Automation Example: Send a Series of Emails Over Time 🎬

Details

If you'd like to automatically send users a series of emails or SMS messages over time after filling in a form, you can create an automation to do so.

Some example use cases could be:

• Onboard new customers or staff by sending a series of messages over a few days, weeks or months
• Nurture prospects through a series of emails sent each week
• Provide training through a series of videos, sent by email each week
• SMS or email the user at set times during an event or conference (nb. Advanced Automations only)

As an aside - we also have a more advanced version of this automation which is configured to wait until a particular email is sent before triggering. This is handy if you want to have more control over when the automation is sent - such as only triggering after a list is uploaded and an initial email sent.

What This Example Will Cover

In this automation example, we'll be building a workflow that emails a different eBook to our recipe club members whenever they complete our subscription form, which is shown below. In our example, we have three eBook emails to send all up. 

How-to Guide

Before you begin, you'll need to have your subscription form created. You'll also need to have your various emails built and ready to go.

1. Select Automation from the sidebar.
2. Click New Automation.
3. Next to the Create your own automation section, click Create.
4. In the first section, select the trigger as Subscribe.
5. In the second section, use the dropdowns to choose the folder and list that you'd like to monitor for subscription events.
6. In the third section, select the folder and corresponding message you'd like to send. In our case, it will be the first Recipe Club eBook email.
7. In the fourth section, set the timing for the send. In our case, we'll wait a day before sending the first email.
   
8. Click Save. The first step in our automation sequence is now complete - let's add some more steps for the other two eBooks in our automation sequence.
9. Locate the automation and click the pencil (edit) icon.
10. Click New Message.
11. Repeat steps 4 - 8 above, this time select the second email in your sequence and don't forget to set the timing accordingly. In our case, we want to send the second eBook email 10 days after the subscribe event, so we'll set the timing on ours to 10 days, as shown below.
    
12. And finally, we'll complete the steps again for the third eBook in our series, at a timing of 20 days after the original subscribe event.
    
13. Once complete, ensure all of your automation steps are enabled by setting the toggle to On, as shown. Your automation is now ready and will run each time a user completes the subscription form.
    

Once you have completed the setup process, you can test the automation by filling in the form to make sure you receive the relevant emails.

Power Session Video

Check out our video recording below, from a Vision6 Power Session on this topic. The topic of this article is one of the examples presented in this video.