Approve & Send Outage Follow-Up Texts (Twilio + Gmail) | n8n

Approve & Send Outage Follow-Up Texts (Twilio + Gmail) — n8n Workflow

Get outage follow-ups out to your customers only after you approve the exact message and recipient list—then automatically follow up if they don’t respond. This n8n workflow sends SMS via Twilio, optionally emails via Gmail, and fully honors STOP/START texting rules.

What this workflow does

• Receives an outreach request via a webhook with a title, message, and customer list, then validates an access key.
• Filters eligible customers by checking consent, cooldown timing, opt-outs, and valid phone numbers before any SMS is queued.
• Queues an owner SMS with an approval link so you can review who will be contacted and what will be sent.
• Uses an approval web page where you can preview the message, review recipients, and choose to approve, cancel, or stop the campaign.
• Schedules customer follow-ups at the next allowed send window based on your configured customer-hours.
• Runs every 10 minutes to send due owner notifications and customer messages—respecting owner quiet hours, customer-hours limits, and a max-per-run sending cap.
• Sends SMS through Twilio, records delivery outcomes, advances each customer to the next step, retries failures, and marks opt-outs/permanent failures.
• Handles inbound replies: messages that include STOP (or similar) end the follow-up for that number and remove them from future requests; START re-enables. Any other reply ends that customer’s follow-ups and texts the owner with the sender name and number.

Use cases

• Notify customers about an outage and send a follow-up only after manual approval.
• Run a controlled “did you receive this?” SMS sequence that stops automatically when customers reply.
• Reduce support workload by funneling only meaningful replies back to you.

Technical details

• n8n workflow using nodes such as webhook, if, set, code, gmail (optional), and switch.
• Twilio for outbound SMS and inbound reply handling.
• Approval-driven sending with time-window scheduling and periodic processing (every 10 minutes).