S Subster
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Emails to customers

You will build an email sequence that goes out on its own to a person who left an email in the funnel, and brings them back to payment.

Before you start

An “Email” block in the funnel. Emails go only to an address the visitor entered themselves. The block goes on a quiz screen or on the paywall — how a funnel is built is in Build a funnel. The block itself is described on Fields and data collection. No block — no address, and the sequence has no one to write to.

Step 1. Create the sequence

Open “Email sequences” and click “Create a sequence”. The window has four fields. Only you see the name; leave the “Active” switch off — you will turn the sequence on in step 3, once the emails are written.

Trigger — the event the countdown starts from. For our task, take “Lead registration”: it happens the second the visitor enters an email, that is, before payment. The other five triggers — about purchase, subscription, trial and app install — are for other tasks.

If the project has “On your own” selected, the list has two triggers: “Lead registration” and “App installed”. The four money ones are not offered — payments go past us, and we will not have the event.

Email class — leave “Marketing email”: such an email does not go to those who unsubscribed. “Transactional email” bypasses the unsubscribe list; the cabinet warns but does not forbid. This class is only for emails about what the person paid for: access, a receipt, a download link.

Step 2. Write the emails

One sequence step is one email. “Add a step” opens three fields: “Subject”, “Delay” and “Email body (HTML)”. The body is typed as markup; the “Preview” button next to the field shows the finished email.

There are no placeholders in the body. Something like {{email}} reaches the recipient exactly as written — the email is the same for everyone. Emails are not translated: even if the funnel is translated, everyone gets them in the language you wrote them in — Translate a funnel.

The delay field is labelled “hours after the previous step”, but in fact each email counts its own hours from the event. Use growing numbers: 0 — at once, 24 — a day later, 72 — three days later. Three equal numbers give three emails in the same minute.

Step 3. Check and turn on

The “Send a test” button sends the first email of the sequence to any address — exactly what the recipient will get.

The switch in the sequence header turns it on. The countdown runs only for those who hit the event after it is on: the sequence sends nothing to addresses already collected.

Payment does not stop the sequence

All emails of a sequence are scheduled at once, at the moment of the event, and then live their own life. Hence three consequences the interface keeps quiet about:

So keep the sequence short: one or two emails in the first day, while the person is still choosing.

What you see after launch

The “Send history” tab shows each email: “Sent”, “Failed” or “Skipped”. Why an email did not go is in the “Failure reason” column: for a skipped one it is most often an unsubscribed address or the person refusing emails. We do not count opens and clicks; those two columns stay empty.

Most often the history is empty because no events happened since it was turned on: a row appears when the email goes out, not when scheduled. If events surely happened but rows are missing, there are three causes: the sequence is off, the funnel has no “Email” block, or a visitor from Europe pressed “Decline” on the consent banner — Ad networks and pixels, section “Tracking consent”.

One email address triggers “Lead registration” in a project once a day, days counted in UTC. Entering the same address again on the same day gives no new emails — test the sequence on a new address.

“Won't we end up in spam?”

Emails go from our service address; you cannot connect your own sender domain in the cabinet.

To every marketing email we add an “unsubscribe” link and a service header, by which mail services show an unsubscribe button next to the subject. Whoever presses it gets no more emails from this project — from any sequence.

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