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Organizing Your Work for Ongoing Automation Studio Sends

If you're hoping to use Automation Studio on a regular basis to streamline your recurring sends, you're on the right track. Automation Studio can help you save a significant amount of time and work, particularly for the sends that occur on a weekly or monthly (or other cadence) basis. For this example, we'll be looking at how the Office of the President organized work for the weekly send of CU Connections.

PRE-REQUISITES This wiki assumes that you've already read Scheduling Data Extension Imports in Automation Studio and Scheduling Salesforce Send Emails in Automation Studio. If you haven't yet reviewed those wikis, please do so before proceeding.

If you're used to scheduling Salesforce Send emails, your Marketing Cloud Salesforce Send Email screen might look something like the example below: one Salesforce Email Send with a unique name for each send.

Salesforce Send Email List Example

While this process does work, it's more complicated than it needs to be for sends that occur on an ongoing basis. For example, on the list above, you'll notice that CU Connections appears three times, each with a different date.

1. Instead of creating a separate list item for each email, you can create subfolders beneath the Salesforce Send Email parent folder. Just right click on the Salesforce Send Email folder in the left navigation pane, and then select New Folder and proceed to organize your work as desired. For this example, we've grouped our work into Monthly, Weekly, and Periodic Sends.

Salesforce Send Email Folder Structure

2. From there, you can create a new Salesforce send in the desired folder. For example, we created two weekly sends: one communication for CU's eComm Specialists, and other for CU Connections.

Weekly Sends

Build your weekly Salesforce Send Email as you normally would - select your audiences, your send classification, delivery profile, etc. For the content, just select the email that you last sent that falls into this weekly category. Since you aren't scheduling anything yet, there's no risk in connecting a previously sent message to your Salesforce Send Email configuration. When you're done, save your work.

3. When you're ready to complete a weekly send to the audience you created, modify your Salesforce Send Email so that it points to the correct content. You can also change the name of the weekly send to reflect the date associated with it. For example, we modified "Weekly Send - CU Connections" to "Weekly Send - CU Connections 103119."

Weekly Send with Date

REMINDER If you make ANY changes to your email content after saving your Salesforce Send Email, you'll need to re-select your content in the send configuration to ensure that the changes are captured.