Auto what?

Before we get too carried away, how about a quick introduction. Autoresponders go by a few different names like triggered emails and drip campaigns, but essentially they are an automated email, or sequence of emails sent when a subscriber meets a condition you set. For example, when someone joins your list, your subscriber's birthday, or a month since someone purchased from your store.

Below is an example of how an autoresponder would look if you want to send an email to subscribers when they first join your list, send a quick guide a week later, and then a final follow up a month after they signed up:

You can set up an unlimited sequence of emails for each type of autoresponder you create. Combine these with our new date-based custom fields and the possibilities are endless.

Choose your trigger

You never want to email a subscriber when it's not what they asked for or isn't something they'd be interested in. The "set and forget" mentality that comes with autoresponders can be a dangerous thing, so we've made it easy for you to choose exactly what should cause an autoresponder to be triggered.

After trawling the feedback from customers, it became clear there were three main types of autoresponders you needed. Here's what you'll see each time you create a new autoresponder for any subscriber list:

You can trigger an autoresponder when a new subscriber joins your list (via a subscribe form or the API), or when a subscriber's date-based custom field matches a rule you set. Date-based autoresponders can be based on either the anniversary of that date (like a birthday), or an exact match (like a membership expiry).

Of course, there are other scenarios outside these like a link clicked in a campaign, or more sophisticated conditions being met, but as always we're going for the simplest implementation to meet the needs of the majority of customers. If the demand is there, we'll look at adding more ways to trigger them in the future.

Reporting you can actually learn from

We put a lot of thought into building autoresponder reports that you can actually learn from. At a glance we give you an overview of the basics like how many emails have been sent, the average open rate, click rate and unsubscribe rate. But, it's the "over time" stats that are really interesting.

Autoresponders are often something you put a lot of work into setting up initially, but then only tend to check on them occasionally. With that in mind, we focused on making it easy to spot how each email in the sequence is performing over time.

This type of report means that if you make a copy or design change to an email in an active autoresponder, you can come back in a few days and see how that change is performing compared to the initial version.

See how individual emails are performing

As well as comparing the performance of each email in an autoresponder over time, you can also drill down to see the results for each email itself.

For each email in an autoresponder we'll slide down a link activity report showing the unique and total clicks for each.

Just 1p an email

Every autoresponder email you send costs 1 email credit, which start at just 1p. There is no £10 delivery fee like a regular email campaign. If you have any active autoresponders, we'll let you know when credits are running low automatically so you can top them up.

If you do end up running out of credits, we'll just pause that autoresponder until you jump in and purchase some more. Then you can turn them back on with the click of a mouse.

Getting started

Everything you see here is live and ready to roll in your account. Autoresponders are list-specific, so simply head into a subscriber list you'd like to set one up for, and you'll notice a new "Autoresponders" link on the right.

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