How to create an email course in MailerLite, step by step

What a workflow waits for, and which group it watches

An automation platform starts a sequence from an event rather than from a date: somebody joined a group, completed a form, clicked a link, reached an anniversary. The event is the trigger, and the trigger is also the door. Whatever is able to put an address into the group a workflow watches is able to start the course, an import and an API call included.

So the first question in MailerLite is which group the course workflow watches, and what else writes to that group. If a shop integration files customers there, a purchase starts the course. If an old form still points at it, a page you forgot about still enrols people. That is the mechanism working rather than a defect, and it only bites where nobody drew the map.

The second question is what the first step waits for, and what each later delay is counted from. A workflow that waits a day after the previous step counts from the moment that step actually went out, so a queue that ran late once drags the rest of the week behind it, and a confirmation at twenty to midnight puts the remaining lessons near midnight.

Where confirmation is switched on, and where it is skipped

Confirmed opt-in is offered by everything in this category, so the useful question is never whether it exists. It is which paths go round it. Find the level the setting sits at — the account, the group, or the individual form — because the level decides how many doors one switch covers.

Then walk the doors one at a time with an address you own: the hosted form, an embedded form on your own site, a spreadsheet import, an address typed in by hand, an API call, and whatever an integration pushes in. A service can ask for confirmation on its own form and take an unconfirmed address through the other five, and the other five are where a list quietly goes bad.

Ask it in the other direction as well. When somebody unsubscribes, what stops: this workflow, this group, or everything the account would send them? An unsubscribe that belongs to a workflow rather than to a person is how somebody who left on Tuesday hears from you on Wednesday, and that message is reported rather than unsubscribed from.

The last step, and the morning after it

A course is finite, which makes the end of a workflow a design decision rather than an edge case. Something is configured there already: the workflow stops, or it files the reader into another group, or it starts a second workflow. Whatever it is, somebody chose it and it was probably not you.

The reader has just finished five days of something, which is close to the best moment they will give you all year, and an unchosen silence spends it on nothing. One note saying the course is over is a fair answer. So is a door into something else. So, deliberately chosen, is silence.

The same screen is where to ask what an edit does to the people already inside. Fix a broken link on day three this afternoon, then find out whether a reader sitting on day two receives the fixed version or the one they entered on. Both behaviours are common and both surprise people the first time.

If you already use MailerLite, test these four things first

A list and a few campaigns already in place are a reason to stay rather than to shop. Two addresses at two different mailbox providers and two days of waiting answer more than any feature page, provided there is a real lesson behind the form rather than a message saying test.

Four tests, in the order that finds problems earliest:

• Join today with one address and tomorrow with a second. The second should receive day one.
• Import a one-row spreadsheet into the group the workflow watches, and see whether anything asks that address to confirm.
• Submit the form a second time from an address already inside, and count what arrives over the following days.
• Unsubscribe on day three with the mail client’s own button, then send a campaign to that group and see whether it lands.

What a settings screen will not say

Two things stay invisible from inside any account. The first is what happens when a mail provider accepts a message and then times out before saying so. Sent late is an inconvenience; sent twice is a complaint, and the shape that prevents it is a uniqueness rule held in a database rather than a line of code somebody remembered to write.

The second is what you leave with. Every tool exports addresses. The consent wording and the timestamps are harder, and the list of everyone who unsubscribed, bounced hard or complained is rarely beside the export. Ask for all three by name while the account is still open, because that third list is what stops a first send somewhere new from reaching everybody who already left.