https://youtu.be/okcauaiZlZM
Following updates, email courses are now called “Sequences” in ConvertKit – just so you know 🙂
Below is a transcript of the video above, that I've slightly modified to be readable.
This is a continuation of our closer, more detailed look at ConvertKit email marketing automation and this general, all-around good guy software.
We have had a look at forms and we've created our form in the system.
I haven't actually saved anything connected with the form because I'm just taking it through its paces, but you should save it every step or you have a tendency to lose your changes.
Today we're going to have a look at Courses (now called sequences). Now Courses is the language that is used by ConvertKit. You might have, in other software, seen it as an auto-responder or various other language that is used.
Essentially an Email Course is a series of emails that you send to someone after they sign up to your list. But in ConvertKit you can very, very closely refine who gets what emails when. We're going to have a look at this.
I've created a Course here. It's an empty Course because it's fictitious, but let's have a look. You can see “New Course from Chris”. And I'm going to click “Create Course.” Here we are, a new course.
You can see that it's very, very easy to do. Firstly, when will the email be sent? In this video I select “One day after the subscription”. And you can change the time, roughly, when it's going to be sent, in the Settings. I'm not going to do that, I'm going to leave it 7 a.m. because that's a good time.
Introduction Content. And here we are, you can change this language. “Chris is great. Reply if you agree!” Obviously I'm going to get a lot of engagement from that.
The Email Status, I'm going to select Published. Now it's obviously not going to go to anyone, so I'm going to change it to Draft just in case it does something silly . Or in case I click the wrong button. However, I can save this at this point. And that is exactly what I'm going to do.
Let's just publish it so we can see the difference. If I go, now, to the next message – you can see here they've set up a bunch of messages. I could delete all of these, but I'm just going to run through because you can see how easy it is to twiddle. If I want this two days, I can change the settings easily to two.
Educational Message: “Chris is still awesome. Here is a video to prove it.” And there we go, email published. Save, and that will now go two days after people subscribe. So they're going to get two emails in a row.
Bear in mind these are from subscription dates, not necessarily from previous messages. They have some good education in ConvertKit too on how to write effective email content, but we're not going to look at that right now.
And so on, you can go through all of your emails. You can, of course, delete these placeholder emails they have in there, and that's all you need.
Now if you go over to the Settings column, what you're going to see is that you can designate when they're going to be sent. I've set it to Brisbane time, that is it's default based on my personal settings. You can set an Account Default email template and we're going to come to the email templates in a little while.
The other thing you can do is you can exclude some people from getting a particular course. You remember I spoke about Tags and Segments in another video. If you haven't had a look at that, we're going to do another video on that. So check out that about Tags and Segments.
You can designate who does and does not get this particular Email Course. I'm going to exclude everyone from the Course. There you go, seven of seven forms have been excluded from the course.
You can recall in the Forms lesson that we spoke about using Forms in a way that allowed you to designate where people were coming from, what forms they were using, and what content they were interested in. This is another way of ensuring that people are getting content that is relevant to them. You don't need to, of course, you could simply use an auto-responder series or a Course that gets allocated to everyone and sent out to everyone.
But you don't have to, and that is a good way of doing it. So if we go back to our Courses and here we are now with two Email Courses. You can see no one's opened them because, of course, I don't actually want anyone to get these particular emails.
So that is how Courses work – it's very simple. Now if I, for example, wanted to change the order in which these were set, I can just click and drag. It's very, very easy, I can swap them around. It will automatically change the order that they go and that is, by far, the easiest way of moving those around that I have seen in a long, long time.
The other thing you can see is all of your content running down the left-hand side. It's very fast, very simply to get this set up in the way you want it. If you want to take a look at your emails you just click Preview, and there you go. That's what my email is going to look like because I've set it to be a plain-text style email. Of course, you can play with that stuff about your email templates as well.
That is how Courses work, that is how you go about using them, and that is how ConvertKit has its auto-responder series set up.
Convinced? How about you check out ConvertKit today.
