Automations are the engine of Ontraport. They follow up with your leads, move them through your sales process, and run your internal business processes on autopilot. This lesson gives you the big picture. The lessons after it go deeper on each piece.
An automation map is a flowchart-like path your contacts follow, step by step. It connects your data, your messages and other assets, and the logic that decides what happens next. Automations target people by their data, not by lists. Ontraport checks your database for anyone who matches, so you don't need to build a list for every email you send.
Every map is built from five kinds of building blocks. Triggers are the doorway. They start contacts on a path when something happens, like filling out a form or buying a product. A trigger can also be based on a contact's details, like their birthday.
Waits control timing. Without them, steps run back to back, so six emails in a row would go out at almost the same time. A Wait element holds contacts for a set amount of time, until a specific date or a date in their record, until a certain day of the week, or until a trigger or goal moves them. In the builder, you'll find the Wait element with the filters.
Goals are the outcomes you want, like a purchase or a membership sign-up. When a contact reaches a goal, they can jump straight to it and skip the steps in between.
Actions do the work. They send an email or SMS, assign a task, change tags, update a record, grant membership access, and more. There's also an AI Assistant action. You give it instructions, and it can merge in each record's data. It's available on all account levels and uses AI credits.
Filters route your contacts. A Condition sends them down a yes or a no path. A Fork sends them down two paths at once. A Split divides them between versions for A/B testing. A Go To connects to another point on the map. And an End marks the end of a path.
To create an automation, go to Automations, then New Automation. If you've turned on other objects, like Companies or Deals, you'll find Automations under Contacts instead. Start from a prebuilt template, start from scratch, or build one with AI using Opie. Click the plus icon to add a trigger, then click What Happens Next? to add the next step. Elements stack from top to bottom. In Edit mode, you can use the plus icon to add an element between two others, or drag an element by its move icon to move or copy it, on its own or with everything below it. Your changes save automatically every minute, but nothing goes live until you click Publish, then Save & Publish.
When a contact matches a trigger, they enter the map there and move down, one element at a time. But the path isn't always a straight line. Conditions split it into yes and no paths.
Goals pull contacts ahead. If someone buys partway through your follow-up emails, they skip the rest and move straight to the goal. Go Tos send contacts to another point on the map.
And a contact can be in more than one place on a map at the same time, for example on both paths after a Fork. Every element has settings that change how it behaves. Trigger and goal settings matter most, like what happens when a contact who's already on the map triggers it again. You'll learn those in the coming lessons.
Once a map is published, it opens in the Performance tab. Choose a report and a date range, and each element shows its stats, like how contacts are flowing through the map. Click a number to see that group of contacts, and take action on them if you need to.
We're using contacts as the example, but you can build automations for any object in your account. For example, a veterinarian who keeps a Pets object could build automations for those pet records. Custom objects come with a Dynamic CMS package.
So: triggers start the path, waits set the timing, goals mark the outcomes, actions do the work, and filters route your contacts. Next up, we'll take a tour of the Automation Builder.