When building an automation to personalize the contacts' experience, you usually add a conditional split early in the automation to adjust to channel preferences or engagement level. After the split, however, you typically use the same triggers, activities, or splits for each branch.

To minimize the number of activities, reduce clutter, and streamline the building, you can merge splits and only add the desired activities once.

In the case below we have split the automation based on channel preference. The preferred channel for our message is email, but we still want to reach those that have opted out from emails. Afterwards we wait for a purchase using a trigger split.

Without merging we'd have to insert the trigger split twice. And all activities after that split would have to be duplicated as well.

By using the merge feature you can build automations that are smarter, easier to maintain, and easier to overview.

Using merge with several splits

When you merge a split, Engage always looks to merge any underlying splits as well.

If you choose to trigger a merge on the split at the top, the result will look like this:

Indicators

To help you keep track of where your merges connect, there are helpful indicators. The indicators always reference back to where the merge originated from and show the condition used in the split.

You are probably familiar with the concept of minimizing. You do it to applications on your computer and rows in spreadsheets. It's also possible with splits in automations.

Clicking Minimize split takes everything contained in the split and replaces it with an icon to indicate that there is hidden content. If you wish to show the content again, simply click Expand split. This works similar to merging, as it'll try to minimize all underlying splits as well.

Either if you're looking to improve an existing automation, or just got ahead of yourself and realize you need an additional split, you can insert a split of any type wherever you want in the automation. Simply click the plus sign to open the menu and select the split you want to add.

Just as you can move activities around in a automation, you can move splits (and all content under them). This comes in handy when you want to move a part of your automation to a new branch created with Insert split.