If you are asking how does email automation work, the short answer is: something happens to a contact, the system reads what it knows about that contact, checks your rules, and sends or waits accordingly. Every automated email you have ever received came out of that loop. Understanding the parts lets you diagnose why an email did not send, why the wrong person got it, or why it landed in spam. This article explains the mechanics on the levelpartner.ai platform, from the triggering event to the sending infrastructure to what happens when a person replies.
The five parts of every automated email
The event
Automation starts with an event recorded against a contact. A form is submitted. A tag is added. An appointment is booked or missed. An opportunity moves stage. A payment fails. A date arrives, such as a renewal date stored in a field.
The platform watches for these events. When one matches a workflow trigger, that contact enters the workflow. Nothing happens to anyone else.
The contact record
Every decision afterwards reads the contact record: name, email, tags, custom fields, pipeline stage, appointment history, email engagement. The quality of your automation is capped by the quality of that record. If the industry field is empty for half your contacts, any branch on industry sends half of them down the wrong path.
Conditions
Conditions are the rules. If the contact has the tag "client", skip. If they booked a call, stop. If they clicked the pricing link, notify sales. Conditions are evaluated at the moment the contact reaches them, using the record as it is at that moment.
Actions
Actions are what the system does: send an email, send a text, add a tag, update a field, create a task, move an opportunity, notify a user. Sending an email is one action among many.
Waits
Waits pause the contact. A fixed wait counts days or hours. A timed wait holds until a window, such as nine in the morning on a weekday. An event wait holds until something happens, with a timeout. Waits are where most of the timing behaviour comes from.
Picture a homeowner submitting the valuation form at 21:40 on a Tuesday. That is the event. The workflow reads the record: postcode, property type, no existing tag. Condition: postcode inside the branch area, so continue. Action: send a confirmation email immediately and notify the branch manager. Wait: until 08:30 the next working day. Condition: has an appointment been booked? No. Action: send a second email offering three valuation slots. Wait for an appointment, timeout 48 hours. If the homeowner books at 12:15 on Thursday, the event wait ends and the workflow sends the appointment confirmation instead of the third chaser.
Before you start
- A sending domain added and authenticated in Settings.
- Contacts with the fields your conditions will read, filled in reliably.
- At least one form, calendar or pipeline that generates the events you want to act on.
- A clear idea of which events deserve an automated response and which need a person.
How to see the mechanics in your own account
The fastest way to understand automation is to watch one contact go through a small workflow.
- In Contacts, create a test contact with an inbox you can read.
- In Automation, create a workflow with the Contact Tag trigger.
- Add Send Email, then a five-minute Wait, then If / Else.
- In the If / Else, check for a second tag.
- Add a second email on the None branch.
- Add an Internal Notification on the tag branch.
- Publish, save and add the trigger tag to the test contact.
- Turn on Stats View to watch the trigger and each step.
- Add the second tag before the wait ends and compare paths.
- Switch the workflow back to Draft when you have finished.
Ten minutes of this teaches more than any diagram, and the execution log is where you will diagnose real problems later.
What happens after you press send
An email action does not put a message straight into an inbox. The platform hands the message to its sending infrastructure, which signs it with your domain's authentication records and delivers it to the recipient's mail provider.
The mail provider then decides where it goes. It checks that your domain's SPF, DKIM and DMARC records match the sender. It looks at your sending history, the proportion of recipients who open, reply, delete or mark as spam, and the content itself. Authentication gets you considered. Behaviour decides whether you reach the inbox.
This is why a firm that sends nothing for months and then emails its whole database often lands in spam. The provider sees a sudden spike from a sender with no recent history. Regular, modest sending to engaged contacts builds the reputation that automation depends on. Our guide to automated email campaigns covers volume and pacing in more detail.
What happens when someone replies
A reply comes back to the address you sent from and appears in Conversations against that contact. It is a two-way thread, so whoever owns the contact can answer from the unified inbox.
A reply can also be an event. Workflows can be set to stop when a contact replies, so a prospect who writes back "can we talk on Friday" does not receive the next automated chaser on Thursday. If you only change one setting after reading this article, make it this one.
Treating automation as a sending tool rather than a listening tool. The value is in the conditions and the stops, not the volume of emails. A workflow that sends five emails regardless of what the contact does is just a slow broadcast.
What this replaces and what it costs in time
For a firm of 10 to 250 people, email automation replaces the manual follow-up list that lives in someone's head or a spreadsheet. Once built, a core set of workflows needs about half an hour a week to watch: execution errors, replies and goal completions. The build is where the time goes, so start with the one event that loses you the most revenue, usually new enquiries left waiting.
For working illustrations of which events to automate first, see examples of email automation. To build your first workflow step by step, read setting up an email workflow. For the simplest case, an instant reply, see the email autoresponder.
Troubleshooting
The contact never entered the workflow
The trigger did not match. Check that the event actually happened on the contact record, that trigger filters do not exclude them, and that the workflow was published, not left as a draft.
The email shows as sent but never arrived
Check the contact's email status for a bounce. If it was delivered, it likely went to spam. Confirm your domain authentication records in Settings and review recent sending volume.
The wrong branch ran
The condition read the record before it was updated. Add a short wait before the condition, or check that the field you test is the one your form actually writes to.
Frequently asked questions
Does email automation need coding?
No. Workflows are built visually by choosing triggers, conditions and actions. You need clear rules, not code.
What is the difference between automation and a scheduled email?
A scheduled email goes to a list at a fixed time. Automation sends to each contact individually when their event happens, and reacts to what they do next.
Can automation send from a salesperson's own address?
Yes. You can set the sender name and address per email, so follow-ups appear to come from the contact's owner and replies reach them.
What stops automation from emailing someone who unsubscribed?
The platform records unsubscribes and bounces on the contact and skips marketing emails to them automatically.