Introducing Auto Follow-up: our most requested feature is here

It’s happening! Email follow-up, our most requested feature, is now publicly available. It’s been a long journey to get there as it started more than a year ago. Let me guide you on all the good things that we have released today.

We received literally hundreds of requests to introduce this new feature. So, we are more than excited to let you all get your hands on it. And to celebrate, we are currently offering a 20% discount on the Pro plan.

New: Send auto follow-up emails with Gmail

Follow-up is a new way to send emails via your Gmail account. Starting from now, when you create a campaign in Mailmeteor, you can add follow-up emails until you get a reply.

A follow-up is basically an email that will be sent at a later date. When you create your emailing campaign, you define when and what the follow-up emails should be sent. Here are a few examples:

• Sending a follow-up email 3 days later if the recipient hasn’t replied yet (this is the most commonly used follow-up).
• Sending multiple follow-up emails until you get a reply (aka auto follow-up).
• Sending a sequence of emails, such as an onboarding sequence to welcome a new customer of yours (aka drip campaign).

Our new follow-up feature lets you send all of these examples and more. Here’s what it looks like:

What features does the follow-up offer?

Following up is all about boosting interactivity and increasing the number of replies you will get from your recipients. We have built our solution with this in mind. So when you send a campaign with follow-up emails, you can define multiple criterias:

• The condition that should validate whether the follow-up email should be sent:
  • If no reply = the recipient hasn’t replied yet (most common).
  • If no open = the recipient hasn’t opened the previous email.
  • If no click = the recipient hasn’t clicked a link in the previous email.
  • If click = the recipient has clicked a link in the previous email.
  • If open = the recipient has opened the previous email.
  • No matter what = no condition, the follow-up email is always sent.
• The period after which the follow-up email should be sent:
  • After a few days.
  • After a few hours.
  • After a few minutes (only available with a Business plan).

You can send 1, 2, 3, …, 10 or even more follow-up emails. There are no restrictions on how many follow-ups you can send. Though, it’s standard practice to keep your follow-up sequence under 7 steps. Otherwise you might be considered pushy and your recipients will unsubscribe or at worst flag your emails as spam.

When you send follow-up emails, you can add images or attachments to each email in the sequence. Currently, adding attachments is only supported when using the Dashboard.

How to send follow-up emails from Google Sheets?

1. Open a spreadsheet and insert your contacts list
2. Open Mailmeteor from the “Extensions” menu > “Mailmeteor” > “Open Mailmeteor”
3. Select a template, then in the bottom right, click on dropdown menu and select “Follow-up”
4. Write your follow-up message and define when the follow-up should be sent. You can specify a trigger (if no-reply, on interval, etc.) as well as a delay after which the follow-up should be sent (3 days, 2 hours, or 1 minute!).
5. Once you are ready, click on “Send with a follow-up”.

Pro tip: you can combine follow-up with other features such as autopilot or schedule send.

How to send follow-up emails from Mailmeteor Dashboard?

1. Open Mailmeteor Dashboard.
2. Click on “+ New campaign”
3. Write the first message in the sequence.
4. Then click on “Add a follow-up email” to send a follow-up.
5. Once you are ready, click on “Send emails” to send your sequence.

New features, new pricing

So far, there was only one plan to subscribe to: Mailmeteor Premium. It lets you send as many emails as Gmail offers you, with all premium features: autopilot, schedule send, attachments, alias as well as tracking.

With the introduction of the follow-up, we have added two new plans to Mailmeteor: Pro and Business plans. Both plans include our new follow-up feature.

As you may have noticed in the screenshot above, alongside the follow-up, we have introduced several additional features:

• Sequence (aka drip campaign)
• Bounces & Replies detection
• Custom tracking domain

We are currently reaching out to all our customers that have expressed interest in the follow-up. If you haven’t been contacted yet or if you have personal requirements, please feel free to reach out to one of our sales representative.

Beyond mail merge

When we first started Mailmeteor, we didn’t know where this would lead us. But thanks to feedback from our customers, we have steadily improved our solution and integrated more and more features into it.

Like I said before, the follow-up was by far our most requested feature. More than 1,000 people have expressed interest in it. There are no other features with such a strong interest.

Some of you asked for the follow-up more than 2 years ago. But at that time, Mailmeteor was not built to support it. The release of the follow-up started back in February last year when we rewrote our sending infrastructure to support our rapid growth. Today, Mailmeteor is sending several hundreds of thousands of emails every single day. Wow!

That’s why, with the introduction of the follow-up, we are proud to say that Mailmeteor is now a complete email marketing solution. With this said, we will continue to work as of today by listening to our customers and building the features that you want. That’s our promise.

This article was written by Corentin Brossault, Mailmeteor's CEO. Mailmeteor is a simple & privacy-focused email marketing software. Trusted by millions of users worldwide, it is often considered as the best Gmail mail merge to send mass personalized emails.