Customers on our Professional and Business plans can create an automation that sends a single email. Customers on our Business plan have the option to add steps to their automation to create a series of emails.
This guide will help you prepare to use Copper's new email automation feature and will cover:
Overview of email automations
Copper's email automations feature allows you to automate follow-ups with your warm relationships.
You should only automate emails to people who are expecting an email from you. Unwanted emails may be marked as spam by the recipients, which could affect the deliverability of all emails sent from your Gmail Account.
You can easily create an automation using one of our pre-configured options in the gallery:
Rekindle: Automatically email People I haven't heard from in a while
List: Automatically email People when they are added to a specific List (saved filter)
You must be an Admin User or Account Owner to access Email Automation
How Copper sends automated emails
To make your automated emails more personal and targeted, Copper uses your connected Google Account to send emails on your behalf from your Gmail email address.
Copper's automated emails are only sent via Gmail. There is no way to automate an email from another provider.
You can choose to send an automated email from either the Automation Owner (which is you) or the Contact's Owner. In either case, the User(s) must have a Google Account connected.
If you choose "Contact Owner", any Contacts who do not have an Owner will receive the automated email from the Automation Owner (which is you).
Be sure your Contact Owners have their Google Accounts connected. If you choose to send an email on behalf of a User who does not have a Google Account connected:
The email will not be sent that day
You will see an error message in the automations detail panel letting you know which User(s) need to connect a Google Account
Unsent automated emails will be retried the following day in accordance with the sending schedule. We will retry each Contact up to 3 times. This gives you time to reach out to the User(s) to connect their Google Account or change the Contact Owner to a different User.
When Copper sends automated emails
Automated emails are sent on weekdays between the hours of 8 am and 6 pm, adhering to the Company time zone set in Settings > Workflow Automation.
Automated emails are queued to be sent every hour.
When you create a new automation, automated emails will start sending within the hour. If a large number of contacts meet the initial criteria, due to the daily send limit, it may take more than one day to send the emails.
Ongoing, any contact who meets the criteria for one of your automations will receive the email within the hour, provided it is within the sending schedule and you have not exceeded your daily limit. For example, if you have an email automation tied to a List (Saved Filter), when a person appears on the List, they will receive the automated email within the hour.
Read our article on viewing the status of contacts in your email automations to find out more about the emails that are sent.
There is no way to unsend an automated email. If you make a mistake, delete your automation as soon as possible.
Uses and limitations
Copper's email automation feature should only be used to automate follow-ups with your warm relationships. This means the other person recognizes your email address and is likely expecting an email from you. You will be able to see these emails in your Sent folder in Gmail, and if the Contact responds to the email you will see them threaded together in Gmail.
These are called transactional emails. They are emails that you would normally send yourself one by one and are more likely to appear in the recipient's Important tab within Gmail.
Some common use cases that are supported:
✅ Staying top-of-mind with your customers to encourage repeat business and referrals
✅ Automating follow-ups with warm business opportunities
✅ Responding to new inquiries from your website's Contact Us form
✅ Recognizing important customer milestones – for example, by using our new Recurring Date Filters to create a List of "Birthdays Today"
❌ Copper's email automation feature should not be used to automate marketing emails or outreach to cold Contacts. Marketing emails have needs and requirements that Copper's email automation feature does not support, such as:
Legally required to have an unsubscribe button
Recipients are aware they are part of an automated campaign
Emails may be HTML – for example, a monthly newsletter
Sent via a dedicated email service, where you've "mapped your domain" to make the emails appear to be sent from you but are actually sent via the service
Many Copper customers have a need to automate both transactional and marketing emails as part of their communications strategy. Copper has several integration options for customers who wish to utilize email marketing solutions:
Because emails are sent on your behalf from your Google Account, unsupported use of the feature may lead to your emails appearing in recipients' Spam folders.
Daily send limitation
Additionally, there is a limit of 500 automated emails that can be sent per day from your company with this feature. This includes automated emails that are sent on behalf of the Automation Owner or Contact Owner(s).
The Copper daily send limit is for your protection. Google also limits the number of Gmail messages users can send per day. The Google limit includes emails you send from Gmail, Copper, or any other app. If you exceed your Google limit, you will not be allowed to send new emails for up to 24 hours. By limiting the number of automated emails that can be sent from Copper, we are hoping to help you avoid hitting the Google limit.
Copper's email automation feature includes automatic daily retries. If you have an email automation where the initial send on the first day exceeds 500, the remaining emails will be attempted the following day.
Ok, ready to go? Great! Be sure to check out or guide on creating an email automation.
Then navigate to Settings > Automations > Email Automation to get started 👏
💡 Tip
Have questions or feedback? Contact our Customer Success Team using the in-app chat or create a post in our Community.