How to Add Marketing Automation to Your App — Copy-Paste Prompts Inside

A trigger is the event that starts the workflow — 'user signed up', 'user made first purchase', 'user inactive for 7 days'. An action is what the workflow does in response — 'send email', 'send push notification', 'update user attribute'. Between them you can add conditions (if user.plan = free) and delay steps (wait 3 days). A workflow always starts with exactly one trigger and can have multiple actions in sequence.

Yes — set is_active = false on the automation_workflows row. This stops the trigger engine from enqueuing new jobs for that workflow. Jobs already in the queue (status = pending) should also be cancelled when you pause — add a workflow_active check in your process-jobs Edge Function that marks pending jobs as cancelled rather than executing them. This prevents emails from being sent from a workflow you've paused.

Store unsubscribe status in a user_email_preferences table with an unsubscribed boolean and unsubscribed_at timestamp. Check this table before every email send in your Edge Function — if unsubscribed = true, skip the send and log the skip event in analytics. Register Resend's unsubscribe webhook to auto-update this table when users click Resend's native footer unsubscribe link. The unsubscribe page itself is a simple route that requires only the user_id in the URL — no authentication needed.

Create a test workflow with a short delay step (1 minute instead of 3 days). Use a test email address you control as the recipient. Deploy to your staging environment (Vercel preview URL or Lovable published URL), enroll your test user account in the workflow by calling trigger-workflow directly, and wait for pg_cron to pick up the job. Check automation_jobs in Supabase to confirm the job moves from pending to running to completed. Only then change the delay back to the production value and activate for real users.

SMS is not covered in this build kit because it requires Twilio at $0.0079/message — at 1,000 users receiving 5 automation SMS messages each, that's $39.50 per campaign. Add SMS as a separate action type in your workflow steps JSONB and an Edge Function that calls the Twilio Messages API with the user's phone number from your users table. Make sure you collect explicit SMS marketing consent separately from email consent.

Embed a 1x1 transparent PNG image in the email body at a URL like https://yourapp.com/api/automation/track-email-open?job_id={job_id}. When the email client loads the image, your API route logs an email_opened event in automation_analytics. Important caveat: Apple Mail Privacy Protection (iOS 15+) pre-fetches all images, inflating open rates by 40–60%. Treat email open rate as a directional engagement signal, not a precise count. Click-through rate on real links is a more reliable conversion metric.

The process-jobs Edge Function increments the attempts counter on the automation_jobs row and sets scheduled_at to now() + exponential backoff (2 minutes after first failure, 4 after second, 8 after third). After 3 failed attempts, the job status is set to 'failed' and the last_error column stores the error message from Resend. The workflow dashboard should surface failed jobs so you can investigate — common causes are expired API keys, invalid recipient email addresses, and Resend rate limits.

Yes, but behavioral segmentation requires logging those behaviors to your database first. Standard database events (user signed up, order created) are captured automatically by Supabase Realtime. Custom behaviors (feature used 3 times, video watched 80%) need explicit event logging — your app code calls trigger-workflow or writes to a user_events table when the behavior occurs. Once in the database, these values become queryable attributes in your segment filter builder.