How to Set Up Auto Queues

Auto Queues turn single automations into timed, multi-step sequences: drip campaigns, onboarding flows, follow-up cadences and renewal reminders. You set the timing once, and every contact you enrol moves through the sequence on their own, a welcome email today, a case study in three days, a check-in after that, without you sending a thing.

Watch the walkthrough

A short tour: opening Auto Queues, creating your first queue, adding timed steps, enrolling contacts, and tracking who is moving through.

Open Auto Queues

Go to https://app.trustpager.com/auto/queues.

Create a queue

Select Create Queue, give it a name that describes the workflow, such as "New Client Onboarding", "Post-Demo Follow-Up" or "Renewal Sequence", add an optional description, and save. Your queue is ready for steps.

Add timed steps

Choose Add Step for each stage of the sequence. Every step has two parts: an action (what happens) and a delay (how long to wait first, in days, hours or minutes). Steps run in order. A five-touch onboarding sequence might look like this:

1. Day 0: send the welcome email
2. Day 2: create a follow-up task for the account manager
3. Day 5: send a check-in SMS
4. Day 14: send a feedback form
5. Day 30: send a review request email

Enrol contacts

There are three ways to move contacts through a queue:

• Auto-Enrol triggers: set them directly on the queue so matching contacts join automatically.
• Add to Auto Queue action: call it inside any automation, so an existing workflow hands a contact straight into the sequence. For example, when an opportunity moves to Won, an automation enrols that contact into your onboarding queue.
• By hand: open the queue at https://app.trustpager.com/auto/queues and use Add to Queue to pick contacts or opportunities yourself. Trigger-based enrolments keep running alongside anyone you add this way.

You can point as many of these as you like at the same queue. A lead might reach your re-engagement sequence because they went quiet, because a call went unanswered, or because someone added them by hand. All three can run at once, safely, because of the rule in the next section.

Nobody gets the same queue twice

If a contact is already partway through a queue, enrolling them again does nothing. The second enrolment is skipped and their original run continues undisturbed, so they never receive the same sequence twice and the steps they have left never double up.

This is automatic. There is no setting to configure and nothing you can forget to switch on. It means you can add a new way into a queue at any time without auditing who is already in it, and you do not need a tag or a condition to protect against double sends.

Two things follow from it that are worth knowing:

• A run that scheduled nothing is usually the guard working. When you inspect a run at https://app.trustpager.com/auto/queues and see zero steps scheduled with a reason of already enrolled, that is the protection doing its job, not a failure. Nothing needs fixing.
• To deliberately run someone through a second time, remove them from the queue first, then enrol them again once their pending steps are gone.

A contact is treated as already enrolled while they still have steps waiting. Once a queue has finished with them, they can be enrolled again.

Tip: this only protects a contact from being in the same queue twice. Being in two different queues at once is allowed, and the section on spacing below covers how to keep those two from talking over each other.

Respect business hours

On the queue detail page at https://app.trustpager.com/auto/queues, directly below the Active/Paused toggle, you will find the Respect business hours toggle.

• On: any step that becomes due outside your workspace's configured business-hours window is held automatically and rescheduled to the start of the next window. Nothing sends at night or on weekends.
• Off (default): steps fire as soon as they are due, regardless of the time of day.

Business hours are the window you have configured for your workspace (the default is Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm in your workspace timezone). You can update them at https://app.trustpager.com/settings/workspace.

The toggle saves automatically. There is no save button to press.

Tip: turning on business hours is especially useful for nurture sequences and re-engagement campaigns where a message arriving at 2 am or on a Saturday would feel out of place. Leave it off for time-sensitive triggers like new lead alerts where immediate contact is the goal.

Space out messages to the same contact

A contact can be enrolled in more than one Auto Queue at the same time, and that is often deliberate: one queue can enrol a contact into another while the first is still running. Each queue works out its step timing from the moment that contact joined it, so two queues can end up scheduling the same person a minute apart without either one knowing about the other.

Send spacing stops that. Turn it on at https://app.trustpager.com/settings/auto?section=auto-queues and set a minimum gap in minutes.

• On: if a step comes due within that gap of the last automated message the contact received, it waits and sends once the gap has passed. This applies across every Auto Queue and every channel, so an email from one queue and an SMS from another cannot land on top of each other.
• Off (default): steps fire as soon as they are due.

Nothing is ever skipped. A held message simply sends a few minutes later than planned, and the reason it waited is recorded against the task, so you can see exactly what happened at https://app.trustpager.com/auto/queues.

The setting saves automatically, and it applies to every Auto Queue in your workspace at once.

Tip: this matters most when one sequence hands off to another, such as a nurture queue that enrols people into a re-engagement queue partway through. A gap of 15 to 30 minutes is usually enough to keep a lead from feeling chased.

Other reasons a step is skipped

Alongside already enrolled, an enrolment is also skipped when the contact has unsubscribed from one of the channels the queue uses, when the linked opportunity is already marked lost, so a cadence never chases someone who has said no, and when the queue's own step delays are set so that two steps would fire at the same moment. Each case is recorded with its reason on the run, so you can always tell why nothing was scheduled.

Track and hand off

Active Enrollments on the queue page shows who is moving through the queue right now, and which step each of them is on. Completed Enrollments shows who has finished, so you can see who was contacted and how.

Every contact and opportunity record also carries its own Auto Queue card, listing the queues that record is currently in. You can open the queue from there, or remove that one enrolment without touching anyone else.

Auto-Cancel triggers, such as Email Received, stop the queue automatically when a contact replies, so your team picks up the live conversation instead of the sequence carrying on over the top of it. You can also stop someone yourself with the Remove from Auto Queue action in an automation, or the remove control on the queue page. Removing a contact cancels their pending steps; steps that have already sent are unaffected.

Tip: Auto Queues are the right tool when you need a timed sequence with several touchpoints. For a one-off action triggered by an event, use an automation on its own. The two work together: automations enrol contacts into queues, and queues handle the multi-step follow-through. Every send, wait and enrolment is logged against the contact's opportunity, so the whole sequence stays visible in the CRM while it runs itself.