Hurry up and Wait: Delayed Gratification for Autoresponders

FeedBlitz has offered comprehensive, multi-step autoresponders for years now. They’re great for saying thanks, delivering incentives, or offering multi-step courses. Couple an autoresponder sequence to other lists using FeedBlitz’s triggers, start a signup with a parser, and you’ve got a very capable automated email marketing solution.

A typical autoresponder sequence starts immediately. You sign up for a list, and your incentive is delivered right away. You make your purchase, et voila! A thank you missive is en route, toute suite. It’s what people expect to happen.

But what if you have a fixed sequence that you want to send, but instead of starting immediately, you want to delay until next Thursday, say, regardless of when the subscriber took the action that got them onto the autoresponder in the first place? Tough to do with an autoresponder series that always starts instantly, no matter what time of day (or night) the subscriber joins.

Enter a new feature here at FeedBlitz: The ability to delay an autoresponder’s start. If you go to your autoresponder’s dashboard, or enter its article sequence edit page, you will see that, by default, it is defined to begin immediately. Click the “immediately” link, and you can choose the day and time the autoresponder should actually start. Simple.

Want the best of both worlds, i.e. an immediate “thank you” and then a delay? Well, you can do that too. First, create both your autoresponders (the “ASAP” one and the delayed one). From the ASAP autoresponder’s dashboard, on the “Subscriber Management” tile, click “Triggers” and then add a “Completion” trigger to add the subscriber to the delayed sequence. ASAP does what it does right away, and then hands the subscriber off to wait for the start of the delayed sequence.