The Community Summer of Flows

Just like the summer of love transformed American culture in 1968, Community’s Summer of Flows is transforming customer engagement with two-way conversational marketing. Unlike email, social media, or standard SMS tools, Community is designed to help brands connect directly with their most loyal fans, customers and constituents directly, deeply, and at scale. The secret to our ability to drive this deep level of engagement is Flows, our automated workflows functionality. This 4-part series will highlight new Flows capabilities and common use cases, starting with an introduction to recent enhancements.

What are Flows?

Community’s Flows feature automates personalized messaging and audience targeting based on actions taken by the member. Traditionally, Flows has been used for tasks such as welcoming new members, responding to keyword-triggered messages, and facilitating Shopify automation. Today, it has evolved into a more robust tool for fostering deeper relationships between our customers and their fans. Through recent enhancements, Flows is now more flexible, more user-friendly, and more powerful than ever before.

Below are the new Flows launched this summer that we’ll focus on with this post: 

1. Expanded If/Else branching logic and additional targeting options
2. A new Flow targeting members that joined a Subcommunity
3. A new Flow for targeting Members who engage (or don’t engage) with any specific campaign

Expanded If/Else branching logic

If/Else logic lets you build automated flows, or paths, that power deeper, ongoing conversations and adapt to each member’s responses. As you automate actions in Community, If/Else logic creates multiple branches,or paths, that create different experiences based on an individual’s profile. You can target these branches based on:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Subcommunity membership
• or any Custom Field that lives on a Member record

With this new improved If/Else branching built in, flows get a major upgrade: smarter logic, sharper targeted SMS automations for more powerful, effective, and personalized journeys than ever..

Joined a Subcommunity Flow 

One of the most powerful features in Community is the ability to organize Members into various Subcommunities based on common interests. These Subcommunities can be built manually (by choosing which Members to add to said Subcommunity) or automatically (adding Members to said Subcommunity if they mention a specific keyword or reaching an “Add to Subcommunity” step in another flow).

Now, with our new Joined a Subcommunity feature, you can also automate a series of messages to Members who enter a Subcommunity. Like all Flows, these can be made more targeted using If/Else branching logic highlighted above. 

Campaign Follow-Up Flow

The Campaign Follow-Up Flow is the core of the Community promise. This Flow is exactly what any Community customer needs to scale their engagement! 

In Community, Campaigns are the primary way to send messages to Members, with the most effective ones driving two-way engagement. These campaigns spark real conversations: think polls, videos, and flash offers. . It's important that you don’t leave Members hanging after such a Campaign. However, it can be tough to manually follow up with every Member that responded. This is precisely where Campaign Follow-Up Flows come in. These Flows are designed to automatically engage with Members based on their Campaign activity. Specifically, Community customers can use these Flows to interact with Members when they:

• Click a link in a Campaign, or do not.
• Respond to the Campaign, or do not. 
• Respond to a Campaign with specific keywords, or do not.

This functionality is central to the promise of Community.

Campaign Follow-up Flows are a powerful tool for engagement. Nearly every Campaign created in Community should incorporate a Follow-up Flow. This ensures that engagement campaigns remain active and live without requiring manual intervention, which is a true game-changer. 

Show Your Customers Some Love by Staying In Touch With Flows

We're excited to share these recent improvements to the Community experience. We believe that SMS automation is key to transforming any engagement program from stale to stellar.

Whether your audience is a million or a hundred, automating engagement is crucial for achieving the scale needed to deliver desired results.

Flows are your secret weapon for driving smarter, more meaningful engagement at scale. We hope this post helps you understand how to  leverage these powerful tools and inspires you to be even more creative with Community. 

What’s next?

Stay tuned for part two of our blog series which will be a deeper dive into If/Else Flows Logic and top use cases.  

Learn more about using SMS automation to boost engagement. 

Join our next webinar on Thursday, November 6  to see how Flows keep your audience engaged through personalized automated journeys.

Get a personalized walkthrough of Community by texting ‘Demo’ to 323-310-2202 or signing up here.