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Automating Campaign Events
Everything we've built so far lives inside the Sequencer. This lesson is where it stops being a closed system. By the end you'll be able to build an automation off campaign events with a run condition, and you'll know why not to automate your replies yet.
📋 It's Just a Table
Open the Events tab and every event your campaigns produce streams into an ordinary Clay table. Sends, bounces, replies, category updates. Each one is a row.
The columns are campaign, lead, sender account, the reply body, and the event type.
Which means everything you already know about Clay applies. You can add enrichment columns, run a Claygent over it, filter it, sort it, and act on it, the same as any other table in your workspace.
💬 The Automation Everyone Builds
A Slack message when someone replies is the one most teams build.
It's a Send message to channel column. You pick the channel, name the bot, and write the message. Teams works the same way.
Put a link back to the campaign inbox in the message body. You see the Slack notification, you click it, and you're looking at the reply.
📨 What's Going to Land in That Channel
The replies to cold email are stranger than you expect. Some are warm. Some are curious about how you found them, and if you're enriching contact data, a fair number of people will ask you exactly that. Some are annoyed. A few are creative about being annoyed.
That range is normal, and most of what lands in this table is not something a human ever needs to look at.
🎛️ The Run Condition
Open the run condition. This one line is the difference between a useful automation and a channel nobody can stand.
Run when event type is EMAIL_REPLY.
Without that condition, the column fires on every row in this table, including every single send. Run ten thousand emails and you've built a Slack channel that posts ten thousand times, with the four replies you cared about buried somewhere in it.
Every automation on this table needs a run condition. Decide what event you care about before you configure anything else.
🧰 What Else Is in Here
Four more pre-built actions:
- Reply to lead email: responds programmatically
- Add email to blocklist: auto-unsubscribes anyone whose reply gets categorized as do not contact, which is a good one to set up
- Get rep email: resolves who owns a sending account
- Forward email: pushes a reply to somebody who doesn't work in Clay at all
✋ One Piece of Advice on Auto-Reply
Reply to lead email is how you'd build an automated SDR, however, our recommendation:
Reply manually until you have a strong sense of what your campaign's replies look like. Replies are strange, and some are adversarial precisely because the person suspects they're talking to a bot.
So the middle path from the replies lesson is where to point: let Clay draft, have a person approve it in Slack, and send from there. You get the speed, and somebody still reads every word before a prospect does.
🚀 What's Next
We'll look at combining Sequencer in a workflow.
