Overview:
We just launched a powerful feature and the only of its kind integrated completely with Gmail. You can now set automatic follow-up email campaigns to be sent after an email campaign is sent, to dramatically increase your response rates. Reminders will be sent to your recipients in stages, until you get a reply (or an open or click).
An example: you send an email campaign to 100 warm leads from a trade show offering to set up a demo of your product. When you send that campaign, you set it so that two days later, a reminder is sent to anyone that hasn’t replied, and three days after that, another reminder is sent, and a few days after that, a final email is sent asking for a reply.
It’s easy to use, and you can try it right now using the standard follow-up language we’ve come up with. Just check the box next to each “stage” you want sent, make any adjustments to the timing and language, and hit the GMass button to send.
Important points to know
- You can use this feature for both mass emails and individual emails. If you’ve been using another Gmail tool, like Rebump, for follow-ups to your individual personal emails, you can eliminate that tool and use GMass instead.
- You can choose whether the automatic follow-up is based on recipients opening or replying or clicking. If you choose “Didn’t Open” as your follow-up action, fewer follow-ups will be sent, because you will almost always have more Opens than you will Replies. If you choose “Didn’t Reply” as your action, more follow-ups will be sent.
- Use the power of this feature sparingly. You likely don’t want to configure auto follow-ups with every campaign you send. This will cause your recipients to get additional emails from you, and you should only use this feature on emails to people where you genuinely want a reply.
- If you want your auto follow-up messages to include more than just plain text, you can add rich text the message to your follow-up emails. This is done by creating the auto follow-up message in the Gmail Compose window and saving it to your account, and then selecting “Send custom message…” and choosing the message from the dropdown menu.
- You can also personalize the auto follow-up email with personalization variables, as shown in the screenshot below.
You can use personalization tags inside an auto follow-up message. You will need to type them manually or copy/paste them. The normal personalization buttons only work in the Gmail Compose area. - After you’ve launched a campaign with automatic follow-ups, you can edit or cancel the auto follow-up settings. Here you can also add auto follow-ups to a campaign after the fact if you forgot to do so when you originally sent it, but be careful. Changing the settings to an already-sent campaign can trigger an immediate batch of reminder emails to be sent, if you’re not careful with the settings. If you change your mind and now wish to prevent auto follow-ups from sending, just set the “Days” to 0 for any particular Stage.
- You can manually remove someone from the sequence of auto follow-ups. For more information on how to do that, see this separate blog post on manually removing someone from an auto follow-up sequence.
- You can use this feature with or without Google Sheets. If you use it with Google Sheets you can personalize your emails based on much more than just First and Last Name.
- If you’re setting auto follow-ups based on replies, you can toggle a domain-match setting such that if anybody at a domain responds, all future follow-ups to everybody at the same domain will stop. See the auto follow-up domain match setting doc for more information.
How the timing works
The timing of the reminder emails is based on the time that each individual email of a campaign was sent, not when the campaign was launched. Example scenarios:
- The Days for each Stage are based on the time the original email is sent, not when the prior Stage is sent. For example, if Stage 1=2 Days, and Stage 2=5 Days, then Stage 1 will send 2 days after the original email, and Stage 2 will send 5 days after the original email, not 5 days after Stage 1 is sent.
- If you create your campaign on Monday, but schedule it to be sent on Wednesday with the first stage follow-up sending two days later, then the first follow-up to the non-responder will be sent two days from Wednesday, meaning Friday.
- If you create a campaign on Monday and use the “spread out” feature to send 100 emails/day for three days, and you include a Stage 1 follow-up going 2 days later, then each non-responder will get his first follow-up two days after his original email. So for the 100 emails on Monday, the follow-ups will be sent Wednesday. For the 100 emails sent on Tuesday, the follow-ups will be sent Thursday, and so on.
- If you use the “Just create drafts” option on your campaign on a Monday, but then wait to click the link to have the drafts sent until Tuesday, the timing of the automatic follow-ups will be based on Tuesday because that is when the Drafts were sent.
- If you enable the Skip Weekends option, then an auto follow-up will never get sent on a weekend, and the different Stage setting for Days become business days, not all days. Monday through Friday are business days. For example, if your original campaign sends on Wednesday and has a Stage 1 follow-up set to 7 days, and you enable Skip Weekends, then the Stage 1 follow-up will send 9 days later on the following Friday, since that Friday is 7 business days after that Wednesday.
What counts as a reply?
GMass detects replies to an outreach campaign fairly accurately but isn’t 100% perfect. Generally speaking, an email is only counted as a reply if it’s a legitimate reply from a person and not a bounce or an out-of-office auto reply. An email has a much higher chance of being counted as a reply if it appears as a reply to the same conversation thread in Gmail. Out-of-office auto-replies usually arrive as part of a separate thread, and not part of the original thread, so this is what prevents them from being counted a a reply.
What you see, and what your recipient sees
Your recipient will see your follow-up emails on top of the original and part of the same conversational thread.
You will see the follow-up emails as part of the same email thread in your Sent Mail folder, and each consecutive reminder will include the original and any previous reminders below.
The idea is that a follow-up email looks just like if you had found the original email from your Sent Mail, hit Reply, and then typed a new email on top and hit Send.
Reports
You will get email marketing reports on each follow-up stage just like you would any other mail merge campaign. The follow-up campaigns that are sent to non-responders will be labeled slightly differently so you an easily identify a regular email campaign versus an automatically sent follow-up email campaign.
Beware of these dangers
The sending of auto follow-up emails is dependent upon certain factors, like being able to locate the original “sent” email in your Gmail account. Beware of these dangers which can lead to auto follow-up mishaps:
- Do not delete the original campaign from GMass Reports –> Sent Copies.
Doing so will prevent your auto follow-up emails from sending, because GMass relies on finding the original campaign to construct the auto follow-up. - Do not delete the individual sent emails from your Sent Mail folder.
Doing so will also prevent auto follow-up emails from sending, because GMass won’t be able to find the original sent email to add the follow-up on top of. - Do not add the “GMass Reports –> Replies” Label manually when replies to your campaign arrive in your Inbox.
GMass will automatically apply this Label to replies. If you manually apply this Label, GMass will skip the message and be unaware of the reply, and then an auto follow-up will go out to someone that has already replied.
Want more?
- You can configure up to 8 stages of auto follow-ups.
- After you’ve set your auto follow-ups, you can cancel or edit them.
- If someone you’ve emailed calls you instead of replying to you, you may want to manually remove them from the auto follow-up sequence.
- You can use auto follow-ups to create an onboarding series of emails for new users. For example, if you want a series of 8 emails to go out in a timed manner after someone signs up on your website, you can do that.
- Sometimes you’re emailing multiple people at an organization hoping to just get one of them to reply. In that case you should stop auto follow-ups for everybody at an organization if just one person replies.
- The GMass campaign DRAFT must exist in your account under the GMass Auto Follow-ups Label in order to edit or delete auto follow-ups. If you accidentally deleted the DRAFT, try restoring your DRAFT.
Fantastic!
Awesome. This tool is really amazing — thanks for making it <3
How do I send a follow up a few minutes after the original email? I tried indicating 0.01 for days but that did not work.
How do I stop a follow up for a particular recipient if he called me instead of replying to the email?
Sorry, but you can't send a follow-up after a few minutes. The minimum is 1 day. You have to enter a whole number for the Number of Days for each Stage.
Unfortunately the only way to do that right now is to manually unsubscribe somebody. See section 3 of: http://blog.gmass.co/2015/10/gmail-mass-email-unsubscribe-link.html
I will soon add this capability though, as several users have asked for it.
I'm not receiving reports of the automatic follow-up emails
wait
Nice and excellent features. Hope you can tweak this to accommodate the alias email option of the send as address for the follow ups rather than sending the follow ups using default address. Thanks
Doesn't work for me, says "campaign ineligible for scheduling".
what to do if i want to attach differnt attchments to the recipients.please help
+1
Hi,
How many mail can i send in a day?
How can I use an hyperlink in Auto-follow uo? Is this possible cuz i haven't been able to find a way to do this
Instead of using the To button, can we use the BCC button instead? This is so that the recipients will not see who are the other recipients.
Instead of using the To button, can we use the BCC button instead? This is so that the recipients will not see who are the other recipients.
You want to use the To field in most cases. The whole point of using GMass is that it sends individual, personalized emails to each person in the To field. Your addresses will not be exposed to people, like they would if you clicked the regular Gmail Send button. More info: http://blog.gmass.co/2016/01/gmass-gmail-confusion-between-to-cc.html
Wait did this and it showed everyone on the email chain? I added my email on the mass email and when I opened it, it shows all other 48 people? Also, when I added some personalized fields, it did not pull them but just kept the {Address} field in the email?????
Hi Gaston,
All those indicates that you clicked on the Gmail send button instead of the red GMass button. When you click the Gmail send button it sends your emails as is to everyone at once, but clicking the red GMass button will use the mail merge and personalization used in your spreadsheet to each one individually.
See http://blog.gmass.co/2015/12/understanding-gmail-sending-limits.html
Unfortunately, personalized attachments isn't a supported feature yet, but it will be soon! Several users have asked for this, so it's likely that I'll build it.
A good tutorial. He helped me. If you combine writing with this website https://www.jitbit.com/news/240-complete-guide-to-saas-email-follow-ups/ you can learn all about the e-mail. I advise you to look 2 blog and use e-mail will be easy.
I added a followup today to a campaign I already sent. I set the days to 3 days after, and today is 4 days after my campaign, but I haven't seen any saved copy of the email sent and I haven't seen any reports about it. I originally sent my campaign at 2:47 pm. Will the followups send at the same time?
thanks – wondering if my emails were sent or not.
I have sent out some emails using GMass and had selected the follow ups to happen after 3, 5 and 7 days (emails were sent out on the 28th). No follow ups have been sent that I can tell even though everything I look at makes it look like they are set to go. Not really sure what went wrong.
Hello. Question on the Automatic Follow up Feature. Stage one happens X days after the message was sent, Stage two reads after X days if "no reply"…is this X days after the initial send date or X days after stage one kicks in? Thanks for the help. Love Gmass!
How do I delete every follow up campaign that exists and ensure that no more emails are sent out?
My gmail account got disabled by google after just one day of campaign, can i know reason for that? I can't mention my account here…
I have an email campaign out right now with follow up emails that are specific to a type of person.
I want to send out a new campaign and change the information that’s saved in the follow up sequences.
If I change that information for the new campaign, will it affect the old campaign?
Hi Matt,
I’m not sure I completely understand your question. Can you email us your question at support@gmass.zendesk.com?
The Auto Follow-ups automatically populate with whatever you used on your last campaign. It will not affect your previous campaign if you change that message for a new campaign. They are pre-filled for your convenience.
I loved your blog article. Really Cool.
Can i have complete qotation and pricing of Gmass package?
See gmass.co/pricing.
in the automatic reply field, I don’t see a way for me to change the subject title for each follow up custom message. Why is this? I also notice you don’t allow for pictures to be added as you would allow on the first email going out? Am I missing something? Do you have a feature that allows me to do this that I’m not seeing?
Thanks.
You cannot change the subject title because Automatic Followups are sent in the same chain as the Campaign, and thus will have the same Subject line as the Campaign.
You can, however, add custom content to your Auto Followups: http://blog.gmass.co/2016/07/create-custom-html-content-in-gmail-for-follow-up-email-sequence.html
how can I set auto-follow-up for a campaign which has been already sent.
You can use the Manual Followup Tool to email recipients of a previously sent campaign: http://www.gmass.co/blog/new-feature-send-follow-up-mail-merge-campaigns-in-gmail/
If the campaign is still in progress, then you can set Auto Followups by opening the draft in the GMass Scheduled label, setting the Auto Followups in the GMass Settings Box, and clicking the GMass button to save.
In the future, to get the best support from our team, see: http://blog.gmass.co/2016/11/how-to-get-best-support-from-gmass-team.html
Hello,
Regarding timing of the emails.
If my original email is sent on Tuesday, my follow up is sent two days later which would be Thursday…what about the second follow-up? Is the number of days from the original email or my follow-up email?
Example:
Originial email: Tuesday
First follow-up email: Thursday ( 2 days )
Second follow-up: Following Monday ( So four days from the first follow-up or six days from the original email?)
Hi John, did you already received an answer to this question? I am also curiuous about this.
Cheers!
*curious, sorry for the typo
My Gmass just sent an email cadence at 10:00pm EST rather than 6:00am. Why?
Do we have personalized templates for auto follow up
Hi, I just wanted to check-in on the questions of John on the 4th of April:
Hello,
Regarding timing of the emails.
If my original email is sent on Tuesday, my follow up is sent two days later which would be Thursday…what about the second follow-up? Is the number of days from the original email or my follow-up email?
Example:
Original email: Tuesday
First follow-up email: Thursday ( 2 days )
Second follow-up: Following Monday ( So four days from the first follow-up or six days from the original email?)
Looking forward to receive feedback 🙂
I need the answer to this as well.
Forgot to set the auto followup 🙁 can I set it after sending the emails?
How many times can you send out reminder emails? Any limit?
Thanks!
UPDATE
There is some confusion around whether the number of days you specify for the auto follow-ups are from the ORIGINAL email or from the LAST email.
From testing, I can verify that the dates are from the ORIGINAL email.
So don’t do what I did and try to specify your dates based on the last email and piss all of your prospects off.
If you want to set up an email follow-up sequence to email prospects once per week until you get a response, you would set it up like this:
Original Email
1st Auto Followup: 7 days
2nd Auto Followup: 14 days
3rd Auto Followup: 31 days
etc
Side note…if anyone from Gmass reads this, please recognize that this is a very unintuitive user experience — you guys would do REALLY well to make this more clear.
Side note #2….it would be nice to add in a way to NOT send auto followups on weekend days (unless I missed that option somewhere).
Hope this helps.
Shit.
so I put;
1st Stage = 5 days
2nd Stage = 5 days
3rd Stage = 5 days
So on the 5th I will send 3 follow up messages together?
If you configure it that way, you will get an error when you hit the GMass button. Each Stage has to have a greater number than the previous Stage. The error will be something like:
Stage 2 Days must be a number between 1 and 180 and greater than Stage 1’s Days. Uncheck the box to cancel this Stage
If I set up an automatic follow up for a campaign with a customized email message. Then I start a 2nd campaign to different recipients. When I look at automatic follow up, the email text for the 1st campaign is listed there. If I change it, will I change the text for the 1st campaign? So the question is can you have different auto follow ups going at the same time?
It won’t change the text for the first Campaign or any other scheduled Campaign.
The Stages auto-populate with the Auto Followups you used for your most recent Campaign – this is for convenience only, and you can change them without affecting other Campaigns.
Hi Ajay,
Salute to you boss.
how do I send follow ups to only people who “clicked” or “opened”?
You’d need to configure a Manual Followup Campaign to do that. Click the Manual Followup Tool (red @ symbol near your search bar), select the Campaign and Behavior you’d like, then click Compose. That will launch a new Compose Window with the recipients matching your selected Behavior.
Hello:
I’m using Gmass but not a Google Sheet. I’m directing my email to one individual (To Line), but copying two or three others (cc Line).
Ideally, if anyone of them replied, the campaign would stop. However, the entire district uses the domain so I can’t apply the feature that causes them to stop when one individual with a domain replies.
If one of the CC’d people responds will my campaign stop? This is my desire.
Hi Caliph,
Please contact our support team through http://gmass.co/g/support
I just set it up and sent 1 test message. So far so good. IF I DELETE THE COPIES IN MY SENT BOX< WILL AUTO FOLLOW UP WORK PROPERLY?
Yes, auto follow-ups continue as it is based on the trigger you chose such as sending it if they didn’t reply, open, etc.
Is there a way to create a template of the e-mail sequence of follow ups? Like choosing “my follow up sequence” would automatically set a pre-defined sequence of e-mails.
Is that possible?
At this time, we do not have that built in. But you could create campaigns and save them as drafts in your account then create follow-up flow. Please see https://www.gmass.co/blog/how-to-create-custom-html-content-for-an-automatic-follow-up-email-sequence/
Just wish to say the posting is outstanding. The clearly with your write-up is easily outstanding and I can tell you are the specialist about this niche.
Having a problem with this. Even though people are responding, the system isn’t picking it up and sending them auto replies anyway.
Hi Daniel,
Please contact our support team through http://gmass.co/g/support. Please include the campaign ID of the campaign you’re referencing that you’re experiencing this issue with.
Nice and excellent features. Hope you can tweak this to accommodate the alias email option of the send as address for the follow ups rather than sending the follow ups using default address. Thanks
Why is it auto follow up emails were still sent even though the recipient already replied.
Set up the follow up emails to XX days when there’s No Reply.
Hi Abigail,
We’ve responded to your inquiry directly. Please check your email.
Hi,
I am facing the following issue with the auto follow-up:
Suppose, I have sent the campaign email to a single person for two different campaigns (for example Mr.Jon Emailed for “Sub1” and “Sub2” 2 different campaigns). The moment I schedule an auto follow-up and send it. It doesn’t deliver correctly to the person. Eg., I want to send follow-ups for Sub1 and I have pitched Mr.Jon for both sub1 & sub2. The follow-ups are going in the wrong subject line.
It goes in the wrong email thread thereby creating a lot of havoc.
I hope it helps in understanding. A quick response will be highly appreciated.!
Please help!
Hi Swati,
Please contact our support team through http://gmass.co/g/support so that we may assist you directly. Please include screenshots of the wrong replies being attached to the wrong email thread so we can help get this resolved.
Thanks, it is quite informative
Does it work even if they have a system where they have a ticket opened say like for example ZENDESK they send you a separate email “Ticket has been created” and he answers the question but the reply will not be within the thread of the email conversation but in a separate email, how does that work?
Do you have affiliate program?
Hi Farhad,
Please see https://www.gmass.co/blog/gmass-affiliate-program/
Hi,
Does anyone know why, after I finish configuring all the followup messages (i.e. only 3), I cant get back to the top of the gmass configuration popup window to see the personalization options and such. The top of the popup window remains permanently out of view towards the top of my screen and nothing I do will allow the popup screen to move down to the point where I can see the top of it. Thanks
Hi Ajay
There wasn’t any Step By Step instruction to set-up this Auto Email Follow-up feature
“The GMass Settings box, where you can configure auto follow-ups” – WHERE?
“It’s easy to use, and you can try it right now using the standard follow-up language we’ve come up with. Just check the box next to each “stage” you want sent, make any adjustments to the timing and language, and hit the GMass button to send”.- HOW?
Please show Step By Step how/what to Click first in the message Compose box
Thank you
Today i add the Ext. of GMASS, but the problem that i am facing is when i send a mail (that containing images also) , the images files doesn’t deliver to the recipient.
One obvious question is “Does a follow-up email count towards the 50 emails/day max limit for a free account?” i.e. if I send out 50 emails each day for several days but they all have auto followups every 2 days, will the number of emails GMass can send / day reduce due to the auto follow-up emails.
Can I add more Auto followup emails after I have setup 2 Auto Follow-up emails and are running ..
Example
Original Email Sent on Monday
Auto followup Email 1: Tuesday
Auto followup Email 2: Thursday
On Friday I feel like adding 2 more
Auto followup emails
Can I simply go ahead and add them?
I tried to do this and clicked on the Green SAVE button.. but Gmass doesn’t seem to sent the Email 3 out.
If I set the limiter to “reply” and the recipient then sends a reply this means the follow-up campaign will automatically stop, correct?
If yes, how long does the software take to cancel the auto-followups?
How do I stop this – do not want to use it ever
To cancel your subscription, follow the directions here: https://www.gmass.co/blog/how-to-cancel-your-paid-gmail-mail-merge-subscription-to-gmass/
Hello- Info probably right in front of me but cannot find after 30 mins searching. How do I create and save a new “campaign”. I see in the advanced box an entry field labeled “friendly name”- choose a campaign name. I do not currently have the ability to save anything in this field. Ultimately my goal is to send the same automated responses to all emails contained within a specific campaign. Thank you for the help
Hi Matt,
To be able to send the same automated response, you can “save” the campaign to your account by sending it to your own email address. Then you’ll be able to choose it from the dropdown without manually writing in your responses for each campaign. This will also allow you to reuse the same content for follow-ups across multiple campaigns easier.
So to summarize, you would first need to draft the email content, go in your GMass settings and set the friendly name, then send it via GMass to your own email address.
If you’re adding a friendly name to an existing campaign that is ongoing, add your friendly name in the GMass settings box then click the GMass button to save.
Thank you
If I could please get a response to my comment I asked on may 21. Thank you-Matt
Hi, could you please check why people keep on receiving my followup emails, even though they already replied? I think there is an issue in my account. I already checked the point concerning the GmassReports/Replies label. Thank you very much
Can I send a personalized follow up for those who opened on day 3
AND
Send a personalized follow up for those who did not reply on day 3
Hi Kelvin,
Yes you can but since we do not have the option for “opened” through the GMass settings, you can send a manual follow-up to a campaign to be sent for those who has opened your initial email instead (https://www.gmass.co/blog/new-feature-send-follow-up-mail-merge-campaigns-in-gmail/) then set up a follow-up on the 3rd day for the no replies.
I would like to send an auto response to those people who have CLICK. I can’t find where to do this. Please help. Thanks.
Hi Mike,
Unfortunately, we do not currently have an option that automatically sends a follow-up based on recipients who have clicked a link in your outreach. However, you can manually do so by following the instructions found here: https://www.gmass.co/blog/new-feature-send-follow-up-mail-merge-campaigns-in-gmail/
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I’m trying to send emails with follow up set up for those who didn’t reply but I keep getting the error message below:
“You can’t set auto follow-ups based on NO REPLY when using the Fast Sending option with an SMTP service”
How can I resolve this?
Hi Olu,
You would need to disable the fast sending option in your GMass settings. Seen highlighted in this image: https://marvin-wordzen.tinytake.com/media/b15b18?filename=1570203620593_TinyTake04-10-2019-11-39-36.png
Because sending fast skips logging emails in the “Sent Mail” folder, you can’t use reply-based auto follow-ups (such as No Reply) when this option is on. You can still use open and click-based auto follow-ups, but your auto follow-ups can’t be based on whether the recipient replies. This is because the primary way GMass detects whether a recipient has replied is by examining the “thread” of an email. Without the original sent email in your “Sent Mail” folder, replies can’t be “threaded”.
Hey together,
I am having a more specific question regarding the reporting of the Intro email and follow up messages.
Let’s say I sent out my Intro mail with 100 recipients. 65 acutally received the email and 25 opened it. Now the automated follow up is sent out after 3 days and from 62 recipients 20 are opening the email.
My specific question now is how the follow up email is affecting the reporting of the Intro email. Are all openings and clicks from the follow up email counted to the data of the Intro Mail as well or is it a 100% own tracking?
Would be awesome to get some more insights on that.
Thank you!
Gmass is too lazy to delete A campaign’s Draft especially in case of auto follow up. Any possibility to improve this or make a new folder for this to keep the draft folder clean. A clean draft folder helps feel relax. When something is being done automatically then why this headache in the draft folder? Quite irritating.