How to create a timed Email Sequence from Podio

Posted: 2015-07-12

This is also known as an auto-responder.

Let's say for example, that you have a leads app that captures new leads in Podio, and you want to send specific follow-up emails after 2 days, 7 days, and 18 days.

This is easily done with an additional date field, a number field, and a few flows in GlobiFlow.

The Setup

The first thing we need to do is add a date field and a number field to your Leads App to store the next date to send and the sequence number of the next email to send.

Next, we'll need an App to store the email templates we're going to send. We'll call the app "Auto Responder", and it will have the following fields:

• Response ID - to be able to find the relevant email
• Email Subject
• Email Message Content
• Number of days to wait before sending the next email

Now, we can create our individual email messages that we're going to send out to contacts over a period of time.

Notice that the individual email ID's are:

• ar-msg-01
• ar-msg-02
• ar-msg-03

Initialize each Contact

When a new lead is created in our leads app, we now need to set the initial date and sequence number.

We'll do this with a flow on create:

This flow is basically just setting all new leads to get the first email message in 2 days from when they were created.

Sending the Email Sequence

In order to send the actual email sequence, we need a date-based Flow on the lead's next email date field.

This flow needs to:

• find the correct email to send
• make sure we found an email (and haven't reached the end of the sequence)
• send the email
• update the date field and number to the next value in the sequence

The formula for calculating the next date in the sequence may look a little complex, but it's actually quite simple. Basically you want to end up with an expression like:

date("Y-m-d", strtotime("2015-07-12 +7 days"))

Warning

Sending unsolicited email is a punishable offence in most countries. Make sure you only send automated emails or text messages to people you know.

Please note that if we receive spam complains, you may get your GlobiFlow account suspended. It is highly recommended to use your own SMTP server, which you can add on the Account page.

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by Andreas Huttenrauch
Owner of Globi Web Solutions, and Podio Fanatic.

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