Introducing email sequences: Email drip campaigns for salespeople

Unless you really like sending hundreds or thousands of follow-up emails manually, you're going to love this new feature in Close: email sequences for salespeople.

What are email sequences?

You've probably heard of drip campaigns, automated emails, or auto-responders. They typically involve dedicated (and often expensive) apps, usually complex integrations with your CRM, and more often than not — a lot of fiddling with templates, layouts, and previewing emails for different email clients.

Our email sequences feature is designed exactly for people who know they need something like that, but don't have the time, expertise, or additional budget to deal with all this hassle.

Put simply, an email sequence is a series of emails — written in the normal way you write follow-up emails — that are automatically sent to prospects and leads over the course of days or weeks.

If you want to stand out in your sales email campaigns, don't overlook the importance of technical email setup in improving your results.

How do they work?

Let's say you attended an event over the weekend and came back to the office with a batch of fresh leads to reach out to.

Normally, you'd have a Smart View set up to filter these leads into a list that you'll call or email one by one. When they don't respond (which let's be honest most will not) you'll need to remember to follow up with them in a few days or weeks.

Now you might automate the reminders process, say with tasks or email follow-ups but you still need to write the individual emails and send them. True you'll probably copy-and-paste (or use email templates) but that's still not a great use of your time.

Enter the magic of automation: write your sequence of emails once and all prospects that match your criteria will automatically receive your thoughtfully written and valuable emails.

You can enroll one person today, ten people tomorrow, and a thousand people next week — they’ll all get the right email at the right time.

Email sequences optimized for sales

Our goal is to make you the most effective salesperson possible, so we’ve optimized our sequences for sales.

Here are the things that make our email sequences feature really stand out for sales teams:

• The emails look and feel like a handcrafted email written specifically for the person receiving it.
• We randomly assign a unique time of day for each email in the sequence. We’ve found that this makes the experience feel more natural and improves your reach rate.
• When a prospect replies they are immediately opted out of further emails. Now you have the opportunity of putting your full attention on the prospect without any additional, distracting emails. If on the other hand they are writing to be opted out — well no further work needed on your part.
• What about out of office replies? We automatically ignore autoresponders so your sequences will keep working.
• Emails you create to be used in sequences are automatically available to be re-used by yourself — and your team — in other sequences or regular emails. So when something works, you can scale it up.

Email sequences let you stretch your creative brain once: write a great series of emails and benefit from that creativity every day.

Creating email sequences

Choose a name, pick templates, add as many steps as you like.

You can start sending a sequence immediately after you add someone to it or after a delay (specified as a number of days).

When you’re ready to add contacts to a sequence, you have two options:

1. Enroll a single contact to a sequence (say after a missed call)
2. Bulk enroll an entire Smart View or a search result

Both are literally one-click actions. Equally simple is pausing and resuming sequences: on a per-lead basis or for an entire Smart View.

For those of you who want a little more power and customization, we’ve also added custom triggers and actions to our Zapier integration. You can enroll a contact in a sequence when the lead status changes, or pause a sequence when you make a call to that contact.

Try email sequences for free

Email sequences are available to Professional and Business plan customers. If you're not yet a Close user — now's the best time to start a full-featured 14-day free trial to try email sequences.

If you're already on our Basic plan, reach out to our success team to arrange for a demo.