Engage Your Audience with Email Automation

Transform your audience into customers with Thinkific's email automation — no marketing expertise required!

This feature is currently in Beta and we are continuing to build this functionality. If you have any feedback, please reach out and let us know.

About Email Automation

Marketing and sales can be time-consuming and complex. With Thinkific’s email automation, we take the heavy lifting out of your marketing efforts. Grow and manage your email list, and launch
automated sales flows and abandoned cart reminder emails designed to help drive and recapture sales.

This means you can focus more on creating and teaching, while we streamline your path to business growth. All the tools you need are integrated in one place, simplifying your process and freeing up your time—no expertise required.

Email Automation allows you to:

Take the guesswork out of marketing and selling
Leverage AI to generate and test copy, email subject lines, and calls to action, ensuring your emails resonate with your audience.
Grow your email list
Having all your email contacts within Thinkific makes it easier than ever to grow your list and keep your contacts organized and engaged.
Create sophisticated email sequences
Create powerful and effective email sequences designed to get your leads' attention, and convert them into customers.
Win back abandoned carts with ease
Send automated emails to customers who leave their cart without completing the purchase.
Centralize your marketing and selling efforts, all in one place
Stop jumping back and forth between platforms and get valuable time back for what you do best. Email your leads directly from Thinkific, or integrate with the wider suite of products you already use.

Learn more about Email Automation in the demo video below:

How Email Automation Works

We are continuously working on improving the Email Automation functionality. If you have any feedback, please let us know!

Email Automation is the built-in Thinkific feature that allows you to send email sequences to your contacts who fit certain criteria. Thinkific offers several email automations, including the email sales flow and the abandoned cart email.

Abandoned Cart Email

An abandoned cart email automatically sends a follow-up email to students who abandon their cart, helping you convert missed opportunities into sales. By automating follow-up emails, this tool helps you recover lost sales and boost conversion rates, all behind the scenes without any extra effort from you.

The abandoned cart functionality is available on paid plans to creators using TCommerce. To access the abandoned cart feature, as well as other great TCommerce features, enable Thinkific Payments on your account: Thinkific Payments.

Learn more about the feature here: TCommerce: Abandoned Cart Emails.

Email Sequences

Each email sequence has the following:

Email Analytics
Triggers
Exit Conditions
Email Sequence flow
Emails with pre-built templates

The Email Analytics section offers valuable insights into the performance of your email flows, allowing you to gain a deeper understanding of how well your emails are resonating with your audience.

The Triggers define which contacts (leads or users) will be entered into the email sequence. A contact will need to meet the criteria in order to enter the flow. If using an AND command, all of the conditions must be met in order for the contact to enter the sequence. If using an OR command, any of the conditions must be met in order for the contact to enter the sequence.

The Exit Conditions define which contacts (leads or users) already in the sequence will be skipped or removed from the flow. If using an AND command, all of the conditions must be met in order for the contact to exit the sequence. If using an OR command, any of the conditions must be met in order for the contact to exit the sequence.

At the moment, triggers and exit conditions cannot be modified.

The Email Sequence flow provides a visual representation of the sequence of emails that the contacts will receive. The flow specifies the time in between sent emails and an overview of each email, including the email subject line. Click on each email to open and edit it.

Emails with pre-built templates allow you to quickly edit the AI-generated templates and add a personal touch.

Available Email Sequences

At the moment, Thinkific's Email Automation feature offers one email sequence: Sales Flow.

A Sales Flow is a series of emails designed to engage recipients by addressing their needs, positioning your brand as the solution, and guiding your recipients to purchase your product or service. The Sales Flow sequence allows you to select a product you want to sell and target leads, encouraging them to purchase that product.

A Sales Flow has the following:

Setup: Select one product that leads or users will be encouraged to purchase
Trigger: Sales Flow targets leads / users / leads & users that meet ALL of the following criteria:
- Is subscribed AND
- Has not purchased the product you selected in the setup
- Optional: Came from any lead magnet or a specific lead magnet
Note that only leads created after the sequence was published will be added to it. Existing leads will not enter the sequence.
Exit Conditions: Leads or userse can meet ANY of the following conditions to be removed from the sequence:
- Has unsubscribed OR
- Has purchased the product you selected in the setup

Create Your Email Sequence

Your email address must be verified in order to start creating Email Sequences.

To create an Email Sequence:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Marketing
Select Email Automation
In the Start with an email flow section, select the template for the type of sequence you want to create
Follow AI prompts and answer questions to help create an email template

Once the AI has finished generating the content, you will be brought to the sequence screen, where you can review your emails and publish your sequence!

Edit Your Email Sequence

After you create your sequence, you can start editing emails within the sequence. To do that:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Marketing
Select Email Automation
In the Your email flows section, select the sequence you want to edit
In the Sales Flow section, select the email you want to edit
Use the email editor to edit the body of the email
When finished, click Save

HTML editing is not supported in the email editor.

When using AI-generated email templates, make sure to personalize your emails further by filling in the information in the prompts in square brackets. For example, if you see a sentence like this: I started this work with the goal of [MISSION STATEMENT], make sure to replace square brackets with your own response.

Use variables to customize emails to include your contact information, such as name. When inserted, variables will automatically populate data based on the information of the contact who receives the email.

For example, using {{recipient_name}} in your email will automatically replace the variable with the name of the recipient.

The available variables include:

{{recipient_name}} - replaced with the name of the contact
{{product_name}} - replaced with the name of the product that the flow is based on
{{product_link}} - replaced with the link to the landing or product page of the product that the flow is based on

If you are editing an already published sequence, make sure to click Publish changes to save and apply your updates! You can also click the Send Test Email button to send a preview email to yourself to see how your email flow will look.

Publish and Unpublish Your Email Sequence

When your email sequence is ready, you can publish it!

From your Admin Dashboard, select Marketing
Select Email Automation
In the Your email flows section, select the sequence you want to edit
Select Publish
Confirm the What, When, and the Recipient Rules of the sequence
Click Publish flow

If you are publishing your first sequence, you will be required to provide your physical email address. To comply with anti-spam legislation, we need a physical address on record for email senders. Your address will not be included on any emails, instead, Thinkific includes a virtual PO box address where customers can send physical ‘unsubscribe’ letters if they choose to.

And that's it! Once the sequence is published, the following happens:

Any time a recipient meets the trigger criteria, they will be admitted into the sequence
The sequence will run according to the flow you set up, e.g. the first email will be sent 1 hour after a recipient meets the criteria, the second 2 days after, etc.
The recipient will be removed from the sequence if they meet exit conditions
Any changes made to the sequence will need to be published by clicking Publish changes

If you want to unpublish your flow, you can do it by following these instructions:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Marketing
Select Email Automation
In the Your email flows section, select the sequence you want to edit
Select the three dots on the top right
Select Unpublish flow

Once the sequence is unpublished, the following happens:

Recipients are no longer admitted into the sequence
Recipients who are in the middle of the sequence will no longer receive additional emails

Email Analytics

Analytics offer valuable insights into the performance of your email flows and abandoned cart emails, allowing you to gain a deeper understanding of how these automations are performing and converting your audience.

The following email stats are available:

Delivered: The total number of emails that successfully reached recipients' inboxes.
Opened %: The percentage of delivered emails that were opened by recipients.
Click Through Rate (CTR) %: The percentage of subscribers who clicked on at least one link in an email out of the total emails delivered.
Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR) %: The percentage of subscribers who clicked on at least one link in an email out of the total opened emails.

From the Email Automation page, you will see this data displayed next to each of your email flows.

In addition, you can click into a specific flow to view the stats for each individual email within a flow, which is displayed at the top of the email editor. The stats for the overall flow will also be displayed at the top of the page.

As this feature launched on October 4, 2024, analytics are only available from this date onwards.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I delete my email sequence?

Yes, you can delete a sequence you no longer need:

From your Admin Dashboard, select Marketing
Select Email Automation
In the Your email flows section, select the sequence you want to edit
Select the three dots on the top right
Select Delete flow

Please note that the deletion is permanent and irreversible. We recommend saving a copy of your emails somewhere first to ensure that no email templates are lost.

Can I customize triggers, exit conditions, or the time between the emails?

You can modify some trigger conditions for certain sequences. At the moment, it is not possible to customize the exit conditions or the flow of the email sequence. If this is something you are interested in, please let us know!

Do I have to use the AI to create my emails?

No, you can skip the AI prompt and write the email copy yourself.

Can recipients opt out of my emails?

Yes, emails include an unsubscribe link, which they can use to stop receiving further emails from the sequence. This status will be reflected in the Leads table.

Will the existing leads enter the sequence when I publish it?

No. If your email sequence targets leads, only leads that were collected after an email sequence was published and met the trigger criteria will enter the email sequence. The existing leads will not be entered into an email sequence when it is published.

What happens when I unpublish a sequence and then republish it again?

If a sequence is unpublished, and then republished, the recipients will receive the next email based on where they left off in the sequence, if the system did not attempt to email them while the sequence was unpublished. If the system has attempted to email a recipient while the sequence was unpublished, then they will not receive further emails.

Do these new email automation capabilities replace Thinkific’s existing email capabilities (e.g. mass emails, welcome emails, etc)?

No. At this time, using Thinkific’s Mass User Email functionality is the only way to send a broadcast email to a single or several students at once. Similarly, other automated notifications, such as welcome emails, cannot be sent using Email Automation functionality.

How is Email Automation different from Thinkific’s existing Mass Email Feature?

Thinkific’s Email Automation feature allows you to create and send automated emails to leads based on triggers. This new feature leverages AI, where you can complete a few key prompts to generate a sequence, based on your digital learning product. On the contrary, the Mass Email feature requires you to create your own emails and audience and send them manually.

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