Coming From Another Tool – How Encharge Flows Are Different?

A few tips to help you with the Encharge Flow builder if you're coming from a different marketing automation platform.

Dividing paths in a Flow

If you're coming from a marketing automation tool like ActiveCampaign, Drip, Mailerlite, Gist, Customer.io, or Vero you might be used to creating Flows with a one-directional Flow builder.

In these tools, to add a new Step to the Flow you click a button and select the Action or the Filter. To create multiple separated paths in a Flow, these tools usually ask you to add an additional step called a "parallel step" or something similar.

Encharge works differently from that.

Our Flow builder works with a flexible drag and drop interface. You simply drag a Step onto the canvas area and connect it to however many Steps you like in whichever direction you prefer. So naturally, there's no need for a "parallel step", you simply link the Step to two or more other Steps and divide the Flow into different paths.

To see this in practice check the video below:

Having multiple paths that are not connected in one Flow

Most tools usually only allow you to have a single connected path in a Flow. In Encharge you can have multiple paths (or sub-flows) in a single Flow triggered by different Trigger Steps and not connected to each other.

See the example below where we have two sub-flows with different triggers in the same Flow. Although these paths are not connected to each other, this setup will work perfectly fine. Once the main Flow is activated, both sub-flows will become active.

Send Email step and its content

In Encharge, you don't create emails in the Flow step, you only use the Send Email step as a vessel to attach an email.

Even when you click on "Create new email" from a Send Email Step, you're essentially creating an email that will be added to the Emails page and can be used in other steps. The email is not exclusively linked to that step.

In other words, the Send Email steps and the emails attached to them are two separate items.

This is an important concept to grasp as it will have an impact on how you create Flows. Here are two aspects of the Flow building process that will be influenced by this interface:

Metrics when editing Send Email steps

Editing a Send Email step will not update or reset the metrics on it. For instance, if you have a Send Email Step and 50 people have already passed through that Step (were sent the email), editing this step and attaching a new email to it will not reset the metrics of the step.

If you want to have a step with clean metrics, you simply need to drag a new Send Email step to the canvas and use it instead.

Editing content in duplicated Send Email steps

When you're duplicating a Send Email step you're only duplicating the step on the canvas, not the email attached to that Step.

Therefore, if you edit an email attached to a duplicated Send Email step you're editing the same email attached to the original step (and any other steps). You're essentially editing the email, not the step.