All Collections
Communications & Activities
Using Email Sequences in Pipeliner
Using Email Sequences in Pipeliner

Learn how to use Pipeliner’s Email Sequences to help you communicate effectively with your customers

Updated over a week ago

Overview

Our new Email Sequences allow you to plan and execute targeted email nurture campaigns to your Pipeliner Contacts as part of your ongoing Account Management and communications strategy.

You can schedule the sequence of emails, use email templates and create conditional follow up actions for your team as well as specifying the conditions when contacts should be unenrolled from a sequence ⤵

Your users can enroll their Contacts into a sequence or you could use an Automatizer process.

The unified overview allows you to monitor the performance statistics for each campaign.

Using Email Sequences

The intention with Email Sequences, as with all our emailing features, is to enhance your customer and prospect relationships, making it easy for you to set up targeted, personalised and consistent communications and reducing the workload to achieve these.

You can use Email Sequences for any situation where a structured series of emails and tasks is needed. Some examples are:

  • Follow up marketing emails for new Leads to help with conversions to Opportunities.

  • New customer welcome emails to gain traction with your product.

  • Existing customer subscription or contract renewal process.

  • Event invitations and follow ups.

Before you begin creating your sequence, you’ll need to plan out the steps. Some of the elements to consider are:

  • What type of record in Pipeliner should the emails be sent to - Contacts or Leads, for example?

  • Do you already have the right content for the emails?

  • If so, have you created and tested your email templates (you can also create these on-the-fly)?

  • When do you want the emails to be sent, in what order and on which days?

  • What tasks should be planned to follow on from each email (if needed)?

  • What criteria should identify when a contact should be unenrolled from a sequence of emails (you will want to remove contacts who unsubscribe, for example).

  • Are your users going to enroll Contacts (or Leads/Accounts/Opportunities) or will the sequence be triggered as part of an Automatizer process?

NOTE: if you're planning on enrolling recipients to your sequence by using an Automatizer process, you need to make sure that both are triggered by the same record type - i.e. if your sequence sends emails to Leads, your process will also need to be triggered by Leads.

NOTE: Email sequences are available to our Unlimited Tier customers at no charge. All other customers will need to discuss adding Email Sequences to your subscription with your Account Manager. Email Sequences is an add-on, enabled from the Automation Hub in Pipeliner.

Creating an Email Sequence

From the "Tools" menu, click on "Email Sequences".

You’ll be able to see a "List View" of all your existing Email Sequences along with some basic statistics in the "Reply Rate", "Open Rate", "Click Rate" and "Unsubscribe Rate" columns.

Click on the “Create New” button to add your new sequence ⤵

Give your new sequence a name and description. By default, you will be the "Owner" of the sequence (you can change this if you need to). Finally decide if the process should only be run by yourself (Personal Email Sequence)or if it should be available to all users (Space Email Sequence)

Click on “Create” to begin defining your sequence.

First, select the type of record that the emails will be sent to. You can choose from "Account", "Contact", "Lead", "Opportunity" or "Project" ⤵

And then which email address to use ⤵

NOTE: Leads, Opportunities, and Projects don’t intrinsically have email addresses associated with them in Pipeliner. You can add custom, user-defined, email address fields to those types of record, of course, or you can select an email address from the Primary Contact or Primary Account that the Lead, Opportunity, or Project is linked to. This will only work, of course, if your Lead (for example) is correctly linked to a Primary Contact!

NOTE: Make sure that you’re certain of the type of record you want to use as, if you change your mind later, you’ll need to start again with all your sequence emails and tasks.

Adding Emails and Tasks to your Sequence

Click on the "+" to add your first "Email" or "Task" ⤵

I’m going to send our new customers an email as the first step of my “Welcome” sequence.

You can type the content straight into the new email and can also choose if the email should be sent from your email account or from a company email address that you have access to use ⤵

Or, more likely, you will select an existing template. This article has more details about creating email templates

Click on “Save”.

That’s your first “Day 1” email ready to go. You now need to continue building your next steps.

When you add your next email, you can choose whether it is “Always” sent or only under certain conditions “If not opened”, “If not clicked” or “If not replied” or by using a "custom condition" that allows you to select another email field to use as a filter ⤵

NOTE: if you add a condition, ALL following steps will be executed only for recipients matching your condition. For example, if you start with 100 recipients for your first email and your second email has a condition of "if not opened" and 50 do not open the first email, your second step (and third, fourth, etc) will then be executed only for the 50 recipients who met your "if not opened" condition.

When you add a Task, you’ll need to select the "Activity Type", fill in the subject line and "Due date" as well as the link to the triggering record ⤵

If your previous action was a "Task", you can select if your next "Email" or "Task" should “Always” be executed or “If not updated”, “If not completed” or “If completed” ⤵

You can also select “Add Custom Condition” and add your own Filter criteria ⤵

Click on “Save” at each step and then adjust the Day that the email should be sent or the task created.

Email Sequence Settings

Once all your emails and tasks have been added, you then need to think about the “Settings” for your sequence ⤵

Global Actions (All Steps)

Set your preferences as to what should happen when a recipient of an email from any step in your sequence replies, unsubscribes, meets a custom condition that you define or if the email bounces.

Unenrolling Recipients

In many situations, you’ll want to unenroll recipients from your sequence if they reply or if the email bounces. You can also set up a custom condition which, if met, will unenroll the recipient.

NOTE: Recipients are automatically unenrolled if they unsubscribe from emails.

Send Email

You can choose to set up a specific email to send to the recipient if they reply or meet any custom condition. ⤵

Create Task

Create a task - e.g. for the record’s owner - if the recipient replies, unsubscribes or meets your custom condition. ⤵

Unsubscribe

As well as unenrolling a recipient when the email bounces (good practice to help protect your email domain), you can choose to Unsubscribe their email address to make sure that no further emails will be sent to it (from anywhere in Pipeliner, not just from your sequence).

NOTE: in order to detect replies and bounces, an email integration must be active for the email address(es) used in the sequence.

Creating a custom condition

Additionally, you can unenroll, create task or send an email to the recipient when their record (e.g. Lead or Contact) meets a custom condition that you create. This option lets you create a filter based on multiple different criteria and if the Contact/Lead/Opportunity or Account is updated to meet the filter criteria, it will be trigger the selected action(S).

You’d use the custom condition option, for example, to unenroll a Lead from your sequence if the Lead was marked as Lost by a user. ⤵

Timezone and date/time ranges

Next, choose the time zone for the sequence and the days and times within which to send the emails. ⤵

Email Conversations

Finally, you can select if each email is sent as a brand new email (as a new conversation) or as part of the previous conversation.

Publishing your Sequence

Finally, once your sequence is complete, click on “Publish” to publish your sequence. You can “Publish” — this will save all your changes but the sequence will not be active or “Publish & Activate” to set it running.

NOTE: if you leave your sequence without first publishing, all work will be lost. Your sequence will be saved after clicking on "Publish", you will then need to "Activate" it to set it running.

You can “Run Test” to test the sequence before you publish ⤵

Viewing Email Sequences

You’ll now see your new sequence in the List View of sequences ⤵

Click on your sequence to open up the right-hand panel.

Details

In the "Details" tab, you’ll see the sequence description and an overview of the statistics. You can also "Enrol" recipients, "Edit" your sequence, change the Properties (Name, Description, Owner, etc), "Copy" the sequence or "Delete" it ⤵

Enrolling recipients

You can copy&paste email addresses or search for records to add as recipients ⤵

Currently Enrolled

You can see a list of recipients enrolled in the sequence and can unenroll, search for a specific recipient or filter the list ⤵

Activity Log

The "Activity Log" lists each time the sequence is triggered and shows if the run was successful or not ⤵

You can “Download Log” to output the log to a ".ZIP" file ⤵

Email Sequence Statistics

Click on "Show Full Statistics" to open up a full report on your sequence ⤵

Drilldown to a list view of the underlying data by clicking on one of the parameters ⤵

Select “Show in CRM” to open up the view within the web app itself. From here, you can select all - or individual records - to perform mass action such as "Bulk Update" or running an "Automatizer" process ⤵

Select the "Timeline" for which statistics you want to see ⤵

Recipient Statistics

This gives you an overview of all recipients including the total who have ever been enrolled to the sequence, the number currently enrolled, how many have been unenrolled and the number of unsubscribes ⤵

Sequence Statistics

This is a summary of data from the whole sequence including the total number enrolled and open, clicked, replied, bounced, unsubscribed rates and number of created tasks. Click on the "Emails" tab to see email statistics and Records to see created tasks. ⤵

Step Statistics

These break down the statistics by steps of the sequence. You can choose to reset the "Step Statistics" at any time ⤵

Timeline Statistics

Choose your timeline to view statistics by date range ⤵

Steps

A "List View" of each step in the process. You can reset these ⤵

You can also access the "Statistics" when editing your sequence ⤵

Enrolling and Unenrolling Recipients

Users can enroll individual recipients into a sequence by using the "Email Sequences" widget within an open record ⤵

You can also add a recipient to a sequence when sending them an email. Prepare your email and tick the box at the bottom of the email screen to select the email sequence before sending ⤵

Multiple recipients can also be enrolled - for example, from the "List View" — by selecting them and then using the "Email Sequences" option. Choose "Enrol" and available "Email Sequences" will be displayed for your users to select from.

You can select records by clicking individual records or by using a filter and then selecting All ⤵

NOTE: You can also "Unenrol" selected recipients the same way

You can "Enrol" recipients into an Email Sequence as part of an Automatizer process ⤵

Recipients can be unenrolled individually or in bulk from the “Currently Enrolled” tab for a selected sequence in the "Email Sequences › List View" ⤵

You can also filter to identify batches of recipients to "Unenrol" ⤵

Errors and Warnings

The "Email Sequence › Owner" will receive all error and warning messages. These will include problems sending to email addresses as well as more general warnings where, for example, the period for a sequence to run has elapsed for the day and the email will be sent tomorrow ⤵

Email Limits

The maximum number of emails you can send depends on whether you are using O365 or Gmail:

  • Office 365 users are limited by the following: 10,000 sent email messages per day; 500 recipients total for a single email; 30 emails sent per minute.

  • Gmail users are limited to ~2000 emails per day. The limit depends on the type of Gmail account that you have. More details can be found here.

Did this answer your question?