I know the word “hack” has been overused lately but, if you will, I have a pretty simple autoresponder hack as far as adding new content to your time-based autoresponder sequence. At least if you’re using GetResponse and I suspect other ESPs will have a similar process. I’ll show you how to use the same quality and evergreen content for both your broadcast emails and your autoresponder.
Let’s gets straight into it…
Time-Based Autoresponder Hack – Build Your Email Sequence Content The Easy Way
So you have a solid list you’re building and sending consistent quality content in the form of a broadcast email (sometimes called an email blast).
This is so simple I can’t believe it took me so long to implement it. Maybe you already have?
Take the best of your best email content, as you’re ready to broadcast it, and plug it in immediately to your autoresponder sequence. As long as it is evergreen (the content won’t expire or become irrelevant any time soon).
I’m using, and recommend, GetResponse$ right now and they make this process super easy but I know AWeber offers a similar feature.
Here’s the trick though, don’t send that broadcast email. That’s right, don’t manually send anything. Add the email into your time-based autoresponder on the day you want it sent. In GetResponse, you’ll see an option to send that same email to those on your list already past that point in their subscribership (It’s a real word, don’t bother checking lol).
You’ll see this message after clicking “Save and publish” in GetResponse.
For example, if you plugged that email into day 15, every subscriber that signed-up longer than 15 days ago will be sent that same email as a broadcast – right now. The rest, newer and future subscribers, will get that email on schedule. This covers everyone on this particular list, it covers your broadcast email, and it adds another quality email to your time-based sequence.
Just so I’m not talking out of school here, like I said, I’m using GetResponse and cannot speak for the other email management services. I left AWeber for GetResponse (See: GetResponse, LeadPages, Goodbye AWeber) at the beginning of the year. I wasn’t doing any of this with AWeber and I can’t remember exactly how it worked over there. I do know I hated that complicated “segmentation” process AWeber had when I was using them. GetResponse takes that crazy process out of the equation and makes it very simple to add, edit, and move our autoresponder emails.
Other ESPs
If you are using AWeber or another ESP, feel free to add the process for that service. Better yet, if it fits your blog, post it on your blog and let me know where to find it. If it will help our readers, I’ll be happy to add a link to it from this post.
What Is An Autoresponder?
Skip this section if you already know but I want to quickly explain what we’re referring to when I say time-based autoresponder.
Generally, we send three different types of email; two automated (Time-Based and Action Based Autoresponders) and one manually sent or scheduled (Broadcast Emails). For this discussion, we’ll be referring to Time Based Autoresponders and Broadcast emails.
Time-Based Autoresponders are emails we put into our automated email sequence. It sounds more complicated than it really is. You subscribe to someone’s newsletter and you receive a welcome letter. That’s a time-based autoresponder, with the time set to send immediately (generally). After that initial welcome email, we might receive any number of scheduled emails delivered at a set time – weekly, for example. Every week for “x” number of weeks you’ll receive an email from that person. Hopefully, it will be amazing content.
You can learn about autoresponders in detail at What are Email Autoresponders and How To Use Them Effectively
That’s what we want to do for our subscribers – send the very best we have to offer to every person that opts-in, no matter when they subscribe.
If you’re not building an email list, you’re making a HUGE mistake. ~Derek Halpern
How Many Emails Do We Want In Our Autoresponder Sequence?
Personally, I feel the more the merrier as far as the number of emails to add to our sequence – as long as it is amazing and somewhat evergreen content.
GetResponse Time-Based Autoresponder Email Schedule
Keep in mind, the more you add the more you’ll need to clean-up and update later down the road. Also keep in mind you’ll still be sending broadcast emails so be careful on volume and frequency. We certainly don’t want to overwhelm our email subscribers.
I believe I once read or heard Pat Flynn has almost a year’s worth of content plugged into his email autoresponder sequence. That sounds like a pretty rad goal to shoot for.
Keep in mind, Pat has been at this a very long time and that content grew over time. Today I want to help you get started on your own bank of automated emails without a lot of “extra” work.
Why Automation Is A Good Thing In This Case
First, I feel like I might need to squash any misunderstandings about the word “automated“, at least in this context. The only thing that is automated in a time-based autoresponder is when the email is sent. We write every email ourselves (or someone on our team does) and then decide at what point in what part of the subscriber’s experience the email will be sent.
For example, first you get my welcome email. A week later you get an amazing blogging tip. Then another week later, day 15, you get a free copy of my latest e-book or guide. After another great tip spread out a week or two apart, you might get an offer to buy one of my products.
That’s time-based autoresponders in a nutshell. Send times are scheduled in advance without us trying to manually send each one on our own. Again, we are still sending our manual (broadcast) emails as well so keep that in mind when scheduling your autoresponder send times.
Action-based autoresponder examples – Just for the fun of it.
Skippable: As a side note, and at the risk of making this more confusing, I see an opportunity to show a quick example of an action-based email. We’ll cover action-based autoresponders in a later post but just for fun, take a look at the example I gave above.
In day 15 (two weeks after you subscribed), I sent you a free copy of my e-book. Now (this gets really exciting), if you opened that email and clicked the download link, I might set-up an action-based autoresponder to deliver a subscriber discount on my book, app, or course. Pretty cool, right?
Or, that offer I sent a couple weeks later? Say you opened that email but didn’t click the link and make the purchase. Now you might get an action-based email asking what type of product you would be interested in. Or maybe I’ll send you an email two days later reminding you of that offer, give you a discount code, or even pitch an entirely different product. I told you this stuff was exciting!
Recap
That’s all there is to it. Whenever you want to send amazing and evergreen content to your list, add it to your time-based autoresponder and then let it go to everyone else beyond that point as a broadcast. You get great content added to your autoresponder while sending live email and no one gets the email twice. Man, I love this stuff.
I hope that helped and feel free to hit me up in the comment section below with any questions, comments or corrections.
About Brian Hawkins
I wish more people would spend the extra time making good content such as yours, and not just posting the same old garbage. Thanks also for the great tips on blogging.
It very much depends on business niche. In many cases this wont bring results, but for blogs and MLM, utilizing autoresponder can bring an excellent results in terms of sales and sub-affiliates.
I’m having a hard time imagining a niche where this process of adding autoresponder content wouldn’t work. Care to offer an example or two just to clarify Phantom?
I used to do this in the early days of my online marketing career around the year 2000. At that time, I didn’t really had a lot of business and I was trying to promote my ebooks. At that time, many affiliate programs used to offer pyramid structure for affiliates. I have to admit that sometimes results were quite good, but the main difficulty was that at that time, there weren’t any autoresponder 3rd party websites and everything had do be done through self hosted scripts which and it was very difficult to set schedule, cron jobs, number of messages sent, etc…
It took me a minute to figure this out on one of the easiest autoresponder services out there. I can’t even imagine using a script to install and learn. We’ve come a long way.
Hi Brian,
I am using Aweber since long time, segmentation very difficult in Aweber, I heard a lot about GetResponse one click segmentation which allow us to know who has not opened our newsletter to send second newsletter with different subject headline to improve open rate.
I was not used autoresponder sequence in my initial days, later I realized the value of it, now I am using follow up series with my new subscribers, thanks for sharing the valuable information, see you soon with another great article