Customers on our Professional and Business plans can create an automation that sends a single email. Customers on our Business plan can add steps to their automation to create a series of emails.

This guide will help you prepare to use Copper's email automation feature and will cover:

With Copper's email automations feature, you can automate outreach to your warm contacts through customizable email sequences. It's easy to get started using our gallery of pre-configured templates.

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, facilitating seamless email sequences.

This is a benefit because:

Automated emails are sent on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., adhering to the Company time zone set in Settings > Workflow Automation.

When you create a new automation, automated emails will start sending right away. If your automation has a large audience, 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.

Additionally, there is a limit of 900 automated emails that can be sent per day from your company with this feature.

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 hope to help you avoid hitting the Google limit.

Copper's email automations feature should only be used to automate follow-ups with your warm relationships. This means the recipient recognizes your name, company and email address.

Here's a few examples of the kind of emails you should automate:

These are called transactional emails. They are emails that you would normally send yourself one by one. Transactional emails are not required to include an unsubscribe link.

Unlike transactional emails, marketing emails have requirements that Copper's email automation feature does not support, such as:

Many Copper customers 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:

There are some industry-standard best practices you can follow to increase the deliverability and engagement of your automated emails.

You want your automated outreach to be:

You want the content of the automated emails to be:

Let's dive into the steps you can take to achieve this!

The emails you send to your partners are different than the emails you send to your VIP customers. In Copper, create a saved filter of your contacts to create a segment you can use in email automations.

Copper's email automations use email templates. You can create an email template right from within email automations. You can also create an email template by navigating to Settings > Personal Preferences > Email Settings & Templates.

The most engaging emails with the highest deliverability are emails that are valuable and relevant to your audience. Take a moment to think about the content you're sending. Is it useful? Interesting? Unique?

If you’re writing a text-heavy email, break up large walls of text with bullet points and paragraphs. Use bold or italics to add emphasis if necessary.

To avoid spamming people, be sure your content is not promotional and does not include any phrases that email providers may misinterpret as "spammy" in nature. For example, you don't want a subject line that says "Open for 40% off!!!!!11!!!"

Adding an image to your email? We have some best practices for images in emails as well.

Want to add a video to your email? You can't embed a video directly into an email in Copper. But...you don't want to do that anyway. Email providers can sometimes block videos embedded in emails. Here's what we recommend:

Now, when recipients click the thumbnail, your video will open in a new tab.

Here's why this is a best practice:

Need some help getting started? Use our AI email templates to instantly create best-practices-based email templates that are tailored to your business and personalized with merge fields.

In Copper, you can add merge fields to both the subject and body of your email template. This creates a unique and personalized email for each recipient.

You can also use your custom fields as merge fields, which allows for even deeper personalization specific to each customer, opportunity, or project item.

Sometimes your automated outreach is just providing a status update, and that's ok! But for automated emails where you want the recipient to take an action, be sure your email copy makes it clear what that action is.

Here's a few examples of calls-to-action you could include in your automated outreach:

With Copper's email automations, you can see how many emails were sent, how many were opened, which links were clicked, and who replied.

If recipients aren't engaging with your emails, you may need to refine your audience further or tweak your content.

Over time, if recipients don’t consistently open, read, and engage with your content, it’ll be filtered into spam.

With Coppers's email automations, you can also see if there were issues delivering your emails.

Emails that hard bounce will not be retried. A hard bounce means the email address is incorrect or no longer exists. It could also mean that the contact has already blocked you from sending emails to them. You don't want to continue emailing an email address that has hard bounced – even a single email or bulk email. You should remove the email address from the contact's record until you can find their new contact information.

Emails that soft bounce will be retried. A soft bounce usually means the email is only temporarily undeliverable, such as when the recipient's inbox is full. 

When an automated email bounces, you can see this in the automations detail panel. Additionally, the user selected as the Send From for the automation will receive a bounce notification in their inbox. You can inspect these notifications for additional details on why the email bounced.

If you continue to send emails to email addresses that hard bounce, it could impact your deliverability and ability to send emails through Gmail.

Monitoring your email outreach efficacy and grooming your contact lists are an ongoing activity. Be sure you're checking in to see how your automated outreach is performing and taking any steps to increase your email engagement and maintain deliverability.

Have a question? Contact our Customer Success Team using the in-app chat 💬

Have a suggestion? Check out the Ideas board in our Community 👥