[tutorial] Creating a follow up email

Inbound Pro Membership holders have access to Marketing Automation and Inbound Mailer, which allows for custom followup emails and followup email series. Emails sent by our Marketing Automation and Mailer components are powered by SparkPost.

I. Create your follow up email(s)

The first step is to use the email component to design the follow up email(s) you plan to send to your subscribers.

1. Head into wp-admin->Emails and create a new email.
2. Select the email template you want to use.
3. Change the email type from ‘batch’ to ‘automated’.
4. Setup your email using available shortcodes for personalization.
5. Save your email. (Be sure to test it too!)

Now that you have created an automation email it will become available for use within Inbound Form setup as well as within our Marketing Automation component.

II. Setup your Inbound Form

The first thing we will want to do is create an inbound form and map our input fields to the leads data base.

When creating a form it is good practice to also add submissions to a lead list.

III. Create a follow up email (two ways)

There are currently two ways to send a follow up email, we can either use Marketing Automation to create an email send rule every time an event happens or we can use a direct setup available within the Inbound Form setup area. The former allows us to setup entire email series while the latter is a one-off email only.

Using Inbound Form Setup to send a Follow Up Email

1.  Create an email using the Inbound Mailer component and set it’s type to ‘Automation’ instead of ‘Batch’. Only emails set to the type ‘Automated’ can be sent automatically after a form submission.
2. When editing your Inbound Now form click ‘set email response’
3. Turn email confirmation on.
4. Select an email you created using the email component

Create a follow up email series using Marketing Automation

We can user our marketing automation component to listen in for form submission, or even lead-being-added-to-list actions. The steps below will guide you through one of the possible setups for creating an automation powered folloup series.

1. Create a trigger

Tell the rule to listen for the ‘On Lead Creation event’ trigger. (In the screenshot below it shows a different trigger, since taking the screenshot we’ve added the ‘On Lead Creation’ trigger. It’s better to use this.)

2. Create a trigger filter

In our rule we want only listen for form submission related to the form we just created. To do this we create a trigger condition to help weed out irrelevant submissions.

Here is a screenshot of an automation rule setup to listen to submissions from an Inbound Form with the id 99785.

Please note that filter options will change depending on the form being used to collect lead data. This guide assumed you are using an Inbound Form. Your experience may change if you are using Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, or Contact Form 7 extensions to collect lead data.

Create your follow up email series

The next step to setting up your follow email rule is to create a rule action. Any actions you setup will be performed if a qualified trigger event happens. For a follow up email we should select the ‘Send Email’ action. If you like you could queue up a wait command to delay the email.

When creating a ‘send email’ action be sure to set the email to be sent to the lead that submitted the form.

Select the automated email you created earlier.

You can set as many emails as you want into the rule action queue, you can use the ‘Wait’ action to stagger them.

That’s it! Now go submit a test through your Inbound Form and wait for your follow up email to arrive.

Debugging