Autoresponders allow you to "drip" emails to an individual over time, this is often referred to as "Drip email marketing". This allows you to trickle email messages to individuals over time in response to an action.
For example following the sale of one of your products you can use Autoresponders to send a user guides and tips email 1 day later, followed 5 days later with a further email offering accessories for the product they purchased.
This differs from Marketing Campaign which focus on sending a single message to a list of individuals in one large batch like you might do if you are announcing your new summer sale.
Make a plan
Before any marketing effort you should plan your goals before you dive in, that is especially important when using Autoresponders. So before we make changes lets plan what messages we will include in the drip and when we will send them.
To help illustrate the process lets use the example of someone purchasing an MP3 player from our store and how we will send them the follow up messages below:
- Autoresponder #1: Thanks for purchasing - 5 Minutes later
- Autoresponder #2: Did you receive your MP3? - Five Days later
- Autoresponder #3: Check out these cool accessories! - One Week later
As you see here we want to thank the customer for their purchase, follow up 5 days later to make sure they received their MP3 player int he mail and then contact them 1 week after their purchase see if they are interested in purchasing accessories for the product they bought.
Creating your Autoresponders
Autoresponders are always linked to a single Marketing List so before you begin you first need to create or open the marketing list you plan to use. We have opened our "MP3 player customers" marketing list, we don't have any subscribers yet and that's fine.
Lets create the 1st of our 3 autoresponders by scrolling to the autoresponder portlet and clicking the Create button.
For each Autoresponder you add to your list you will need to decide the trigger condition and time delay along with the message you will send. Lets look at each of the options here:
- Triggered by - It is possible to trigger the autoresponder message when someone subscribes or unsubscribes from your list.
- Send After - set the delay for the message to be sent in minutes, days or weeks after the trigger.
- Subject - The subject of the email message sent to the recipient
- Enable Tracking - Check this to track email opens and click throughs
- Select a Template - Select a pre-created email template to use
- Attachments - Add any attachments you with to include on the email
- Email body - The body of the email message sent to the recipient.
Once you have set your trigger, delay and added your message click save to complete the creation of your autoresponder.
Now lets repeat the process to create the remaining 2 autoresponders in our example. Once we have all three created it should look something like this.
<INSERT HERE EXAMPLE SCREENSHOT>
Add subscribers
The next step is to add your subscribers to the list which will trigger the autoresponders we created and begin dripping the emails out. Its possible to subscribe individuals to a marketing list in a number of ways for a full list you should consult our Marketing List guide which shows all options.
A simple method for this to to add the "Marketing List" portlet to your contact record layout. This allows you to both subscribe a contact to a list and see what other marketing list they already belong to.
Another option is use a workflow that automatically subscribes a contact to our "MP3 player customers" list when a contact purchases the Product "MP3 Player".
FAQs
Q. I added an Autorespnder but it has not sent to the people on my list
A. Adding a new autoresponder to a list will not automatically send the autoresponder message to contacts already subscribed to the list. Remember that autoresponders are triggered on subscription or subscription to the list so only contacts subscribed to the list after the autoresponder is created will receive the message.
Comments