With ‘Messages,’ you can send single emails or sequences to a single recipient or an entire group, each personalized to the recipient. Folk's all-in-one messaging tool allows for seamless, personalized communication, helping maintain strong relationships between you and your recipients while ensuring a personal touch during all interactions.
Getting started
Set up your Sender
To start sending emails from folk, you'll need to first set up a Sender.
We offer 2 options to send emails from folk: Custom Sender or Gmail sender. With a Custom Sender you can authenticate any domain name (emails will be sent from our provider) and with Gmail sender, you can only send from a Google account (emails will be sent from your Gmail provider).Send a test email
Once you've set up your sender, we recommend sending a few test emails to ensure they reach you and look like you expect them to. To do this, please add your email address to a group, select yourself within that group, or send an email from your contact record. For tips on writing great emails, check out Julie's Tips, a series of short and informative videos.
Best practices to increase email deliverability
Selecting your recipient/s
Email a whole group: Select 'Email all' to message the entire group as they appear for you. Alternatively, you can apply filters and select 'Email all' to message a filtered view.
Email an individual or set of people: Select the contact/s from a group list by checking the tick boxes and then clicking 'Email,' which will appear in the toolbar at the bottom and just above your group. To quickly select multiple people, hold
shift + ↑↓orshift + ⌘. Alternatively, you can send an email to someone from their contact record.
Create your message
Once you've followed the steps above, a blank message will open as a draft. Here, you can start curating your email.
Pick the intended sender in the "From" section (insert link). Once your domain is authenticated, you can add multiple senders. See here how you can send messages from your own email address.
Add other recipients in CC and BCC.
Add a subject - we recommend a short, punchy subject line that grabs the recipient's attention quickly.
Use a template for quick email creation. We've included more info here.
Curate your email:
Custom variables to personalise the message can be added by typing "/" or selecting the option in the toolbar. For example, using the variable /First name when addressing your recipients will automatically address everyone by their first name in the email. Custom variables are dynamic data such as first name, last name, job title, company, URLs, or any custom text field from which group you selected your recipients. This means the custom variables are unique to the group.
Add images - you can copy/paste and upload pictures in your message or use our handy integration with Unsplash to search thousands of beautiful free images.
Add attachments.
Enhance your writing by using bold, italic, underline, blockquote, and ordered and bulleted lists.
Create hyperlinks by highlighting the text, selecting the link icon in the toolbar, or directly pasting the link onto the highlighter text with
cmd/ctrl+v. Links can only be inserted into text, not images.Add a signature - you can create it directly in the message and save it as a template. For the moment, it’s not possible to embed an external signature. If you want this in your email, you can save your signature as an image and insert it into the message.
To remove the space between lines in your message, just hit shift+enter. This way, you’ll go to the following line without a space.
Send a sequence
Sequences are a great way to engage with your audience as you can send automated follow-up messages. Gradual engagement lets you quickly build relationships and trust by introducing your brand, values, and credibility. Follow the instructions above to create your first email, and if you'd like to send more messages as part of a sequence, you can find more details on how to do this here.
Be aware, this feature is only available when you set up a Custom Sender.
Unsubscribe
Want to give your recipients the option to unsubscribe from your emails? If so, adding an unsubscribe link to your emails is super easy. Details for allowing recipients to unsubscribe can be found in our guide.
Review before sending
Folk gives you the opportunity to check your emails before sending them to your recipients. When you've finished editing your email content, select 'Review' in the top right-hand corner. This will bring you to a page where you can edit each recipient's email content. Alternatively, you can select 'Edit draft' in the top right-hand corner to be taken back to the email content page or 'Send' to send the email/s to your recipient/s.
Check & remove recipients
We recommend that you review all your recipients before sending your email to make sure your email reaches the right person/people. If you have someone you'd like to search for, you can do so in the search bar, which makes it quicker if you have an extensive recipient list. For any recipients you'd like to remove, you can select the bin icon next to their contact details. You can also double-check you've selected the correct recipient by opening their profile in folk.
Personal touches
When reviewing your emails, you may send a personal message to someone in your recipient list. For example, if someone's birthday is coming up, you can add a happy birthday message to their email. To do this, select them on the left side of the recipient list to open and edit the email content.
❗️Please note: any recipients who have unsubscribed from your emails or bounced from previously sent emails will still appear in your recipient list. The email will not be delivered to the recipient's inbox, but a message will be removed from your monthly messaging allowance.
Save your email content
If you're in the drafting stage, all email content will automatically be saved as a draft in your inbox under 'Draft'. Otherwise, leaving it in review before sending the email will automatically save it and appear as 'In review' in your email inbox within folk.
Replies from recipients
Once you've sent the email, any replies from recipients will appear in your external email inbox (whichever is connected to your sender domain) and will not appear in your folk messaging inbox.
Tracking recipient replies:
You must ensure the same sender email is connected to your folk account in the email sync section, Settings > Accounts. We've written up steps on how to sync with your Google Workspace here and Outlook inbox here. Once synced, you can track and analyze these replies on your contact records as interactions and in your message analytics in the 'Replied' folder.
Message analytics
By analyzing which messages lead to the best and most successful outcomes, you can refine your messaging strategies to be more effective. More details about message analytics can be found here.
By default, all campaigns sent from folk are tracked to monitor analytics on your message (like open rates, click rates).
However, you can decide to turn off the tracking. It will apply to all the sent campaigns from the workspace.
By turning off the tracking, we will not track open & click rates anymore. We'll only track the sent & reply rate.
To turn off tracking, go to your Settings > Senders and unselect the tracking option:
Follow-up
It's easy to perform follow-up actions after campaigns are sent. For example, you may wish to follow up with people who have yet to respond to your email as a chaser. To do this, choose a previously sent email and select the 'Unread' folder. You can select the contacts you want to message from within that folder and choose 'Message' from the toolbar options at the bottom.
Deleting emails
You can delete emails in draft or review (not sent yet) by selecting the bin icon on the right side of your inbox.
Considerations
The maximum number of recipients per campaign depends on your Sender (with Custom Sender it's up to 5000 emails in one campaign, versus with a Gmail Sender up to 500 emails in one campaign).
If you've received an OOO and can see the recipient has changed email (this is usually stated in the OOO message), we recommend updating the recipient’s new email address manually within your folk account.
When sending a campaign, we send the first 100 emails all at once and after that, we add spacing (up to 30sec) per batch of 100 emails for the remaining ones. This approach helps for deliverability. Note that a campaign of 5000 emails will take up to 30 min to send all emails.
Messaging use cases
Messages are incredibly versatile and ideal for a variety of reasons, such as:
Event Invitations
Sales prospection
HR prospection
Investor updates
Press release campaigns
Product launches
Donation campaigns
Fundraising campaigns
Personalized newsletters
Survey or Poll campaigns
Official communications
Canvassing
User research campaigns
Followup campaigns
💬 Do you have any questions or feedback? We'd love to hear from you! You can find the folk team via:
Live chat from your account (the ? button in the bottom right-hand corner)
Or send us an email