The Agency Playbook: Automation Workflows for Every Client Site

Every WordPress agency wastes roughly 4 to 6 hours per month per client on tasks that run identically across every site they manage. Welcome emails, user role assignments, form-to-CRM syncs, comment moderation, internal Slack alerts for new orders or registrations. The work is not complex.

It is just never automated, because no one has built a reusable system for it. This playbook covers exactly that: the baseline agency WordPress automation workflows worth deploying on every build, how to export and import them as portable JSON, and how to price the service so it generates recurring revenue.

The plugin doing the heavy lifting here is Krom Automation, a visual workflow builder that runs natively on WordPress. It connects site events to automated responses on a drag-and-drop canvas, with no code required and no per-execution billing at any tier. Agencies can build a workflow once, export it as JSON, and deploy it to every new client site in under two minutes.

This is not a list of tools to evaluate. It is a production system you can implement this week.

Work through the sections in order. The first section saves the most time across the most sites, so skipping ahead to the advanced flows before configuring the baseline is a waste of effort.

Browse the full feature list to see every trigger and action available before you start building.

Quick Summary

• Baseline set: 6 workflow categories worth standardising on every client site, covering users, forms, comments, orders, internal alerts, and scheduled reports.
• Repeatability: Build once in Krom Automation, export as JSON, import to each new site in under 2 minutes. No rebuilding from scratch.
• What to standardise: Trigger type, action sequence, and branching logic. What to customise: email addresses, role names, CRM list IDs, and Slack channel targets.
• Retainer pricing: 4 to 6 saved hours per month per client translates directly to a defensible $150 to $300/month automation management line item.
• Free tier: 16 triggers and 21 actions are available at no cost. Most baseline workflows need nothing from Pro.

Why Agencies Need a Standardised Automation Layer

The problem is not that agencies do not automate. Most do, inconsistently, one client at a time. One client gets a welcome email workflow because someone had an afternoon to set it up.

The next client gets nothing, because the project was already over budget. The result is a portfolio where every site behaves differently, support tickets arrive unpredictably, and no one can reliably answer “what happens when a user registers on this site?”

A standardised automation layer fixes this. It means every site in your portfolio responds to the same events in the same way, with site-specific configuration sitting in a handful of fields rather than in the workflow logic itself. Onboarding a new client goes from “build everything from scratch” to “import the baseline pack, update four field values, done.”

The goal is not automating for automation’s sake. It is making your agency’s behaviour predictable at scale, so the fifteenth client gets the same quality of implementation as the first.

There is also a revenue argument. Automation work that takes you 30 minutes to deploy is genuinely worth $150 to $300 per month to the client receiving it, because the alternative is hiring someone to do it manually or living without it.

We will cover the pricing model at the end. First, the workflows.

The 6 Baseline Workflow Categories

1. User Registration and Onboarding

Every WordPress site registers users. Most send nothing when it happens. The baseline here is three connected workflows: a welcome email to the new user, an internal notification to the site owner or team, and a CRM or email list sync.

• Trigger: User Registered
• Action 1: Send Email (welcome message with merge tags for first name and login URL)
• Action 2: HTTP Request to the client’s CRM endpoint, or a native integration if they use Mailchimp or FluentCRM
• Action 3: Send internal Slack alert with the new user’s email and role

The welcome email documentation walks through the exact merge tag syntax for personalising these messages. For the CRM sync, Krom Automation has native integrations for Mailchimp, FluentCRM, and ActiveCampaign, so no HTTP Request is needed for those. For less common CRMs, the HTTP Request action handles GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE with JSON response parsing.

Build this workflow once. The only fields that change per client are the welcome email sender address, the CRM list ID, and the Slack channel webhook URL. Those three fields sit in the action configuration, not in the workflow logic, so exporting and re-importing the JSON leaves the logic intact and the client-specific values are updated in under 5 minutes.

2. Form Submission Handling

Contact forms are where most agencies lose hours. The client submits a form. That data needs to reach the CRM, trigger a confirmation email, and ideally alert the relevant team member.

Without automation, someone checks the form plugin’s inbox manually, copy-pastes the data somewhere, and maybe sends an email. With automation, it happens in under 3 seconds.

• Trigger: Form submission event from Gravity Forms, WPForms, Contact Form 7, Fluent Forms, or Elementor Forms
• Action 1: Send confirmation email to the submitter using merge tags from the form fields
• Action 2: Create or update a contact record in the client’s CRM
• Action 3: Send an internal notification to the responsible team member

Krom Automation has documented integrations for Gravity Forms, WPForms, Contact Form 7, Fluent Forms, and Elementor Forms. The trigger configuration differs slightly per form plugin, but the action sequence is identical. That means a single workflow template with a swappable trigger covers all five form plugins, and the JSON export captures whichever trigger the client’s site uses.

3. Comment Moderation

Comment spam costs community-oriented sites roughly 30 minutes per week of manual review time. Automating moderation with AI brings that to near zero. The workflow uses Krom Automation’s AI Content Moderation action, which evaluates comment text against a configurable threshold and routes it down a Yes or No branch.

• Trigger: Comment Submitted
• Branch Yes (clean): Update Comment Status to Approved
• Branch No (suspect): Add Comment Label for manual review, send internal alert

The AI actions are included free in Krom Automation. The user supplies their own API key and pays their AI provider directly at standard rates.

GPT-4o Mini via OpenAI runs at roughly $0.15 per million input tokens, which means a site with 500 comments per month costs less than $0.01 in AI fees. For a detailed look at building this workflow, the post on automating WordPress comment moderation covers the full setup.

4. WooCommerce Order Alerts and Post-Purchase Flows

WooCommerce sites generate the most automatable events per day. New order created, order completed, subscription renewed, refund requested. The baseline workflow for most WooCommerce clients is a three-part post-purchase flow.

• On Order Created: Send internal Slack alert with order number, customer name, and total
• On Order Completed: Send post-purchase email with a personalised product recommendation or review request
• Delay 7 days, then: Send follow-up email checking satisfaction

The delay node accepts minutes, hours, days, or weeks. A 7-day delay between order completion and a review request is a proven sequence for increasing review volume without being aggressive. The documentation on delays and scheduling covers how to configure each unit and what happens if the WordPress Cron fires late on low-traffic sites.

Agencies that add a post-purchase email sequence to a client’s WooCommerce site typically see review volume increase within 30 days, without the client doing anything manually.

For clients with subscriptions, the WooCommerce Subscriptions integration adds triggers for renewal, cancellation, and payment failure, which are the three moments where a timely automated message has the most impact on churn.

5. Internal Team Alerts via Messaging Integrations

The most common agency complaint about client sites is finding out about problems from the client rather than from the system. A user role gets changed unexpectedly. A post moves to published when it should have stayed as a draft.

An order exceeds a threshold. None of these are emergencies, but all of them are worth a Slack message to the right person.

• User Role Changed: Alert the agency’s admin channel with user ID and old and new roles
• Post Published: Notify the content team channel with post title and author
• Order Created (above threshold): Alert the client’s sales channel using conditional branching on order total

The messaging integrations documentation covers Slack, Discord, Twilio, and Telegram in one place. The conditional branching uses a Yes/No path on any trigger data field, so filtering for orders above $500 is a single condition node, not custom code. See how conditions and branching work for the full syntax reference.

6. Scheduled Reporting Workflows

This category is Pro only, but it is the one clients are most willing to pay for explicitly. The Schedule Trigger fires on a recurring interval (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom interval) and can send a compiled report email to the client covering whatever data the site tracks.

The most common use case is a weekly summary: new users registered, posts published, orders completed, failed workflows flagged. Krom Automation logs every execution with a full per-step audit trail, so the data is already there. The workflow reads it and formats it into an email or posts it to a Google Sheet for the client’s records.

The Schedule Trigger documentation covers configuration options. The Google Sheets integration is useful for clients who want a live dashboard rather than an inbox full of emails.

Export, Import, and Repeatability

The entire value of a standardised workflow library depends on being able to deploy it without rebuilding. Krom Automation exports any workflow as a portable JSON file and imports it on any other WordPress installation running the plugin.

The workflow logic, trigger configuration, action sequence, branching structure, and delay settings all transfer. The only things that need updating are the environment-specific values: email addresses, API keys, CRM list IDs, and webhook URLs.

The practical process for agencies looks like this:

1. Build and test the baseline workflow on your own staging environment
2. Export as JSON and store in your agency’s shared drive or version control
3. On each new client site, install Krom Automation and import the JSON pack
4. Update the 3 to 5 client-specific field values per workflow
5. Run the simulator to verify the flow fires correctly with no side effects

The workflow simulator runs a dry test of any workflow without executing the actions for real. No emails get sent, no CRM records get created. It validates the logic and shows exactly what each step would do given a sample trigger payload.

For agency onboarding, this is essential. It lets you confirm a workflow is configured correctly before handing the site to the client.

The import and export functionality is covered in the workflow settings documentation. Workflows can also carry a notes field for internal documentation, which is worth using when you have a library of 20 or more templates and someone other than you is doing the deployment.

A workflow library your whole team can deploy in 10 minutes is worth more than a perfect workflow only one person understands.

What to Standardise and What to Customise

Element	Standardise (same across all clients)	Customise (per client, update on import)
Trigger type	Yes	No
Action sequence and order	Yes	No
Branching logic and conditions	Yes	No
Delay timing	Yes (default values)	Adjust if client requests differ
Merge tag structure	Yes	No
Sender email address	No	Yes, always
CRM list or tag IDs	No	Yes, always
Slack channel webhook URL	No	Yes, always
Email copy and branding	Template only	Yes, per client voice
AI provider and API key	No	Yes, client’s own key

The rule of thumb: standardise the decision logic, customise the destination. If a workflow decides “when a user registers, send a welcome email and sync to CRM”, that decision is the same on every client site. The CRM it syncs to, the list it adds the contact to, and the email address the message comes from are all client-specific.

Pricing the Automation Retainer

This is the section most agency playbooks skip entirely. They say automation saves time without telling you how to turn that into a line item. Here is a concrete model.

Task	Manual time per month	Automated time per month	Hours saved
Welcome emails and CRM sync	2 hours	0 hours	2 hours
Form submission routing	1.5 hours	0 hours	1.5 hours
Comment moderation review	1 hour	10 minutes (reviewing AI flags)	50 minutes
Internal order/event alerts	0.5 hours (checking manually)	0 hours	30 minutes
Monthly client report	1.5 hours	15 minutes (reviewing output)	1.25 hours
Total	6.5 hours	0.4 hours	~6 hours

Six hours per month at a blended agency rate of $75 to $100 per hour is $450 to $600 in labour value. Charging $150 to $250 per month for an automation management retainer is not aggressive pricing. It is a discount on what the manual alternative actually costs the client, and it is far below what it would cost them to hire someone to do it themselves.

The retainer is defensible because the ongoing service is real. Workflows need monitoring. Krom Automation’s analytics dashboard shows execution counts, success rates, and failed execution alerts by email, but someone needs to review them monthly and update workflows when the client’s site changes.

That is the retainer. Initial setup is a one-time project fee. Ongoing monitoring, updates, and new workflow deployment is the recurring line item.

Krom Automation Pro is licensed per site. The Standard plan covers 5 site activations at $199 per year, which is $39.80 per site per year.

Add that to your cost of goods, mark it up appropriately, and the margin on the retainer is healthy. The full pricing breakdown shows all three plan tiers, including the lifetime options if you prefer to avoid annual renewals.

What the Other Playbooks Leave Out

Most agency automation content focuses on plugin updates, backups, and uptime monitoring. Those are important, but they are hosting and maintenance tasks, not site-level automation workflows.

Krom Automation does not handle server backups. What it handles is everything that happens inside WordPress after the server is healthy: user events, content events, commerce events, and the integrations that connect those events to the tools your clients actually use.

Two things are genuinely missing from most agency automation setups:

• Execution visibility for the client. Krom Automation logs every workflow execution with a full per-step audit trail. Clients can see exactly what ran, when it ran, and whether it succeeded. That audit trail is also your defence when a client asks why a welcome email did not arrive. The answer is in the logs, not in your memory.
• AI-assisted workflow generation. In Krom Automation Pro, you can describe an automation in plain English and get a working workflow in seconds. For agencies onboarding a new client type for the first time, this is faster than building from the trigger browser manually. It is not a replacement for understanding the system, but it compresses the time from brief to first working draft significantly.

There is also an honest limitation worth naming. Krom Automation runs on WordPress Cron for delayed workflows. On sites with very low traffic, WP-Cron can fire late if no page visits trigger it.

The fix is a real server cron job pointing at the WordPress Cron endpoint. On any client site handling commerce or time-sensitive workflows, this configuration is mandatory, not optional. The post on WordPress Cron reliability covers exactly why and what to do about it.

Getting Started: Deployment Order

Work through these in this order. Each workflow category is more complex than the one before it, and later workflows sometimes depend on infrastructure configured in earlier ones (such as the AI provider key needed for comment moderation).

1. User registration workflow (free, zero dependencies, highest frequency trigger on most sites)
2. Form submission routing (free, needs the form plugin identified and the CRM endpoint confirmed)
3. Comment moderation with AI (free, needs an AI provider API key configured)
4. WooCommerce order alerts (free triggers available, needs Slack webhook URL or messaging integration)
5. Post-purchase email sequence (free, needs delay scheduling confirmed with server cron in place)
6. Scheduled reporting (Pro, deploy last as it depends on execution data from all workflows above)

The step-by-step workflow builder guide is the best reference for anyone deploying Krom Automation for the first time. The merge tags documentation covers how to inject live event data into action fields, which you will use in every email and notification workflow.

Also from wpRigel

Commandify is a command palette for the WordPress admin. Press Cmd or Ctrl plus K to jump anywhere, search anything, and run admin actions without clicking through menus. It is the only WordPress command palette with real WooCommerce order, product, and customer commands built in, which makes it genuinely useful for agencies managing stores with high order volumes.

Pollify is a Gutenberg-native poll, survey, and quiz plugin. Polls are built directly inside the block editor as real blocks, with no shortcodes to paste and no separate configuration interface to learn. If any of your clients run community or editorial sites that need audience engagement tools, it fits cleanly into the same WordPress-first workflow you are building with Krom Automation.

Our Verdict

Agencies that standardise their automation layer before they need it scale cleanly. Agencies that automate reactively, one client at a time, end up with a portfolio of inconsistent sites that each behave slightly differently and each require individual troubleshooting. The gap between those two outcomes is roughly one afternoon of setup work: building the baseline workflow pack, testing it, and exporting it as JSON.

If you manage 5 or more client sites, the retainer model pays for the Pro licence within the first month on a single client. If you manage 20 or more sites, the time savings compound faster than the cost rises.

The Standard plan at $199 per year covers 5 activations. The Enterprise plan at $369 per year covers unlimited sites, which is the correct tier for any agency above 10 active client deployments.

Start with the free version. Download Krom Automation from the WordPress.org plugin directory, build the first three workflow categories, and export the JSON before you add the next client site.

The free tier gives you 16 triggers and 21 actions, which is enough to deploy everything in the baseline set except scheduled reporting. Upgrade to Pro when the retainer revenue from the first two clients covers the licence cost, which for most agencies is within 30 days.

Compare all three Pro plans and see which fits your current site count.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use Krom Automation across multiple client sites on one licence?

Yes. The Standard plan covers 5 site activations at $199 per year. The Enterprise plan covers unlimited sites at $369 per year.

Each client site needs an active activation, so the right plan depends on how many clients you are managing. The free version has no site limit and no feature lock, but Pro features like the Schedule Trigger and AI workflow generation require a Pro licence on each site.

What happens to a workflow if the client changes their CRM or email platform?

The workflow logic stays intact. You update the action configuration to point at the new destination, which typically means changing a list ID, an API key, or a webhook URL.

The trigger, branching structure, and delay settings do not need rebuilding. This is a 5 to 10 minute update, not a rebuild.

Do AI-powered workflows require an ongoing subscription to an AI provider?

Yes. Krom Automation’s AI actions require the client or agency to supply an API key from OpenAI, Google Gemini, or Groq. wpRigel does not charge per AI call and does not mark up tokens.

The user pays the AI provider directly at standard rates. For comment moderation on a typical blog, the monthly AI cost is under $0.05.

Is there a way to test workflows before they go live on a client site?

Yes. The workflow simulator runs a dry test of any workflow without executing the actions. No emails are sent, no records are created, no external services are called.

It validates the logic and shows what each step would do given a sample trigger payload. Run it on every import before handing the site to a client.

What is the minimum WordPress version required?

Krom Automation requires WordPress 6.2 or higher and PHP 7.4 or higher. MySQL 5.7 or MariaDB 10.2 is also required. WooCommerce is optional and only needed for the commerce-specific triggers and actions.