Sequences
Sequences
Article Summary
Do you have the right plan for Sequences?
Sequences are available to members on our Professional and Business plans. You can upgrade your plan under Settings > Billing > Plan.
Do you find yourself sending the same emails over and over to cold leads? Are you looking for a better way to warm up a list of cold leads without dedicating your valuable sales team resources to do the outreach?
Unless you really like sending hundreds or thousands of follow-up emails manually and creating a list of Leads to call, you're going to love this feature in Close: sequences for salespeople. With Sequences allow you to automate the process of sending follow-up emails to your Leads in a drip email format, create lists of Leads to call as another way to engage your clients, and send a quick SMS to customers who like to be reached via text.
You can enroll one person today, ten people tomorrow, and a thousand people next week — they’ll all get the right message, the right call, at the right time.
Understanding How Sequences Work
A Sequences is a series of outreach attempts that allow you to automate your communication with your Leads with designated email templates, scheduled time for phone calls, or a quick SMS.
The Sequence will run until the contact responds in one of the following ways:
- The subscriber sends or replies to any email from a Connected Account in Close (this includes, but isn't limited to, replying to an email in the sequence);
- The contact sends an SMS response to the SMS step.
Sequences can be resumed for individual contacts from the lead page.
If you would like more information on how Sequences work and whether or not they are a good fit for your sales process, see our in-depth blog post here. Check out our latest webinars hosted by our own Nick Persico, Director of Revenue, and Steli Efti, CEO.Want to learn more?
Creating a New Sequence
You can create a new Sequence or manage an existing Sequence by clicking 'Sequences' on the left-hand sidebar of Close.
Every Sequence needs a name, at least one step, and a sequence schedule. Sequence steps can be either an email, a phone call, or an SMS, and steps can be delayed between 1 hour and 365 days apart. Contacts that are subscribed to a Sequence will receive each of the sequence steps until they are paused or removed from the Sequence.
Sending Rate Limits
To avoid hitting sending rate limits for some email servers such as Gmail or Microsoft, always have the first step sent after a 1-day delay instead of sending without a delay. That way the emails will be spread out throughout the day, lowering your chances of hitting sending limits.
Setting a Delay
Adding a delay to your Sequence can help time your outreach down to the hour.
Sending after a delay will delay the Sequence for the period of time that you select. You can delay a Sequence for 1 hour, to 365 days.
Setting a delay of 3 hours.Choosing to start your Sequence without a delay means your Sequence will be sent within your sending window. The time that you enroll your Contacts matters: if you enroll your Contacts outside of the sequence schedule that you select for that Sequence, then your Sequence will start at the next sending window. See the next section on selecting a Sequence Schedule to learn more. If you enroll a contact with a specific delay, and then change the delay within Sequence settings - any steps that are still pending (emails that weren't sent yet or calls that haven't been made) will use the new delay. For example, if you enroll a contact that has a pending email step with a Changing a step delay for enrolled contacts2 days step delay and then update it to a 1 hour step delay, the contact will receive their email within the next hour after you save those changes.
Select a Sequence Schedule
Use our pre-defined sequence schedules to pick the timeframe during which emails will send in your Sequence, and when calls should be made. Each sequence has a sending schedule and a fallback timezone option.
Sequences will be sent to the Contact during the time you select, within their timezone. A schedule set to 9am - 4pm will send emails to Contacts between those times based on their timezone. Each Contact's timezone is based on their phone number or their parent Lead's address.
If a Contact's timezone cannot be determined, the Sequence schedule will default to the fallback timezone.
Sending Schedules for SequencesThe timezone in Calling Schedules.
When possible, Close will use the Contact’s timezone. The system will only use the Sequence fallback timezone if the Contact timezone cannot be deduced.
The Contact’s timezone is defined by:
1. If the Contact has a single phone number, we calculate their timezone based on the country code & area code of that number.
2. If the Contact has multiple phone numbers, the system will consider all phone numbers available to determine a “middle timezone”, between all timezones available.
3. If neither exists (phone numbers or Lead addresses), the system will use the Sequence fallback timezone settings to initiate the step.
Note: If the Contact only has US or Canadian toll-free phone numbers, the system will not be able to correctly define the timezone since toll-free numbers are not location-specific (i.e. they could be in any US/Canadian timezone).
Sending Window
Sequence steps use “sending windows” to mimic human sending behavior. The length of your delay will determine the window when your next step will send. For example, let’s say there is a 1 hour delay between two steps. If the first step is sent at 9:32 AM, its sending window is 9am-10am. The 1 hour delay is added, which means the next step will be performed within the 10am-11am sending window.
For longer delays between steps (of 24h or more), the sending window is expanded to the entire day according to the sequence’s schedule (9am-4pm). For example, if in our previous example the delay was 1 day, our calculation would look a little different. The first step was sent at 9:32AM, which means it was sent in the 9am-4pm sending window. The sending window 1 day later would be 9am-4pm the next day, which means the next step would be sent some time during the next day. Email step sending times are randomly distributed throughout the sending window. It is possible for the delay between steps to be longer (or shorter) than 24 hours * the number of days selected for the sending delay. For example, if there are two steps with a delay of one day in between, it would be possible (though unlikely) that the first email could be sent at 11 PM and the following step could be sent at 1 AM the next day — a delay of only two hours. If it is important to avoid this possibility, consider selecting the Pro TipMonday-Friday, 9am-4pm sending schedule.
Enrolling contact outside of its sending window
If a contact is added to a sequence outside of its sending window, an email step will send at a random time on the first day or hour of the sending window (depending on whether the step delay is less than 24 hours or not).
For example, if you select the 9am - 4pm, Weekdays sequence schedule with a 1-day delay, and add a contact to the sequence on Saturday, the contact will receive the first email in the sequence at random time on Monday.
Calling steps
Calling steps will start at the beginning of the Sequence schedule. Selecting 9am - 4pm means Contacts will populate your To Do calling list starting at 9am of that Contact's timezone.
Weekends
Sequences always count every day (working days and weekends) when you set up a delay, but they won't send any on weekends if you have Weekdays selected as your schedule. For example, if you have a Step 1 to go out on Thursday, and you have Step 2 with a 2-day delay, that 2nd step will start on Monday.
