This help article is for an old version of Direct Mail.
Before creating an autoresponder, you should have already composed the message that you want to send when the autoresponder is triggered. Once your message is ready, here's how to create an autoresponder:
- Choose Message > New Autoresponder from the menu bar at the top of the screen
- Give your autoresponder a name (your recipients will not see this)
- Select the message you just composed from the popup menu
- Select what kind of event should trigger the autoresponder. See below for more information about triggers.
- Based on the trigger you choose, you will be given different options to select the recipients.
- Select when you want your autoresponder to send. See below for more information.
- Click the start button (▶︎) in the top-right corner of the window. You can also save an autoresponder as a "draft" by clicking the popup menu next to the start button. See the discussion below for how drafts can be useful.
Triggers
There are six different events you can use to trigger your autoresponder:
- Subscribing to a mailing list
- Opening an email campaign
- Clicking a link in an email campaign
- Editing an address
- Adding a new address via the API
- Triggering based on a date
- Trigger after another autoresponder
Note that once you've started your autoresponder, the type of trigger cannot be changed.
Scheduling
By default, Direct Mail will send your email as soon as the autoresponder is triggered. If you want, though, you can delay the message by one or more hours, days, week, or months.
By default, your autoresponder is active (i.e. responding to triggers) seven days a week. If you only want your autoresponder to only send on certain days of the week, however, you can turn off the unwanted days. If a triggering event occurs on an "off" day, the message will be held and sent on the next "on" day.
Drafts
There are some situations where it may be useful to create an autoresponder, but save it as a "draft" instead of starting it right away. For example, you may be creating an entire series of autoresponders (like for a weekly email training course) where each successive autoresponder is triggered by the one before it. In this case, you could create each autoresponder as a "draft", and then wait and start them once the entire course is ready to go.