Subsequences are a powerful email automation technique — and one that’s not oversaturated like so many other tactics.

With subsequences, you automatically send a follow-up campaign to a recipient when they take an action on an initial campaign.

For instance, you could automatically send a subsequence to everyone who clicks on an email. Or you could send one to everyone who replies.

Subsequences are simple to set up in GMass using a combo of our dynamic lists feature and our behavior-based segmentation feature.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the process of setting this up.

Subsequences in GMass: Table of Contents

• How to Set Up a Subsequence in GMass
  • Step 1: Create a dynamic behavior-based list
  • Step 2: Making the behavior-based campaign dynamic
  • What about subsequences based on specific words in a reply?
• Next Steps for Subsequences in GMass

How to Set Up a Subsequence in GMass

There’s a quick two-step process to set up a conditional subsequence in GMass.

You can set one up as a follow-up to any campaign with these steps…

Step 1: Create a dynamic behavior-based list

In Gmail, click on the envelope icon to the right of the search bar to create a behavior-based segmentation campaign.

If you’re not familiar, these are new, automated follow-up campaigns that go out based on the action a recipient takes in an initial campaign.

For instance, you could send one of these to everyone who clicked, or replies, or opened but didn’t click, and so on.

Select your initial campaign from the dropdown. Then select the action you want to use for your subsequence.

In my example here, I’m sending my subsequence to everyone who replies to the initial campaign.

Click the Compose follow-up button. GMass will open up a new compose window where you can create your subsequence.

Step 2: Making the behavior-based campaign dynamic

We’re now going to employ GMass’s dynamic lists feature.

With dynamic lists, your email list can change and grow over time; it’s not static in GMass.

So every time someone new replies to your initial campaign, they’ll be added to the dynamic list for your behavior-based follow-up campaign.

To turn your list dynamic, edit the email alias that GMass generated (in my case, it was [email protected]) by adding in -dynamic before the @ symbol.

Now type up your behavior-based follow-up campaign. It can include everything you’d use in a standard GMass campaign, including automated follow-ups.

One more setting before we send: We need to make it a recurring campaign. That way, GMass will send emails once a day to everyone who’s been added into your dynamic list because they now match the behavior criteria.

Once you’re all set, click the red GMass button to send the initial batch of your behavior-based follow-up campaign messages.

And now, once a day, this subsequence campaign will recur — and go to any new people who’ve taken your desired action.

What about subsequences based on specific words in a reply?

With the technique I’ve described above, unfortunately, you won’t be able to restrict follow-up campaigns only to people who meet additional criteria.

So with the technique above, you can send to everyone who replied… but not, say, only to those whose replies contained the word “interested.”

If you’d like to better restrict your follow-up campaigns, there are a few options.

One is triggered emails. That’s GMass’s feature where you can send an automation to people who reply and you can base that on specific words appearing in the reply.

The downside is that triggered emails aren’t a full sequence, so you can’t also have automated follow-ups with them.

The second is a more complex workaround that brings AI into the mix. I won’t detail the entire process here (it would roughly quadruple the length of this article), but I’d do it like this:

• Set up a Google Apps Script to bring replies to your campaign into a Google Sheet. Check out our step-by-step walkthrough on how to convert Gmail to Google Sheets.
• Use an AI integration, either Google’s built-in Gemini AI (if you have access) or a third-party like GPT for Sheets, to analyze those replies and determine if they want you to follow up.
• Create a recurring campaign based on that Google Sheet, where GMass automatically sends your new subsequence to everyone who the AI says you should.

The downside here is the complexity of the setup — this will take a bit of time and you’ll need to test it before you set it live.

Next Steps for Subsequences in GMass

Good news: If you have a GMass plan, you can set up subsequences as I described right now.

Everything I’ve discussed — behavior-based segmentation, dynamic lists, recurring campaigns — is included in your GMass plan.

And if you’re not a GMass subscriber yet… it’s time to give it a try.

You can test out GMass for free, with no credit card required. Just install the Chrome extension to get started. And you can do the subsequence technique in this article during your free trial.

Come see why almost 400,000 users love GMass for mail merge, bulk email, and all types of campaigns — and why they give it an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars across 10,000+ reviews.