As an incentive to join an email list, you may want to offer a free e-course, where subscribers receive a sequence of emails over a set period of time. Rather than sell a course that requires visitors to register a user account, you can set up an Autoresponder using the RainMail functionality and build an email list you can use to hopefully convert subscribers into customers.

In this tutorial I will show you how to create an Autoresponder sequence using the RainMail email marketing tools and the Rainmaker Autoresponder feature.

Video Instructions – click play below

Text instructions

To set up the Autoresponder, there are a few steps to go through. Firstly we are going to create the autoresponder sequence that contain the emails to be sent to our subscribers. After the Autoresponder, we will create a RainMail email list to add our subscribers to. And finally, we will add an opt in form to our website for people to add their email address and subscribe to the email list.

Follow the text instructions below.

1. To create the autoresponder, hover over the ‘Edit’ link in the blue admin bar and click Autoresponder Sequences’. Click the blue ‘Add New Sequence’. In the next screen, you will be prompted to give the sequence a title and select from either a pre-existing sequence template, or create a sequence from scratch.

2. Once you have chosen a template, you will be directed to the Autoresponder editing area. To make any changes to the existing sequence, hover over the area you want to edit and click the ‘pencil’ icon or click on the text (such as the title or message text).

3. After you have added the email sequence, click ‘Publish’. A window will appear with a progress bar to show the status of the sequence creation. Once the sequence is created, the editing area will refresh.

4. Next, we are creating the email list to subscribe visitors to. Hover over the cog icon in the right of the blue menu bar and select ‘Email’. Click the blue ‘Add New Email List’ and complete the details for the new list.]

5. Finally we need to create a custom form that will be used for the Opt In. Hover over the ‘Manage’ link in the blue admin bar and select ‘Form’. Use the ‘Email Marketing’ tab to integrate the RainMail email list with the form.

6. Lastly, go back to the ‘Manage’ –> ‘Form’ area and copy the shortcode for the form. The shortcode can be used to embed into any content area on your site, such as posts, pages and text widgets. For your widget areas, you can also use the ‘Form Widget’.

7. Once everything is in place, I recommend testing the sign up process, which you can do using a disposable email address if you have Gmail. Just add ‘+subscriber’ (minus the single quotes) after your email handle – yourname+subsciber@gmail.com. The email will come into your normal inbox, but will have the subscriber part added to it.

And that is it!