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Building Your First Automation

A step-by-step walkthrough of building a weekly affiliate performance email automation.

What We're Building

By the end of this guide, you'll have a working automation that:

  1. Pulls affiliate stats from your tracker every week
  2. Sends a personalized email to each of your top affiliates with their individual numbers

This is the most common AffZero use case. The same pattern scales to more complex flows — invoices, conditions, multiple recipients — once you understand the basics.

Before You Start

Make sure you have:

Step 1 — Create the Automation

  1. Go to Automations in the left sidebar
  2. Click New Automation — a modal appears with three options: Describe It, preset cards, and Start from scratch
  3. Click Start from scratch → name it something like Weekly Affiliate Performance Email

You're now in the visual automation builder with an empty canvas.

Want to skip the manual setup? Use the Weekly Performance Summary preset instead — it creates this exact automation with the steps already in place. Or try Describe It (Pro and above) to generate it by typing a description.

Step 2 — Add a Pull Stats Step

Click + to add the first step and select Pull Stats.

Configure it:

FieldWhat to select
ConnectionYour Affise / CAKE / Binom connection
Stat TypeBy Affiliate
Date PresetLast 7 Days
TimezoneMatch your tracker's timezone

Then click Test Pull. AffZero will fetch real data from your tracker and display it in a preview table.

Select the cells you want to use in the email

This is the key step. In the preview table, click on individual cells to select them as variables.

For example, click:

  • The affiliate name in row 1 → becomes {affiliate_name_1_stats_1}
  • The revenue in row 1 → becomes {revenue_1_stats_1}
  • The payout in row 1 → becomes {payout_1_stats_1}

Repeat for row 2, row 3, and so on — for each affiliate you want to email.

Selected cells turn highlighted. You'll see the variable name appear in the Variables Available panel on the left side of the step editor. You can copy a variable from there and paste it into your email later.

Step 3 — Add a Send Email Step

Click + again and select Send Email.

Set up recipients

Enter the email address of the affiliate in row 1. If you're sending one email to each affiliate, you'll have one recipient per row — or you can use a single email that lists all affiliates.

For sending individual emails to each affiliate, you would create one Send Email step per affiliate (or set up multiple automations). Each step references the variables from the corresponding row number.

Write the subject

Your weekly stats: {affiliate_name_1_stats_1}

Write the email body

Use the email editor to write your message, and insert variables from the Variables Available panel on the left. For example:

Hi {affiliate_name_1_stats_1},

Here's your performance summary for last week:

Clicks: {clicks_1_stats_1}
Conversions: {conversions_1_stats_1}
Revenue: {revenue_1_stats_1}
Payout: {payout_1_stats_1}

Thanks for your work — keep it up!

Best,
Your Team

Choose which email account to send from

In the Send From dropdown, select your configured Gmail account.

Step 4 — Set the Schedule

At the top of the automation builder, set:

  • Schedule: Weekly
  • Day: Monday (or whichever day makes sense for your workflow)
  • Time: Choose a time before business hours — stats sent first thing in the morning tend to perform well

Step 5 — Save and Test

  1. Click Save to activate the automation
  2. Go back to the Automations list
  3. Click Run Now next to your automation

AffZero will immediately execute the workflow. After it finishes, go to Runs & Logs to see what happened — the step outputs, variable values, and confirmation that the email was sent.

Check your inbox to see the personalized email with live data.

What's Next?

Now that your basic automation works, you can extend it: