one of the eight permissions that
arrive unchecked on an AI agent's consent screen, with the consequence stated — see
the MCP guide.
In Sendly
Workflows are built in a visual builder and run server-side, with a per-contact execution log so you can see which branch someone took and why. They are also a full API object, so one can be created, cloned, paused, resumed and inspected from code.
See Workflows and Event tracking.