Automating welcome sequences

We love a warm welcome sequence here at Buttondown. A welcome sequence is a series of automatically scheduled emails that introduces new subscribers to your newsletter, all while driving engagement and boosting brand affinity. This topic explains how to create an effective welcome sequence to help onboard and welcome new subscribers.

Before you complete the procedures in this topic, read “Registration and Setup” and “Sending Your First Email.”

You also need a paid Buttondown account, because automations are a premium feature.

Automations are shortcuts that facilitate your ideal Buttondown workflow.

Every automation is made of four parts: A trigger, a filter, a scheduled time, and an action.

This graphic displays how the four steps of an automation interact with each other.

You can leverage automations to schedule the perfect welcome sequence for new subscribers. It's simple: we'll break it down step by step.

When you get a new subscriber, it’s polite to send a little "Thank you" email that welcomes them to your newsletter. This is a useful communication for the subscriber too, because getting a welcome email can act as a confirmation that they've subscribed successfully. You can create an automation to send a "Thank you" email to new subscribers. Here's how:

1. Navigate to the Automations menu of your Buttondown dashboard and click New. If you see a banner that says "This automation is currently paused," click Unpause.
2. Specify a name for your automation sequence. Something simple, like “Welcome email,” will do just fine.
3. Use the dropdown to choose a "Trigger" that will start the automation. Set the trigger to “When a subscriber confirms their subscription."
4. In the "Filters" section, click Add. For example, if you only want to send welcome emails to subscribers with a WordPress tag, set the "Filter" to Tags, Equals, WordPress.
5. In the "Timing" section, you can schedule when you want the welcome email to send. If you want to send this email as soon as possible after your subscriber confirms their subscription, leave the "Timing" option set to Immediately.
6. Finally, choose your automation's "Action." This is where you can write a custom welcome email.
7. Choose "Send an email" from the "Action" dropdown and configure the fields with your subscriber's information.
8. Click Save changes.

When you think you're happy with the welcome email, you can test it by sending an email only to yourself. To do this, enter your own email address in step 7 above.

After you create the automation, you can enable or disable it from the Automations menu.

So you’ve sent your welcome email. Why not send a follow-up to engage them further? To do this, we’ll create a new automation, and keep our "Trigger" and "Filters" the same. We will, however, change our "Time" to “After some time has passed,” and specify that we want our next email to send one week after our subscriber confirms their subscription. We’ll also write a new custom email (but keep our other "Action" settings the same). Here's how:

1. Follow steps 1-4 in "Send a "Thank you" email to new subscribers".
2. In the "Timing" section, set the option to After some time has passed. The timing configuration options appear.
3. Set the time delay to 7 days and optionally specify a time when the follow-up email should be sent.
4. Choose your automation's "Action." This is where you can write a custom follow-up email.
5. Choose "Send an email" from the "Action" dropdown and configure the fields with your subscriber's information.
6. Click Save changes.

We're not done yet! Now we'll write another follow up automation, this time scheduled for two weeks after our new subscriber confirms their subscription. Perhaps this time, you might even want to include a survey to get to know your new subscriber's tastes a little bit better. Here's how:

1. Follow steps 1-4 in "Send a "Thank you" email to new subscribers".
2. In the "Timing" section, set the option to After some time has passed. The timing configuration options appear.
3. Set the time delay to 2 weeks and optionally specify a time when the follow-up email should be sent.
4. Choose your automation's "Action." This is where you can write another custom follow-up email.
5. Choose "Send an email" from the "Action" dropdown and configure the fields with your subscriber's information.
6. Click Save changes.

After they've received a few weeks of follow up emails, as well as whatever content you're sending on your newsletter already, your new subscriber will be pretty familiar with you and your work. But let’s round out our welcome sequence with a final call to action, or CTA. Here's how:

1. Follow steps 1-4 in "Send a "Thank you" email to new subscribers".
2. In the "Timing" section, set the option to After some time has passed. The timing configuration options appear.
3. Set the time delay to 3 weeks and optionally specify a time when the follow-up email should be sent.
4. Choose your automation's "Action." This is where you can write another custom follow-up email. This time, entice readers to explore your offerings outside your newsletter.
5. Choose "Send an email" from the "Action" dropdown and configure the fields with your subscriber's information.
6. Click Save changes.

And voila! You’ve just created an awesome welcome sequence. You've earned a little celebration! 🎉

Want to see how each of the emails in your welcome sequence is performing? Head on over to the Automations of your Buttondown dashboard. Click on the automated email you want to investigate, and from there you'll be able to see all sorts of nifty stats like your open rate, click rate, and more.