Welcome back. So we now have those basics set up, and it's time to talk a little bit about the main ways to send emails in Bento. So I'll walk through these in the back end in a moment. Basically, all emails you could ever send in Bento will be sent from one of these three places, broadcasts, sequences, and flows.

And so within the Bento dashboard, we can see that it directly maps that way. Under emails, we have broadcasts and sequences, and then flows are the advanced workflow builders that we'll cover a little bit later in the training. And in those cases, you basically build your emails within the flow itself. So you might, within here, have a new action for sending an email, and let's say we call it 12345.

If you built this flow, saved it, what would happen is that this email, I might have to publish it. We'll see. But basically, any email you create shows here on the Flow Emails page, and clearly, mine doesn't show up. I'm going to publish it and save it.

One moment. All right, there we go. So in this case, the thing that was making it not show up, it actually was showing up, it just didn't show up with the name. So when I went in here, created the email, and added a subject line, so we have email one as the subject line, and then an example flow email as the flow.

We can see that that maps directly here under Flow Emails. But don't worry about that yet, because that is much more complicated than what we're doing first. First, we're going to start out with the super-duper simple stuff. So we will be starting out first with broadcast, then sequences, and then only after that, flows.

So the difference between the three really comes down to what you're trying to do with them. Broadcasts are great for simple one-offs, sequences are good for, well, simple sequences, and then flows, especially flows compared to sequences, flows are useful when you need to either do some subscriber segmentation data updating or when you need some complex branching logic, that kind of thing. I personally almost never use sequences, but Jesse likes them. A lot of users like them.

I'm just kind of nerdy. So you'll be learning how to use these through implementation in the coming lessons. So for right now, I just want to do the high level. So broadcasts.

Within your dashboard, when you go to Emails and then Broadcast, that's where you'd create a new one. And basically, you just go in here, you choose your editor. So you've got the Shoji Text editor and then the Stripo drag and drop. We'll play with both in a little bit.

Shoji Text I like for message from a friend style emails. Jesse uses them for everything, and then I use Stripo for my newsletter personally. And so within a broadcast, you basically first create the email itself and subject line and whatnot, and then you would exit that and set up all of this stuff on the right-hand side for your audience segmentation, the scheduling, batching, that kind of thing, and then you send it. So very simple.

And for sequences, the workflow is pretty much the same. So you go Emails and then Sequences, and we'll call this Test Six since I've made a few. And cool thing about sequences we'll talk about later is that you can automatically remove somebody or just block them in the first place based on certain tags, which is useful, because in a little bit, we'll be talking about a setup flow Jesse often uses for sequences where he'll use an automated workflow to essentially add someone to a sequence, and then if they upgrade to the next product, that same workflow will remove them from the You Should Upgrade sequence and add them to the Thanks for Upgrading sequence. But for simpler use cases, like let's say something like an abandoned cart, you can often use that tag block thingy I showed you a moment ago, where you send them this abandoned cart sequence until they receive the customer tag, and then you just stop sending it to them without you having to mess with the workflow.

But more on that later. Within a sequence, basically, you add an email, and you'll notice that the UI is pretty much the same. The main difference is that within a sequence, so let's say we go make our test email here, within the sequence, you choose delays. So if you want your first email in the sequence to send instantly, you set that, and then you have to publish the emails.

And so the nice thing about this is that you can sort of play with a bunch more. Like let's say we added five emails. You can play with upcoming emails, without having to worry about people receiving them in the way that you would if you published the whole sequence versus one-by-one emails. So that's why it's set up to allow you, and also force you, to publish individual emails.

One cool thing we'll do in a little bit is we're going to actually use AI via MCP, which stands for Model Context Protocol. It's essentially a way for AI tools to connect to your other tools like Bento. We will use AI to scaffold out a Bento sequence, via MCP in an upcoming lesson, and that's pretty exciting and fun. But alas, for now, just a quick overview.

So I covered most of these notes from the Flows section already, but just to clarify a couple things I didn't say. Basically, the way flows work in Bento is that something has to trigger the flow. And we'll get more into this later, but common triggers for a flow would be like someone buys something from your store, or someone signs up for a free trial, somebody signs up for a lead magnet, whatever. That triggers the flow.

So I had one I was playing with a moment ago for the test email. Yeah, here we go. So in this case, when I was showing you adding an email to a flow There would've been something that kicked it off. So maybe somebody views a certain page on the website, they click a link, or they get a tag applied or a custom event, which is where anything integrated with your app or other Bento events, et cetera, come into play.

Again, more on this later. But the zoomed out thing I need you to understand is that for these workflow automations, you can do some really, really cool, powerful stuff. You can add little splits and stuff. So you can say, "If somebody matches whatever condition, then send them this email.

If they don't, then send them this other email," things like that. So really, really cool and exciting if you are nerdy like me. One thing that's important also to communicate is that flows are for so much more than just sending emails. So we'll get into all the triggers and actions and stuff later, but you can almost, in some ways, use Bento as an email-centric version of something like Zapier or n8n or Make.

You can send external webhooks based on stuff happening in Bento. You can send messages to Slack. So you could do something where if somebody signs up for your lead magnet, you could notify yourself in Slack that you got a new user who signed up, and you could send a webhook to your app so that your app could say, "Oh my gosh, I just saw that you signed up. That's amazing." You could do all of this stuff.

I don't know why you'd want to do those two specific things, but you could, and that's pretty dang cool. So let's wrap up with a simple mental model decision framework kind of thing. So basically, if you're just sending a one-off email to a group of people, use a broadcast. If you want a simple series of emails that doesn't really need any fancy logic, and you don't want to have to mess with a flow, you just want to set it up real quick, use a sequence.

And if you want to do some branching, conditional logic, event triggers, or non-email automation like transforming user data or anything like that, use a flow. So this gives you the basics. Let's jump to the next lesson. We'll go a bit deeper.