Focus: The focus of this public FAQ/Self Help guide is to provide you an overview and details about Cliently Flows.
What are Cliently Flows?: A flow is a list of items based upon “actions” for a marketing campaign that will be processed(sent) to your Cliently contacts (Deals). For Example: Send email, wait 1 day, Send Video message, wait 2 days, Send postcard.
Contact ownership controls how flow actions are processed.
This means that any user who is an Owner, an Administrator, or a Manager role can log in with their own credentials and send flows to leads who belong to other Contact Owners in their workspace. When this is done, those flow actions will come from that Owner and not the user logged in at that time. This can be beneficial for teams who are using a default email address across their account for engagement, but the users only have access to their own login credentials. This can be done from within the Cliently app as well as from the CRM extensions available for Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Hubspot.
Please note: Instant Actions will always be sent from the integrated email address for the user logged in at that time. Lead Ownership does NOT impact Instant Actions as it does for Flows.
What does a typical flow look like? At Cliently, we’ve observed thousands of sales professionals who’ve used our app. What works:
Space out your Flow actions: do not “rapid-fire” prospects with sales-y messages.
Customize and then customize some more: take advantage of Emails, Video Message options, combined with Tokens (which change for each message recipient, like their name) to make it clear you’re not sending spam.
Start with email, video messages and end with postcards, tasks and gifts.
Schedule your flows with options to exclude U.S. Holidays, process actions on specific days of the week and hours throughout the day!
Ability to “lock” down the flow so it can only be seen by you, or Owners/Admins of the account.
Ability to update action content in masse and automatically update flows that have been assigned to your contacts.
Can I have a contact in more than one flow at a time? No. Each individual email address/contact can only be in 1 flow at a time. You can always change a contact's flow at any time, but this means that the previous flow will end for that contact. This helps to prevent duplicate outreach for teams that can could potentially result in negative responses from the recipient(s).
Please note: Make sure you have connected your email integration before creating your first flow!
Sending Limits: Cliently offers an ability to limit the number of emails sent per day for your flows. Be sure to check out this FAQ article to setup “Sending Limits”.
Step 1: Creating a new Flow Let’s create your first flow. In this example: we will create a new flow, apply settings, add 3 actions and enable it to be used, to start sending out to contacts.
Step 1-A: Accessing Flows in Cliently Click on “Flows” on the left. You will see something like this:
If you are on the Dashboard, click on the Flows icon on the left.
Step 2: Naming your flow and options. Next, we need to enter a name for the flow, enable “Stop Workflow” options and setup an “unsubscribe” message. When completed, click the blue button “Save”. In this example: we have named the flow “New Flow – Email – Time Delay – Video Message” and enabled both options.
Please note: Checking the “unsubscribe” option - this will include an unsubscribe option for your recipient to click, in order to no longer receive any further messages that you are sending through Cliently. When a recipient unsubscribes, it will STOP the flow from continuing. Though the Unsubscribe feature is optional, we strongly recommend giving this option to your leads.
Step 2-A: Stop Workflow if engagement options. In this section you can enable email options to turn off the flows in the case of specific events.
Email Replies - When the lead replies to your email sent through Cliently.
Email Bounces - When the lead’s email address does not exist and you receive a bounce/undeliverable message.
Email Auto - Replies - When the lead auto-replies to your email sent through Cliently. i.e. Vacation reminders, etc.
Please note: Flow Stopped Messages If you use the above options and the flow has been assigned to a contact, you will receive a message as to why the flow has been deactivated upon your opening the contact's card.
Please note - Replying with an Alias email address: Cliently will always do the best it can to detect and stop a flow when these options above are enabled. However, if you are sending Flow actions to a lead that replies back from an “alias” email address (an email address NOT listed in Cliently for this contact), we may not be able to detect the reply and stop their Flow. As this is a possibility, we recommend always double-checking your contact's card to see if their flow has stopped.
Pro-Tip: Name your flows accordingly so that assigning your contacts to the correct campaign is always easy.
Step 3: Schedule. Here you can set up your flows and input specific dates and times for when your actions will process. You have the ability to set your Timezone, to exclude US holidays, and to set specific days and time frames for your flow actions to execute.
Please note for default settings: Your current web browser/computer time zone will be set for the timezone, Exclude US holidays will be unchecked, all 7 days of the week will be checked to process actions, and scheduled times will be set from 12:00 AM to 11:59 PM.
Step 3-A: Timezone: By default, this will be selected to your web browser/computer selected timezone. We do not recommend to change this unless you are traveling.
Step 3-B: Exclude US Holidays: By checking this option, your actions will be not be processed for any Official U.S. Holidays. (List of U.S. holiday’s found here: https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/)
Step 3-C: Scheduled Days: Select which days of the week that you want your actions to process.
Step 3-D: Scheduled Time: Select the time frame in which you want your actions to process.
Step 4: Private/Public Sharing of your Flows. Private (locked) is enabled by default. However, you can enable (unlock) to share your Flows with your entire team. Click here to learn more about setting Private/Public permissions for your flows.
Step 5: Adding Actions Next, we can start adding our actions. Click on the action icons on the right side of your screen. To add your next action, click on the blue “+” under your last action. You can also click the small grey "+" between existing actions if you would like to add elsewhere in the Flow.
In this example, we have added an “Email” Action + “Time Delay (2 Days)” Action + “Video Message” Action.
Pro-Tip: You can click-hold using your mouse over the left side actions to move them up and down to modify the sequence of the actions.
Cliently Actions (Click each link to learn more about each action):
Step 6: Saving and enabling the flow Saving is handled when you have added each action to the flow and completed creating the action. Next, we have to “enable” the flow so we can use it for our contacts (Deals) in Cliently. Below is an example of the flow we have created in the “ON” position. It's now ready to be used for our contacts.
**Please note: Turning off a Global Flow does NOT turn off the Flow for contacts that have already been assigned to that flow and activated. This includes any leads imported and added directly to a flow, or manually entered and manually added to a flow that has been activated.**
Step 7: Adding flows to Contacts Once the flow has been created and enabled, go to your Real-Time View page. Open your contact card to view the Flow drop-down on the far right side. You will select your Flow from this drop-down. Alternatively you can go to the Real-time View page and bulk engage this flow with multiple contacts.
Step 7-A: Enable the flow for the contact. Your last step is to now enable the flow for this contact. Once you do this, the flow will begin and the first action will process within seconds.
Step 7-B: Start Now or Schedule for later. As soon as you enable the flow, you will be presented with two options. Immediately or “On…”. Here you can choose if you want the flow to process as soon as possible, or you can choose the 2nd option will provides you a Start Date, Start Time and Timezone. Please note: Time Zone is set by default to your browser timezone setting.
Step 8: Renaming and deleting a flow. At any time, you can also rename and delete any flows you no longer wish to have in your account. Click on the grey “cog” icon to access those settings. Please keep in mind that deleting a Flow will NOT end the sequence for any contact already assigned to the Flow. They will continue to get your Flow actions, as originally scheduled.
Step 9: Flow Analytics (Drop-down for date/time) Once you have used this flow and sent emails out, you can go back to your Flows page. Select your Flow from the drop-down to view it's Global analytics/stats. Please note: You can also change the “Time Selector” and #/% for values for specific analytics on when this flow was used.
Total
Engaged
Not Interested
Failed
Please note: As of 10/11/2019, we have also added in “exclusion keywords”. If any of the following phrases is used in a reply, those will not be counted as “Engaged”, but “Not Interested”.
Those keywords are: “unsubscribe me”, “spam”, “take me off your list”, “remove me from your list”, “remove me”, “not interested”
Step 10: Action Analytics Once you have used this flow and sent emails out, you can go back to your Flows page. Select your Flow from the drop-down. As you click on each individual action of your Flow (email, postcard, video message, etc), you will be able to view its individual analytics (below the action) as it populates the right side of your screen. Please note: You can also change the “Time Selector” and #/% for values for specific analytics on when this flow was used.
Sent – Number of times this email was sent.
Replied – Recipient replied to the email sent.
Opened – Email was opened, only applies to users who have remote images enabled.
Auto-replied – Replies generated from a away message set within the recipient’s mail settings.
Bounced - Message from a service saying the email address doesn’t exist or the email was undeliverable. Also includes any undeliverable emails.
Unsubscribed – Recipient clicks on the unsubscribe link within the email sent.
Step 11: Reviewing actions via Timeline. If you open your contact card and scroll down, you will be able to view this individual's timeline of all actions sent in your flows. You will also be able to review any replies and monitor their opened/read messages.
Step 12: Updating existing content to flows that have been assigned to your contacts. A new feature as of 10/28/2019. Now, when you update content (such as an email body), you can have those updates be added to existing flows you have assigned to contacts. Learn more here about this feature.
Troubleshooting:
Server Related errors. Its possible that your email server might send back to Cliently the following errors:
429 - Rate Limit Errors
422 - Mail server timeouts
400/500 - General Errors - All other mail server errors.
Cliently will try to process these workflows up to 7 times if Cliently receives these errors. After 7 times your flow will automatically turn off, like show below: You would need to contact your email provider to investigate why these errors continue to occur.
Need Help? If you need any help with Cliently Flows, please login to your Cliently Account and click on the red “Help/Chat” icon found on the bottom right side of your account.