How to Customize Your Workflows for Multiple Use Cases, Roles & Industries

• When do you need customization?
• Prerequisite: organize your data
• Method 1. Different workflows
• Method 2. Different emails inside one workflow
• Method 3. Different Liquid blocks inside one email
• Conclusion: theres no right or wrong way

When we say customization, you think Dear {{ user.first_name }}. But that would barely scratch the surface. The most powerful customization means tailoring your workflows to the users exact role, use case, or situation.

In this guide, youll learn to customize your workflows for multiple scenarios. Well talk about three methods, and see when each one works best.

When do you need customization?

• Different roles. Admins, managers or editors may need to learn different things to become successful in your product.
• Different billing plans. Users on different plans may require a different approach to their onboarding and lifecycle emails. You can promote hands-on help to premium users, while focusing on DIY options for other plans.
• Different industries. If your product targets 2-3 different verticals, its powerful to use domain-specific language.
• Different use cases. If your product can do multiple things, it helps to know what goal your user is trying to achieve. You can then help them do exactly that during their onboarding.

Prerequisite: organize your data

Your customer data needs to reliably reflect those use cases youre customizing for. This means a dedicated property with consistent values. You can send these properties via the Push API or Segment integration.

For example:

• industry = hotels, restaurants, beauty_salons
• use_case = photo, video
• role = admin, manager, editor, viewer
• billing_plan = basic, professional

Youd typically get this data during the signup process by asking the user directly what theyre planning to do, or what industry their company belongs to.

Ideally, you want to make the values mutually exclusive, meaning that each user only has one value in these fields. This way, you can clearly direct them into one path.

Method 1. Different workflows

If your narrative needs to be absolutely different, the best way is to have multiple workflows filtered by use case.

For example, you run a B2B SaaS that serves hotels and restaurants. You will have two onboarding workflows:

• Onboarding: Hotels. Trigger when user joins segment Trials and industry = hotels
• Onboarding: Restaurants. Trigger when user joins segment Trials and industry = restaurants

This method provides complete clarity and control over different workflows.

However, if these workflows are too similar, youll find yourself copying and pasting a lot. When updating workflows, youll find yourself implementing the same change in different workflows. It can get unproductive.

Thats a sign that you should be using one workflow, which is described in our next method.

Method 2. Different emails inside one workflow

This method works best if the core of your workflow remains the same, and you only need to customize certain emails.

For example, your product has two plans: Basic and Professional. All users need to learn the same things, but you want to promote hands-on help to your Professional users, and share the DIY guide with your Basic users.

Heres how your user onboarding workflow can look like. Most emails are sent to everyone, but some of them are split via Multiple Split based on the use case:

1. Welcome to our product
2. Book a call with our tech team multiple split branch for billing_plan = professional
3. Heres your DIY guide multiple split branch for billing_plan = basic
4. Inspiring case study
5. Top tips on being great at X
6. Another inspiring case study

This method helps you avoid duplicate content, as you only customize a few individual emails. Inside those emails, you have full control over the subject line and the content.

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Using a multiple split in Userlist workflows

Learn how to split user journey into multiple paths based on conditions.

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Method 3. Different Liquid blocks inside one email

Sometimes, even separate emails would be an overkill. You merely want to customize parts of one email. For that, Liquid tags work magic.

With multiple use cases, we recommend using the case/when condition. It allows you to customize an email fragment based on a variety of values.

In the following example, we personalize the product benefit based on the users occupation (marketer, designer, or photographer), and show a generic benefit to everybody else:

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{% case user.occupation %}
  {% when 'marketer' %}
     As a marketer, you can use Sparkle to craft eye-catching visuals for your ads and email campaigns.
  {% when 'designer' %}
     As a designer, you can use Sparkle to polish images for your website projects.
  {% when 'photographer' %}
     As a photographer, you can save hundreds of working hours with Sparkles batch editing and processing.
  {% else %}
     Sparkle is an all-in-one solution to any image editing needs in your business.
{% endcase %}

Depending on your situation, you can use other tags like if/else or unless.

You can also use Liquid conditions in the emails subject line and preheader (see message settings).

For more details, see our guide on using Liquid.

This method helps you avoid duplicate emails and extra work.

Conclusion: theres no right or wrong way

Hope these three methods help you achieve the desired results for your own SaaS business. Theres no right or wrong way, as soon as your users receive the most relevant message at the right time.

Check out these guides on SaaS email automation:

• How to Trigger a Behavior-based Email Campaign
• One Email List, Multiple Products
• Email Marketing for B2C SaaS
• Email Marketing for Unpopular SaaS Pricing Models

If you need help with your specific case, let us know and well recommend the most optimal way.