Email Sequences (Legacy): Older Timed Email Series

Overview

Before Flows, BestWebby had email sequences: a series of emails sent a set number of days apart after a trigger, such as a purchase. Marketing → Email sequences (legacy) keeps them reachable so you can see, pause, edit or delete the ones you already have.

For anything new, build a flow instead: flows have more triggers, conditions and text messages. See Segments and flows.

Email sequences are part of email campaigns, on the Growth plan and above. Creating, editing, pausing and deleting a sequence needs an owner, admin or manager.

What the page shows

The cards at the top show Total sequences, Live and Enrolled. Each sequence shows its name, its trigger, how many steps it has and how many people have been enrolled in it. Click a sequence to see its steps: when each one is sent, its subject and the start of its text.

• The switch on a sequence pauses it or makes it live.
• Edit opens it; the bin deletes it.

Create or edit a sequence

1. Click New sequence, or Edit on a sequence.
2. Enter a Sequence name and choose a Trigger.
3. For each step, set Send after a number of days (0 to 365), a Subject line and an Email body. Click Add step for another, up to 50.
4. Click Save sequence.

Saving an edit replaces all the steps. People already part-way through carry on from the same step number in the new list.

Who each trigger enrols

• After purchase — the buyer of every paid order.
• New customer welcome — every new customer: one who creates an account on your storefront, or one you add in the dashboard. (Sequences made before it had this name were called VIP welcome.)
• Win-back — only a customer you click Win-back on under Insights → Retention.
• Abandoned cart — a shopper who entered their email and left items in their cart, once the cart counts as abandoned.
• Review request — the customer of an order, once the order is delivered.

Each email address goes through a sequence once. A customer's second order does not start an After purchase sequence again.

How the emails are sent

Due steps are checked every five minutes. The first step waits its number of days from enrolment; each later step waits its days from the step before.

Sequence emails are marketing email, so they follow the same rules as your campaigns:

• they go only to people who agreed to marketing email from your store, and never to an address on your do-not-email list;
• each one ends with your store's name, its postal address and an unsubscribe link;
• someone who has not agreed, or who unsubscribes, gets no further steps.

A store with no postal address on file (its billing address) cannot send marketing email: the step is held and tried again each day until you add one.

Pausing and deleting

• Pausing ends the sequence for each person whose next step comes due while it is paused. Making it live again does not restart it for them.
• Deleting stops it for everyone enrolled.

Writing the email body

The body is sent as you type it, as HTML. Line breaks you type do not show as new lines in the email, so use <p> and </p> around each paragraph. {{first_name}}, in the subject or the body, becomes the customer's first name, or "there" when your store has no name for them. No other placeholder is filled in.