How to set up a follow-up email for your forms

A follow-up email is an automated email you can send to those who submit their email address in your website form.

You can use it to:

• Thank your visitors for subscribing to your newsletter
• Deliver a promised incentive, e.g. a discount code, a freebie, etc.
• Give visitors useful information about anything interesting for them
• Redirect visitors to specific pages of your website, e.g. your sales page.

You can also create multiple follow-up emails and pick a delivery time for each one of them, which allows you to build an automated welcome email sequence for new subscribers.

But before we get to that, let’s take a look at how to create a follow-up email in Getsitecontrol.

1. Sign in to Getsitecontrol

First, sign in to your Getsitecontrol account.

2. Open the Follow-up tab

Click the + Create widget button to start creating a new widget. Or, if you already have a widget that you want to set up a follow-up email for, find it in the ‘All widgets’ section. Click the Edit button below its name:

Switch to the Follow-up tab and click the + Add follow-up email button:

3. Craft your email

At this point, you’ll have 3 options:

1. Start from scratch — you’ll need to type the text, format it, and add visuals and buttons to the email from scratch, without using a template as a base.
2. Use premade emails — you can use pre-designed email templates from the gallery.
3. Reuse my emails — you’ll use one of the emails you have previously created in Getsitecontrol.

The premade email gallery is regularly updated with new templates and it often features seasonal-themed emails. This is what you can expect to find there:

Regardless of whether you start from scratch or use one of the templates, you can take full advantage of the built-in options of the email editor to shape the content and appearance of your follow-up emails.

Let’s take a closer look at the controls now 👇

Text formatting options

In the top-left corner, you’ll find all the text formatting options available:

To apply any of the following stylistic changes, make sure to select the necessary piece of text first. Follows a detailed description of each one of these controls. Feel free to skip to the next section if their functioning is obvious to you.

Use the Style menu to create headings of 3 levels, quotes, and notes to better organize your message.

Click the B button to make the text bold, the I button to italicize the text, and the U button to underline the text.

The Link button allows you to add a link to a piece of text:

Use the A button to change the color of the text and its background (the latter creates an effect of highlighted text):

Use these buttons Alignment to align the text to the left, center, and right sides respectively.

The last two buttons from this section Bulleted Numbered allow you to create a bullet list and a numbered list.

Let’s move on to the buttons on the right side of the screen.

Visual elements of the email

The controls in this section allow you to add visual elements to your email, namely:

• Images and GIFs
• CTA buttons
• Coupon boxes
• Dividers
• Countdown timers

Below is a more in-depth description of these options.

If you’re using a template that already features any of these elements, just click on them to open their settings or delete them.

Image

Click the image icon (Image) to add an image or GIF to your email. You can choose one from the built-in gallery or upload a creative from your device.

To resize the image or GIF, drag the arrows in the bottom right corner as shown above.

In the settings menu, you can also assign a specific URL to the image click and align it to the left, center, or right side of the email. The former is a good idea if you’re featuring a product in your email and want people to land on the product page if they click on the image.

Button (call-to-action)

Use the Button icon to add a CTA button that will take the recipients to the URL of your choice and style it to match the design and color palette of your email (and your brand’s vibes):

Coupon box

Coupon boxes (Coupon) allow you to conveniently display coupon codes for discounts. You can add one to your email and use the settings to customize its color, shape, and alignment:

Divider

Dividers Divider allow you to segment your email content. For example, if you want to visually separate your email's header or signature, dividers will help you do just that. You can position them wherever you prefer and change their color, size, width, and style:

Countdown timer

The countdown feature (Timer) lets you add a countdown timer to your follow-up email. Use it to add a sense of urgency to your offers or create hype for an event (e.g. start of a promo, launch of a new product or store, etc.).

Here are the countdown timer settings:

Let’s go over them one by one.

The first control allows you to choose between an evergreen timer and a fixed-date timer.

The evergreen timer starts when the email lands in the recipient's inbox and counts down the number of hours or days you’ve set up.

The fixed-date timer will display the time remaining until a date and time of your choosing.

Use ‘Captions’ to rewrite the time units if your subscribers’ language is different from English.

Choose among 4 different styles for your countdown timer: