Buttondown Documentation
We love a warm welcome sequence here at Buttondown. What's a welcome sequence, you may ask? It's a series of automatically scheduled emails that introduces new subscribers to the wonderful world of your newsletter, all while driving engagement and boosting brand affinity. Read on to learn how to craft your welcome sequence and make your new subscribers feel right at home!
Before we get going, it might be useful to take a look at our “Registration and Setup” and “Sending Your First Email” docs (if you haven’t already, that is!).
Full disclosure: We also recommend having a paid Buttondown account, as automations are a premium feature.
Think of automations as shortcuts to your ideal Buttondown workflow.
Every automation is made up of four parts: A trigger, a filter, a scheduled time, and an action.
How can we leverage automations to schedule the perfect welcome sequence for new subscribers? Let’s break it down step by step.
When you get a new subscriber (yay!), it’s polite to send a little "Thank You" for joining your newsletter. You can create an automation by hopping over to the “Automations” tab of your Buttondown dashboard and clicking “New” in the upper right hand corner.
First, come up with a name for your automation sequence. (Something simple, like “Welcome Email,” will do just fine.) Then, we’ll specify our "Trigger" to jump-start the automation “When a subscriber confirms their subscription." As for the automation’s “Filter,” let’s say we only want to send welcome emails to subscribers with a WordPress tag; in that case we’ll set our "Filter" to “Tags,” “Equals,” “WordPress.” Then it’s time to schedule our newsletter. Likely you’ll want to send this as soon as possible after your subscriber confirms their subscription, so we’ll set our "Time" for “Immediately.” And last, but not least, you’ll want to determine your automation's "Action." This is where you’ll be able to write your own custom email.
Phew! After all that, your automation might end up looking something like this...
When you’re happy with your “Welcome Email,” you can choose to send yourself a test email.
When your email's good to go, click “Create” to publish your automation!
So you’ve sent your welcome email, and now you want to make sure your new subscriber is settling in. Why not send a follow-up to engage them further? To do this, we’ll start a new automation, and keep our "Trigger" and "Filter" the same. We will, however, change our "Time" to “After some time has passed,” and specify that we want our next email to send one week after our subscriber confirms their subscription. We’ll also write a new custom email (but keep our other "Action" settings the same).
But we’re not done yet! We’ll craft another follow up, this time scheduled for two weeks after our new subscriber confirms their subscription. Perhaps this time, you might even want to include a survey to get to know your subscribers’ tastes a little bit better.
Pretty hard not to engage with your newsletter at this point, right? Cheers to marketing at its finest!
At this point, your subscribers are getting pretty familiar with your newsletter. But let’s round out our welcome sequence with a final call to action. To do this, we’ll follow the pattern we’ve already established by setting our "Time" to three weeks after our "Trigger" (which is still set to "When a new subscriber confirms their subscription"). We’ll also write a new custom email, this time to entice readers to explore your offerings outside your newsletter.
And viola! You’ve just created your very first welcome sequence. Pop open the champagne—you’ve earned a little celebration! 🎉
Want to see how each of the emails in your welcome sequence is performing? Head on over to the "Automations" section of your Buttondown dashboard. Click on the automated email you had in mind, and from there, you'll be able to see all sorts of nifty stats like your open rate, click rate, and more.