In Quanda, an automation is an action the application performs on its own in response to a specific event. You do not have to be there, you do not have to remember anything and you do not have to watch the calendar. You describe once what should happen and under what circumstances, and Quanda then does it the same way every time, for each contact individually. This lesson gives you a map: where automations live in Quanda, what they are made of and how to tell which ones are worth switching on.

Every automation has three parts

Whether you open an automation in a campaign, in a form or in a questionnaire, you always fill in three things.

• The condition, meaning the event that triggers the automation. For example "the form was submitted" or "the recipient did not open the email".
• The time, meaning how long to wait. You enter it in minutes, hours or days. Zero means immediately.
• The action, meaning what should be done. Most often adding a tag, sending an email or sending a notification.

Once you memorize this trio, you can set up any automation in Quanda, because the screen looks almost the same everywhere. You also give each condition a name, so you can still make sense of them six months later.

Where you will find automations

Automations are not one feature in one place, they are scattered wherever an interaction with a customer happens.

• In a regular email campaign you react to what the recipient did with the email. They opened it, did not open it, clicked a specific link, did not click, or the email could not be delivered.
• In an active form you react to its submission. You mark the new contact with a tag, send them a welcome email and notify a colleague.
• In an online questionnaire you react to completion and to specific answers. You use them to sort contacts with tags.
• In contacts, automations run over the database itself. They can, for example, fill in a name day date based on the first name.
• Birthday and name day campaigns are automatic by nature. You launch them once and they just keep running.

The whole course is built exactly on this map. We will go through each area separately and show the specific settings.

What is worth automating

A good rule of thumb is repetition. If you write the same message every week to a different person, it belongs in an automation. Typical examples are welcoming a new subscriber, confirming and thanking after a form submission, delivering a promised file, inviting people to a questionnaire after a purchase, sending birthday greetings or reminding those who did not respond to something.

The second rule of thumb is timing. An automation can send a message at the moment when a person is paying the most attention. Half an hour after a click, a day after the goods were delivered, an hour after a form submission. You could never manage that precision by hand, even if you wanted to.

What to leave to a human

Automation is not a replacement for communication, it is its skeleton. Do not automate replies to specific questions, complaint handling or offers that change with the customer's situation. One-off news, seasonal promotions and invitations to a specific date belong in a regular campaign, not in an automation.

Also watch the volume. If a contact has five automations running at once, they can receive five emails in a single week without you realizing it. We will get frequency under control in the final lesson.

What to prepare in advance

Before you start building, it helps to have three things ready. A well-thought-out tag system, because tags are the glue that holds individual automations together. A verified sending domain, so your automatic emails actually get delivered. And a picture of the customer journey, meaning how people find you and what happens with them next. Without that, it is easy to build a technically correct automation that nobody needs.

Whenever an automation is supposed to send an email, it needs a transactional email to do it. It is a special type of campaign that you prepare in advance and leave waiting. The automation then simply says "send this one" and Quanda delivers it to a specific person at the moment they meet the condition. Without a transactional email you cannot set up an automation that sends a message, which is why we start right here.

How to create a transactional email

The process is almost the same as for a regular campaign, with two differences. First difference: you do not choose recipients. Those are determined later by the automation that calls the email. Second difference: the email is not sent, it is activated. On the last page, instead of a "Sending" section you will find a "Campaign activation" section. Until you activate the transactional email, it will still appear as an option in your automation, but there is no point relying on it.

The settings and the email editor work exactly the same as in a regular campaign, so you can use a saved template. If you want to send the same email again to those who did not open it, save the original campaign as a template and simply load it into the transactional email. That way you can be sure the copy, images and links all match with one click.

Watch out for the personal data processing purpose. Choose it so that it covers all the contacts the email should go to. If a contact has a different processing purpose than the one set in the campaign, the email will not reach them and you will waste time hunting for a bug in the automation.

Events a campaign can react to

In a regular email campaign, Quanda tracks five events:

• the recipient opened the email,
• the recipient did not open the email,
• the recipient clicked a specific link,
• the recipient did not click a specific link,
• the email could not be delivered.

The last one can only be answered by assigning a tag, not by sending an email. That makes sense, because the address has already failed once. For clicks, you also pick a specific link from the list of links in your email, so you can tell interest in different products apart. There is no limit on the number of conditions, you can attach as many conditions to one event as you need, and they are evaluated one by one according to the time you set.

How Quanda counts time

This is where mistakes happen most often. For opens and clicks, Quanda knows the exact moment the event happened and counts the time from there. If you set two hours after a click, a person who clicked at eight in the morning gets the follow-up email at ten. Someone who clicked at two in the afternoon gets it at four.

For an unopened email, no such moment exists, because nothing happened. That is why the time is counted from when the original campaign was sent. If you set three days, the follow-up email goes out exactly three days after the first campaign was mailed. The same logic applies to not clicking a specific link.

Three scenarios that pay off

The quickest win comes from resending to those who did not open the first email. You set "did not open the email", after three days, send an email, and pick a transactional email with the same content. For one customer, this raised the overall click rate from 5.1 percent to 6.2 percent, roughly a fifth more.

The second scenario targets those who did not click the link you care about. Prepare a shorter reminder with one prominent link, and keep in mind that it will reach both people who never read the email and people who read it but did not click.

The third scenario rewards interest. When someone clicks a link to a specific product, send them an expanded offer within thirty minutes. The interest is fresh and the email arrives at the moment they are genuinely thinking about it.

A birthday greeting is one of the few messages people are genuinely happy to receive. It sells nothing, it simply pleases, and that is exactly why it works. Quanda has two dedicated campaign types for this, "Birthday greeting" and "Name day greeting". Name days, a tradition where each first name has its own date in the calendar, are popular in Central Europe, and Quanda supports them alongside anniversaries. You build these campaigns once and they just keep running. Every day they check your contacts, and whoever matches today's date gets the email.

Without a date, nothing gets sent

Both campaigns rest on a single field on the contact. The "Birthday greeting" campaign follows the "Date of birth" field, the "Name day greeting" campaign follows the "Name day / anniversary date" field. If the field is empty, the contact simply never comes up in the campaign, even with the right tag.

With a larger database you cannot fill in the dates by hand, a bulk import is the sensible way. The supported date formats are 01.01.2019 or 1.1.2019, so format the column in your spreadsheet in advance.

How to fill in name day dates in bulk

For Czech first names, the name day date can be calculated. Quanda offers a downloadable table of names and their name day dates, and the whole process takes about fifteen minutes.

• Export all contacts from Quanda via "Contacts / Bulk contact export".
• Open the downloaded name day file and, on its second sheet, load the exported data from the CSV. In the wizard, choose Unicode UTF-8 encoding and a comma as the separator.
• In the "Name day / anniversary date" column, insert the formula =VLOOKUP(B2,namedays,2,0) and copy it down to the last name.
• Wherever you see a "value not available" error, the first name is missing or misspelled. Remove those values from the column, otherwise the import would fail.
• Save the file as CSV and import it back. When matching, select only the primary email and the name day date, and give priority to the imported contacts.

Contact automations fill in the date for you

The second way is to leave it to Quanda. Contact automations can fill in the name day date automatically for every contact that has a first name in the "Name" field. For new contacts, set the automation to the event "a new contact was created", so every newly arriving prospect has their name day date right away.

For contacts already in Quanda, you need the event "an existing contact was updated". For it to trigger, some change must happen to the contacts. Simply export them in bulk and import them again, matching only on the primary email. Nothing actually changes, but to Quanda it counts as an update and the automation kicks in. If you have a connected CRM, just export the contacts to Quanda again. Contact automations are not available in all plans, check the scope on the pricing page.

Creating the campaign step by step

In the top menu, under Email campaigns, choose "Create new campaign", name it and click "Create" next to the appropriate type. On the Settings page, choose the language of the helper texts and invite colleagues if needed. These items cannot be changed once the campaign is running.

On the recipients page you select one or more tags. In birthday and name day campaigns, the tag does not define a recipient list, it only marks out the group whose dates are checked every day. By adding or removing the tag you can change the group even many months after launch. Quanda excludes unsubscribed contacts from the mailing on its own.

Prepare the email the same way as in a regular campaign, and be sure to insert the salutation. In the test email you will see only a personalization tag instead of a name, the actual salutation is filled in at the real send. On the Sending page, choose the day and hour of the first greeting. If you pick two in the afternoon, Quanda will go through the selected contacts at 2 p.m. every day and send the greeting whenever a date matches.

What to watch after launch

The statistics of these campaigns are cumulative. Emails go out continuously one by one, so the numbers in the overview grow gradually across all sends combined. Watch mainly the number of delivered messages and the open rate. A low number is usually a sign of nonsense data on your contacts, such as January 1 set for everyone who never filled in a date of birth.

An active form on your website collects email addresses, but on its own it is just a doorway. The interesting part starts the moment someone submits the form. That is exactly the event automations in Quanda hook into. The condition for each of them is the form submission, so you do not have to think about choosing a trigger. You only decide what should happen next and how soon.

The tag is mandatory, and that is a good thing

As soon as the form is submitted, the contact appears in your list in Quanda. To be able to work with them further, they must be labeled, which is why adding a tag is the only mandatory automation. You set it up like this: Add a new condition, name the automation, Trigger when "Form was submitted", Set the action "Add tag", schedule the time in minutes, hours or days.

Name the tag after the source, not the content. "Website footer newsletter" or "Lead magnet checklist" will tell you far more in a year than a generic "Prospects". With a tag like that you can easily see which form on your website actually brings in contacts and which one just takes up space.

A welcome email right after submission

The second action is sending an email to the new contact. You have to create and activate the email in transactional emails beforehand, as we showed in lesson two, and then you simply pick it from the list in the automation. The setup is the same as for the tag, you just choose "Send email" as the action.

For the welcome email, set the time to zero or a few minutes. The person has just submitted the form, the screen is still in front of them and they are waiting for the email. This is also where you deliver what you promised. If you offered an ebook, a guide or a discount code, it belongs in this message, not a week later.

A notification for a colleague and summary reports

The third action is sending a notification. The difference from a regular email is the addressee: it does not go out to the customer, it goes inside your company. You again prepare the notification text as a transactional email, and in the automation you choose "Send notification".

You will appreciate this with forms where time matters. An inquiry, a meeting request or a seminar registration. The salesperson learns about the new contact within a minute and does not have to keep watch in the application. If you do not set up per-contact notifications, you can have a summary report sent to the form manager instead. That works well for newsletter forms, where nobody needs to jump on individual signups.

Double opt-in and the order of steps

In the form you can switch on double opt-in, meaning email address verification. After the form is submitted, a verification email with a single link arrives first, and only after the click does the contact enter the database. This protects you from typos and from addresses that do not exist at all.

Keep in mind that the verification email and the welcome email are two different messages. Keep the verification one as simple as possible, without images and with a single link, so it lands in the main inbox. Everything else, the thank you, the company introduction and the promised file, belongs in the welcome email from the automation. In the overview of submitted forms you can also check how many people never finished the verification.

How to connect the form to other automations

The tag assigned by the form is the ticket into everything else. When you use it as the recipient condition in an email series, the new contact automatically starts receiving the welcome series. When you add it to the tags in a birthday campaign, the new contact joins the greetings too. And because tags can be added and removed at any time later, you can move whole groups between automations without touching the campaigns themselves.

This chaining is worth a few minutes on paper. Sketch out what happens after the form is submitted, what follows after two days and what after a week. You will see right away whether someone is getting two messages at once.

A questionnaire gives you something you will never read from emails. Not just what a person clicked, but what they actually think. It would be a shame to let the answers sit in a report and read them once a quarter. Automations in a questionnaire can react to answers immediately, say thank you, sort contacts with tags or alert a colleague when something comes up that cannot wait.

The questionnaire must be launched

The condition for automations in a questionnaire is that the questionnaire has been launched, meaning distributed. Until you switch it to the "ready to use" state in the Distribution step, no automation will fire, because there is nothing to react to. So build your set of conditions before you send the questionnaire out, not afterwards.

The setup looks the same as in a form: Add a new condition, name the automation, Trigger when the questionnaire was completed, Set the action and schedule the time in minutes, hours or days. You have the same three actions available, add a tag, send an email and send a notification.

A thank you for completing

The simplest and most useful automation is a thank you. The person has just given you several minutes of their time, so acknowledge it right away, while they still remember. You prepare the email in transactional emails and select it as the action in the automation.

Two things belong in the thank you. A short summary of what you will use the answers for, and information about when you will be in touch again. If you promise to send the results, really send them. People who filled in a questionnaire once and saw an outcome will fill in the next one too.

A tag based on a specific answer

The most powerful use of questionnaire automation is sorting. You can label a contact with a tag based on how they answered a specific question. Ask which area a person is interested in, and assign the matching tag based on their choice. The database segments itself, and you then send campaigns only to those who genuinely care about the topic.

A tag created this way is useful elsewhere too. You can use it when selecting recipients for an email series, add it to the tags in a birthday campaign or filter contacts by it in a regular mailing. The questionnaire answer becomes a permanent piece of data you keep working with.

A few recommendations to keep it meaningful:

• Tag only answers you will genuinely communicate differently on. The rest can stay in the statistics.
• Stick to consistent naming, for example "Questionnaire 2026 interest shipping". After a year and several questionnaires you would otherwise get lost.
• Remember that contacts filling in the questionnaire via a public link are anonymous. A tag can only be assigned to someone Quanda knows, typically the recipient of an email invitation.

A notification when an answer matters

The third action is a notification for you or a colleague. Use it wherever an answer calls for a human response. A low satisfaction rating, a described delivery problem, interest in an offer. The notification reaches you within moments, and you can call before the customer complains somewhere else.

Set notifications only for what really matters. If an email arrives after every single completion, you will stop reading them within a week.

An invitation that sends itself

The automation can also be flipped around: instead of reacting to a completed questionnaire, you can distribute it. In the automation you set a condition based on a contact event, and as the action you choose sending a transactional email with a link to the questionnaire. Choose the delay by situation, a day or two after the goods were delivered, within twenty-four hours after a resolved support request, the same day after a training session. You then always ask in the same way and nobody slips through.

The biggest objection to automation goes: "it will feel cold". It is a legitimate worry. A machine sending impersonal messages from a noreply address really will not build a relationship. The good news is that the coldness does not come from automation itself, but from how you set it up. In this final lesson we will go through four levers that keep automated communication human.

A salutation that fits

Quanda can insert personalization into an email, a tag in double curly braces that gets replaced with the recipient's real data at send time. You can choose a complete salutation with a prefix, for example "Dear Ms." combined with the last name or "Hello" combined with the first name, as well as the first name or last name on its own. It is Quanda's automatic personalized salutation, addressing each recipient by name.

You insert the personalization by clicking into a text field and choosing Personalization in the menu above it. You can copy the tag into the email subject too. And feel free to add your own text around it, like "Happy Thursday, Jane". The one requirement is that your contacts have names filled in. If they do not, add them during import, where Quanda can build the personalized salutation for you.

Let the sender be a real person

Automatic greetings and series can go out in the name of the person who looks after the contact. That is what the automatic sender setting is for. Quanda then picks the sender in this order: the contact owner, and if none is stored on the contact, the company owner, and if that is missing too, the campaign manager chosen on the Settings page.

You create a contact owner first as a user in Quanda and then assign them to contacts via import, using a "Contact owner" column with their email address. A single campaign can therefore have several different senders, and the customer gets the message from the salesperson they have already talked to. Remember that the sender must have a verified email address and a verified sending domain, otherwise sending is limited.

Apply the same logic to the reply-to address. An automatic email that cannot be replied to is a wasted opportunity. Someone really has to watch the replies.

Watch how many emails a contact receives

The personal touch is not just about the salutation, it is mainly about volume. Individual automations do not know about each other. A new contact from a form can receive a welcome email, the first part of a series, a questionnaire thank you and a birthday greeting within a single week, without you ever planning it.

So go through all your running automations at once and write down what is sent to whom and with what delay. Wherever the messages collide, extend the delays or drop one of the actions. It also helps to follow the rule that only one automation talks to a given contact on any given day.

Write the machine like a human

An automated message gives itself away by its language, not its technology. Avoid phrasing like "Your request has been registered". Write the way you would write to one person: what just happened, what comes next and who they can turn to. Sign with a name, not a department.

Before launch, send yourself the whole sequence as test emails and read them back to back in the order the customer will receive them. Check the design, the images and every link, including on mobile. In a test email the personalization tag appears instead of the salutation and the unsubscribe link is deliberately disabled, so do not let that worry you.

A review once a quarter

Automation is not "set and forget". Once a quarter, open the statistics of your automatic campaigns and look at deliverability, opens and clicks. Pay attention to the number of unsubscribes too, because that is the fastest signal that too many messages are going out.

At the same time, reread the copy that has been running the longest. The offer changes, the pricing changes, colleagues leave. An email written two years ago may be welcoming new customers to a company that looks very different by now.