Tips & Tricks (& a Bug) for working with Drip's shared workflows

Drip has recently put out an amazing new feature called “shared workflows” - basically email marketing automation recipes. Im my opinion they are really cool. That’s why I have included a number of shared workflows in my book. These workflows allow my readers to implement new revenue-generating email marketing automation into their product with a few clicks.

So here are the basics, some tips for working with shared workflows, and I’ll also show you a bug.

The basics

So Drip has workflows, which are super cool in their own right, because you get an easy to digest visual representation of all the things going on with your subscribers.

Here’s a picture of one:

This is a simple workflow and the real beauty becomes obvious when you have more complex logic turned into workflows. Now with shared workflows you can create a workflow and share it with others. When sharing a workflow all the logic gets copied to the new account. You can decide for each workflow whether others will be able to also copy one-off emails and campaigns.

Create a separate workflow before sharing

My first tip is to create a separate workflow before you share it with a broader audience. It’s okay to share your production workflows with a close friend, but when you expose your workflows to a big audience (like I do with the book) you should set up a new workflow.

This makes it easier to version your workflows, prevents you from accidentally publishing sensitive information, and allows you to experiment with your production workflows (and later incorporate working elements into the shared workflows).

Shared Workflows corrupt your trigger links

There is one big caveat with shared workflows: Trigger links don’t work after a workflow gets installed in a new account. The bigger problem with that is, that the links seem to work when looking at the visual designers.

What is a trigger link?

A trigger link in Drip is used to trigger (duh) a rule or a workflow goal in Drip. It’s a link in the form of

http://drip.la/c/eyJhY2NvdW50X2lkIjoiODc1NDc0MyIsInRyaWdnZXJfaWQiOiJud3FhOW01eWw3OCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vZG9tYWluLmNvbS9sYW5kaW5nLXBhZ2UifQ

When someone clicks on this link two things happen:

1. The user gets redirected to a web page
2. the corresponding workflow goal (or rule) in Drip gets triggered

If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering what that big blob of characters and digits is for.

eyJhY2NvdW50X2lkIjoiODc1NDc0MyIsInRyaWdnZXJfaWQiOiJud3FhOW01eWw3OCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vZG9tYWluLmNvbS9sYW5kaW5nLXBhZ2UifQ

doesn’t look like an identifier. For that you’d probably use a hash (like SHA-1), which is usually much shorter.

So what then is it?

You’ve probably guessed by now: a Base64 encoded string. So what does it contain?

When you decode the above Base64 string with a website like Base64Decode.org you get the following:

{"account_id":"8254743","trigger_id":"nwqa9m5yl78","url":"https://domain.com/landing-page"}

So the Drip engineering team cleverly included the account ID, the trigger ID, and redirect target URL in the trigger link’s URL. Sweet.

Installing a shared workflow breaks the trigger links

This is what the designer for the one-off email looks like after I installed the shared workflow:

Looks good - right? That link looks intact. Lets take a closer look at it:

Looks great as well. Clearly those links are working - right? Okay, one last test. We’ll look at the HTML source code and the actual link URL in there:

http://drip.la/c/eyJhY2NvdW50X2lkIjoiODc1NDc0MyIsInRyaWdnZXJfaWQiOiJud3FhOW01eWw3OCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vZG9tYWluLmNvbS9sYW5kaW5nLXBhZ2UifQ

Same as above. Now this is not good. The trigger URL includes the account number and the trigger ID. So this still points to the old account, not to the current one. Here’s the trigger URL on the new account:

http://drip.la/c/eyJhY2NvdW50X2lkIjoiODM5MzY2NyIsInRyaWdnZXJfaWQiOiIyOGUxY2Y1MDM5N2YwMTM1ZGVmNTA2YTY2MjhlMDJhNCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vZG9tYWluLmNvbS9sYW5kaW5nLXBhZ2UifQ

Yeah, that is a different URL. Which means those trigger URLs won’t work in the new account.

How to fix this

Sadly, you have to fix this manually by updating the trigger link in the workflow goal and then updating the trigger links in all of your emails.

I’ve told Drip support about this, so I hope that this bug will be fixed in a few weeks. It’s a new feature in an amazing software, so it’s okay that it needs a few kinks worked out.