Add your first channel
A channel is a phone number or social network account which we can use to send and receive messages on your behalf. It’s important to understand that your flows won’t send if there is no channel connected!
Learn how to add your first channel here.
Build your first flow
After you’ve connected your first channel, you’re ready to start mastering flows.
To view sample flows and start building, click on the “**Flows**” tab at the top of your account page.
We suggest sending yourself a simple flow to start learning the basics. Start by clicking on the “**Create Flow”** button within the “Flows” tab:
A dialogue box will pop up asking you to create a name, add an optional keyword trigger & choose a flow type. In this example, we’re going to create a sample registration flow. We’ve chosen “Messaging” as our flow type since we’ll be using SMS and social media channels. See more about languages here.
After clicking “**Create”**, you’ll be brought to your new flow’s editor.
In this registration flow, we’ll ask our contacts for their name, update their contact information to save their name, and add them to a group:
We start the flow by asking for the contact’s name:
Next, we’ll need to evaluate our contacts’ replies with a Wait for Response action. Simply click the little red dot, called an “exit”, in your Send Message node and drag down to make this new connection:
The Wait for Response action node will automatically appear. In this case, we want to save the result as “Name” and we’ll want our contacts’ replies be open-ended, so we’ll leave the response rule blank. By leaving the rule empty, it will collect “All Responses”.
Because we want to save the contact’s name and be able to reference it later in future messages and flows, we must save it. Do this with an Update the Contact action after collecting the name. Click on the red exit node after the “Wait for Response” and drag down to create a new node. The default node action will be ‘Send Message’, so we need to change it to Update the Contact from the dropdown menu. It will change to green!
After selecting Update the Contact from the dropdown, your node will turn green and be called “Update Contact”.
Since we want to save the contact’s name, we’ll choose “**Name”** from the “Save to field” dropdown menu. In the “Value” field, typing the ‘**@**’ symbol triggers an auto-complete dropdown menu containing a complete list of available variables. In this case, we want to use @results.name.
Once we’ve clicked ‘Ok’, we’ll now see that we’ve saved the contact’s name in the flow.
Here’s what the flow should look like after we’ve asked for a name, collected it, and saved it:
Finally, we want contacts that complete this registration flow to be added to a group we’ve created called “Completed Registration”. To do this, we can hover over the “Update the Contact” node and click the blue + button that will appear. This button allows you to stack actions. If you don’t see this little button, no worries- just click and drag the red exit node!
Choose Add Contact to a Group from the dropdown menu in your newly created node and then select the group. You can either choose an already existing group or create a new one.
Here’s our flow now:
That’s it! Our flow has successfully asked for the contact’s name, collected and saved their response, and added them to a group. One last step would be to send the contact a message to let them know that they’ve completed the registration:
You’ll notice that rather than using the contact’s full name, we’ve used the variable @contact.first_name which will use only their first name to be friendlier. You can see more about variables like this here.
To test out our flow, we can use the simulator on the right-hand side of the flow editor:
