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Follow-Up Campaigns

Introduction to using the follow-up campaign functionality. We used this growth hack internally and decided to share it with everyone.

Marco DiDomenico avatar
Written by Marco DiDomenico
Updated over a week ago

We initially built Replyify to automate the initial cold email and follow-ups.  A few months ago we started using Replyify (internally) to automate other email related follow-up tasks and we're excited to share this awesome tool with you now!

You can now use 'Follow-up Campaigns' to automatically add a contact to a new Replyify campaign right from your inbox.  This is awesome functionality (we use it everyday) to manage things like:

  • Following up with inbound leads when they fill out a lead form on your site

  • Following up with referrals or when you cold email gets forwarded

  • Following up with prospects who replied with interest but haven't booked a call/demo yet

Pro Tip: Follow-up campaigns are set up like any other cold email campaign on Replyify and you can create as many Follow-up Campaigns as you want.  With this setup, your emails retain their original thread so there's context for the recipient.

Setting up a Follow-up Campaign

  1. Create a new campaign on Replyify.  Pro Tip: make the first step in your campaign a 'wait period' or a Manual Email (explanation in next section below)

  2. Copy the unique Follow-Up BCC Address from your Campaign Settings section (at the bottom in purple text).  

  3. Paste/enter the BCC email address for the Follow-up Campaign into the BCC field of any email you compose from your email account (gmail, outlook, etc). 

  4. Compose and send your email.  Replyify receives a copy of the email and any recipient in the To or CC fields for that email will be added to your account as a contact and added to the campaign.  If your email client doesn't pass through a name for the contact, you can edit the contact(s) in Replyify.

  5. The contact(s) will be activated instantly and Replyify will send emails based on your wait period between each step and your campaign settings.

Pro Tip: Once you have your campaign built you can save the special BCC address for that campaign as a new contact in your email client for quick access.

In this screenshot above you can see that 'To' is john.doe@email.com and the 'BCC' address is an example of a unique campaign BCC email from my account.  In this example john.doe@email.com will be added to your contacts in Replyify (if they don't exist already, otherwise we will use the existing contact) and John will automatically be activated in the campaign.

Campaign Setup and Execution

[Important] A Follow-up Campaign triggered by your email will execute immediately after Replyify receives the BCC notification.  If the first step in your campaign is an 'Automated Email', your prospect will receive that email immediately. (don't do this)

To avoid a second email being sent right away, you have two options depending on how automated or how customized you want the next email in the campaign to function:

1) In Replyify, make the first step in your Follow-up Campaign a 'Wait Period' which tells Replyify to 'wait x days' before sending the next email.  Then add your first email after with initial wait period and continue building out your campaign.

Here's how to add a wait period as the first Step:

(if you didn't catch that...1) click 'add a step' 2) click 'set delay' 3) check box for 'add delay' and enter the # of days 4) click 'continue' 5) create/select first email template)

2) Make the first step in your Follow-up Campaign a 'Manual Email'.  When Replyify receives your email via BCC, we will create a ToDo item in the Manual ToDos Section.  The campaign will not start until you actually send the Manual Email from ToDos.

  • If the contact's name wasn't passed through in the email address markup, you can select 'edit contact' on the Manual Email ToDo step which will be applied to the 'First Name' variable (if you used one) and automatically inserted.

  • The template you saved for the 'Manual Email' will be inserted and you can edit it before clicking 'Send' > 'Resume Sequence' which will queue up the additional emails in your campaign (see video below)

Wait...there's more.  You Can Also Bump Your Follow-up Campaign Email

If you would like to 'Bump' the original email sent from your email account, you can enable this option by enabling 'Bump' on the first email in the campaign.  To enable this feature you can click the toggle in the top right hand corner of the step of the Replyify campaign editor once your template is saved/selected.  

The subject line will be replaced by "Re: {Previous Email Subject}" which automatically pre-fills the subject line from the previous email and turns this into a threaded or nested reply to a reply.  The header and time stamp from the original email will be automatically inserted below the current email for this step.

How do I remove a contact from the Follow-up Campaign?

If your contact booked a meeting or replied back that they are not interested, you have a few options.

  1. If your first step of the campaign is a Manual Email, you can go to the Manual Email section of the ToDos.  Click on the contact's row.  When the row expands, there is an option at the bottom to 'Remove from Campaign'.

  2. In the 'Contacts' section of your campaign is setup to allow you to a) search for prospects to view/edit/pause specific contacts, b) unsubscribe, c) add/remove contacts to/from this campaign or d) mark contact as 'Converted'.  All options will prevent the contact from getting a future email for the campaign.

Search and filter contacts on the left of this page.  Then click on the contact's row to view the contact timeline and 'pause' the contact from future steps or mark them as converted.  

To see a more detailed view of the contact's data, click the expanded view.  You can also mark the contact as 'Unsubscribed', View all history, and update/edit the contact's details.

Ok, that's it (for now)

The alternative to NOT setting up a Follow-up Campaign (based on experience) is:

  • Not following up with prospects enough and leaving opportunity on the table or...

  • Sending these follow-ups 1 by 1 which is a huge waste of time.

These campaigns are really easy to set up and bound to get you more replies in less time than whatever you were (or weren't) doing before we released Follow-up Campaigns.  Enjoy and please send feedback!

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