The steps you can add to an automation

Steps in the builder are grouped into four families.

Trigger

Trigger — what starts the flow. Exactly one, at the top. See Automation triggers.

Flow control

• Delay — wait a fixed amount of time before continuing.
• Smart Wait — wait for something to happen, with a time limit.
• Condition — branch on something about the contact. Different people take different paths from here.
• A/B Split — send people down two paths so you can compare outcomes.
• Goal — the outcome you are aiming at, such as a purchase. Reaching it can take someone out of the flow.
• Exit — ends the flow for that contact.

See Delays and Smart Wait for the two that behave least like people expect.

Actions

• Send Email — the reason most flows exist.
• Tag Contact — apply a tag, useful for later segmentation.
• Update Contact — change a field on the contact record.
• Add to Audience / Remove from Audience — move people between lists as they progress.
• Webhook — call an external URL, for pushing into another system.

AI

• AI Step — generates content as the flow runs.

This one costs credits every time it runs — 2 per contact. The only other step that costs anything is Send Email, at 25 credits per 1,000 emails like every email. On a flow with real volume the AI Step adds up quickly, so read What an AI Step costs before putting one in a high-traffic automation.

Keep flows shorter than you think

Every step a contact passes through is work the system performs for that person. A ten-step flow across ten thousand contacts is a hundred thousand steps.

This is not a reason to avoid automations — it is a reason to prefer three well-aimed steps to twelve speculative ones. Long flows are also much harder to debug when someone asks why they got a particular email.

Next: open your automation and use the step list to add the next node.