Setup a Series of
Follow-up Auto ResponsesThe dialog for managing your sequence of
follow-up auto responses shows a
list of all messages that will be sent to the recipients of a
follow-up sequence.
Add a new follow-up auto response
In order to add a new message to the
sequence, click on 'Add New Message'.
As when sending a new email message,
EmailUnlimited will ask you to select a template or open an existing
HTML file that you want to use as an auto response.
The message editor that pops-up after
selecting the template, however, looks a little different from the
message editor for sending a mailing:
The editor for creating follow-up messages
has an additional toolbar that you can use to specify when the
follow-up auto response shall be send. If you want the response to be
send immediately after the contact has been added to your recipient
list, enter 0 (=zero) days. Furthermore, you can also choose a special
weekday on which the response shall be delivered.
All
other features such as personalization, preview, sending test messages and using
queries, are identical to creating email messages for immediate delivery, as
described in chapter 3.1
Send a Mailing to Your List
When
you are finished, click on 'Update mail' to save the changes to your auto
response.
Understanding the technical aspects of follow-up auto
respondingHere is a sample that
shows you what exactly the follow-up auto responder does when
sending auto responses:
You have 3 follow-up messages with the following interval
settings:
Message1: 0 days
Message2: 3 days
Message3: 7 days
When a new recipient is added to
your database on 01/01/2000, he will receive Message1
immediately. The Follow-up progress field will be set to
1, indicating that the first follow-up message has been sent.
NextMailingDate field will be set to 01/04/2000, so that
Message2 will be sent on that date (3 days after 01/01/2000).
When Message2 has been sent,
Follow-up progress field will be set to 2, and the NextMailing
Date will be 01/11/2000. Message3 will be sent on 01/11/2000,
after which the Follow-up Progress field will be set to 3,
indicating that all three messages have been sent.
So if you want to keep track of
the auto-responses that have been sent, all you need to do is
have a look at the two fields mentioned above in your underlying
data source.
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Manage Your Sequence of Messages
When you have completed your sequence of
messages, you can change their order using the buttons labeled 'Move up' and
'Move down'. To delete a message, click on 'Delete message'. All changes become
effective only when you click on Ok to close the dialog and save your sequence.
Once you have a follow-up auto responder up and
running, better not change the order or the intervals, because EmailUnlimited
might get confused, and either not all contacts receive their messages, or they
receive your auto responses several times. For that reason, be careful when
modifying the sequence at a later point of time.
Of course, you can modify the messages themselves
anytime without getting the system confused.
