Sequences are a great way to engage with your audience. Gradual engagement allows you to easily build relationships and trust as you introduce your brand, values, and credibility.
Benefits of sequences
Sequences are automated email messages from folk sent to your contacts over a set period. These are great for engaging with your audience and can be used for a variety of use cases to automate your follow-ups:
Sales: nurture leads and move them through the sales funnel. By sending targeted emails, you can engage with prospects, provide value, and convert them into customers.
Onboarding: email sequences can be used to onboard and welcome new users/clients. This can include sending tutorials, tips, and helpful resources to ensure a successful start.
Events: if you're hosting an event, webinar or podcast, email sequences can help promote it and keep attendees engaged. You can increase attendance and interest by sending invite emails, reminders, and follow-ups with additional resources.
Recruiting: if you're sourcing new candidates, email sequences will help you engage with them. By sending reminders and follow-ups, you can increase your response rate.
These are just a few examples, but email sequences can be customized and used in various ways depending on your business goals and target audience.
Sequence setup
3. Create your multi-step sequence
When you create your first message, you'll see the option to select 'New step' at the bottom underneath the email content.
By default, the sender is the same as in the previous email, but you can change it and pick a different one for subsequent emails so that each message has a different sender if you wish!
Sending in threads
By default, each steps of your email sequence, will be sent in the same thread of the previous email. You will see that "Send in thread" option is automatically selected.
When sending in the same thread, you won't be able to edit the subject as it will be the same as the previous email.
If you don't want to send in the same thread, you can unselect the option and add different subject lines for each email.
Tracking replies
Once you've sent the email sequence, 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.
To track replies to your email sequences, you'll need to ensure that your synced email (the same as the sender email in your sequence) is successfully connected to your folk account, which you can find under Settings > Accounts. If you've selected a sender from another member of your workspace to send a sequence step from, and that email is synced on their account, any replies will be shown on the contact record's interactions. Details on authenticating your domain/setting up your sender are in our guide, and email syncing from Google Workspace is here, and Outlook is here.
Triggers
Two triggers are available for emails in your sequence (after your 1st email).
Wait time: the number of days before the following email is triggered in your sequence. When you add more emails to your sequence, please remember messages are sent from the date of the last email, not the first email in the sequence.
Stop if replies: if someone replies to your email, the sequence will stop for them, and they won't receive your upcoming emails planned in your sequence. By default, the 'Stop if replies' condition is selected. You can unselect it to send all your emails to all recipients.
Signature
To 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.
Considerations
You can create up to 10 steps in one sequence (10 emails).
A yellow banner will notify you if you're trying to use a sender email address that has yet to be synced on your account. You must ensure the sender email address is saved as a synced email under Settings > Accounts sync to ensure replies are synchronized.
You can delete any steps when crafting your sequence by selecting the bin icon in your email (bottom right-hand corner).
Each email will be sent as a new email, not in the previous email thread. We suggest using "RE: Subject" as the email name as a workaround.
If your email sync (not sender) is disconnected after you've sent your sequence, you'll be asked to reconnect your source. Once reconnected, interactions & replies will be retroactively synced and considered for your ongoing sequence. The' Stop if replies' condition will be removed if your email is disconnected during the Review step (just before sending your sequence).
5. Send your sequence 🙌🏽
Once you send your email sequence, the first email will be triggered immediately. You can also manually stop your sequence for any recipients by removing them as recipients once the sequence is sent.
Credits
When sending an email sequence with multiple steps, you'll need enough credits to send the entire sequence, regardless of the conditions. If you don't have enough credits, you won't be able to send the email. We calculate the maximum number of messages that could be sent during the sequence for each step.
For example, if you are sending a sequence with three steps to 200 contacts, you'll need 3x200= 600 available credits to send this sequence. Once the whole sequence is finished, if it has stopped for some recipients (because of any triggered conditions or you manually remove them), we will recalculate the number of messages sent and adjust this for the credit allowance.
Sequence stages
Stopped: means your sequence has stopped for all the recipients
Ongoing: means you still have emails planned in your sequence
Sent: means the sequence is finalized
❗️Please note: you cannot change the sequence written content or delete specific stages within the sequence once it has started, so we recommend making any changes before sending.
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.
Sequence 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.
How-to video
💬 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