Every email or text step in an automation carries its own switch: Draft for review or Send automatically. Nothing forces you to pick one setting for a whole automation, so an opening email can wait for your eyes while a routine nudge three months later goes out on its own.
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8:43The Switch Sits on the Step
Open a step inside an automation card and you will see How It Sends with two options: Draft for review waits in your queue until you approve it, and Send automatically goes out on the day, with nobody reading it first. This is set per step, not per automation, so a five-step sequence can mix both freely as you build trust in the later steps.
What a Draft Does Instead
A drafted step lands in the Pulse queue with its recipients, subject and message filled in. You can send it as written, edit the wording first, or dismiss it if it does not apply. Nothing reaches the client until you act, so this is the safer default while you are still reading what a step actually writes.
Which Triggers Start on Automatic
A step whose action is outward-facing or irreversible, such as an email or a text, always starts as a draft the first time you build it. Some triggers do not offer automatic sending at all for a given channel: if a trigger's policy has no automatic path for texts, the toggle for that channel is locked to draft and says so. Steps that are not client-facing, like adding a tag, filing a task or moving a stage, have no send mode at all. They just run.
What Forces a Draft Whatever You Chose
A step tagged as needing your approval or the client's consent cannot be switched to automatic, full stop. The toggle disables itself rather than letting you flip past this. This is the same rule that keeps your Advanced Pulse safety switch out of the way: read-only mode holds every step, whatever mode it carries, so turning a step to automatic never gets ahead of your own settings.
Moving a Step to Automatic Safely
Watch a step run as a draft for a few cycles first. Read what it actually sends real clients, not just what the preview shows, and confirm the timing lands where you expect. Once you trust the wording and the timing, flip that one step to automatic. The earlier steps in the same automation can stay on draft indefinitely; nothing requires you to promote a whole sequence at once. If you would rather test changes without touching real clients at all, read-only mode holds the entire library on your test deal while you work.
What to Do Next
- Review the Pulse Queue to see and act on everything still waiting as a draft.
- Hold Everything in Read-Only Mode while you are still shaping an automation.
- Build Your First Automation if you have not set up a trigger yet.