Automate review-request follow-ups

The three stages

• First follow-up

  When it sends

  After a delay you set from the original send

  Its own subject line

  Yes

  Repeats

  No — once only

• Second follow-up

  When it sends

  After a further delay from the first follow-up

  Its own subject line

  Yes

  Repeats

  No — once only

• Repeating reminder

  When it sends

  On a repeating interval after the earlier stages

  Its own subject line

  Yes

  Repeats

  Yes, until the cap or a stopping condition

Each stage carries its own subject line, and each delay can be set in hours or in days — so "three hours later" and "three days later" are both available.

There is a hard ceiling of ten follow-ups per person. The repeating reminder fills the remaining slots, so with the first and second stages enabled it can fire at most eight more times. Nobody receives more than ten, whatever you configure.

The checkbox that decides whether clicking stops the chasing

Step 3 has one setting that matters more than the rest: Stop follow-ups once the recipient clicks a review link.

Synup ticks it for you on a new campaign, so the default behaviour is the one you would hope for: once someone clicks through — or leaves a rating — they drop out of the remaining follow-ups.

It is still the box to look at before you launch, because it is a checkbox and checkboxes get unticked. If it is clear, everyone keeps receiving reminders on schedule — including the people who already did what you asked. That is the quickest way to irritate a customer who has just reviewed you.

Worth a glance on any campaign you did not build yourself, and on anything cloned from an older one.

Each stage is switched on separately with its own toggle. The subject and delay fields for a stage only appear once you enable it, which is why an unused stage looks so bare.

Follow-ups are email only

An SMS-only campaign gets no follow-ups at all. Not fewer — none. The follow-up step does not even appear in the builder when you choose SMS only, and if a campaign is later running as SMS-only nothing is scheduled for it.

If reminders matter to you, the campaign has to include email.

What else stops a follow-up

Whatever that checkbox is set to, a follow-up will not go out when:

• the campaign has been stopped — use Stop on the campaign to halt every remaining stage at once
• the person unsubscribed — the unsubscribe link honours itself immediately
• their address is on your suppression list — usually because of an earlier bounce or complaint
• they have already had that stage — each person receives each stage once, so re-running does not double up

Stop is the control to reach for if you realise something is wrong mid-campaign. It is faster and more complete than editing individual stages.

Checking what a campaign is set to do

The Invite list has a Follow-ups column showing how many have gone out per campaign. A campaign that has been running for a while with a count of zero usually means the stages were never enabled, or the campaign is SMS-only.

Next

• Create a review campaign
• Send from your own domain