What is a Recurring Email and How to Send One?
A recurring email, such as reminders, weekly reports, or newsletters, is sent automatically on a regular basis.
Let’s say you sell digital products centered on habit creation and routine checkups. You could send email reminders to customers about their weekly goals or planners.
Even though you have a great email campaign template, creating a similar email each time can be time-consuming. This is where recurring emails help you streamline communication and maintain consistent customer engagement by automating the process.
Once you set up recurring emails, you can send different emails in just a few clicks.
We’ll learn how to set up and work with recurring emails to simplify email marketing and achieve better results.
What is a Recurring Email?
Recurring emails can be weekly email marketing newsletters or monthly team updates. They are typically automated to achieve specific marketing objectives.
For example, you can increase email click-through rates by providing the latest industry news or interesting email content to capture the audience’s attention.
Since it’s impractical to produce similar emails each time you wish to send them, you will schedule them using email marketing software.
Here are a few use cases for recurring emails:
- Reminders: Send out weekly reminders for project deadlines, team meetings, or personal tasks.
- Reports: Automatically distribute reports at regular intervals.
- Newsletters: Send industry news, updates, and content to email marketing subscribers at specific times, such as weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly.
- Follow-ups: Sending automatic follow-up emails to customers or clients.
- Birthday or anniversary emails: These emails are sent annually to celebrate the recipient’s birthday or a milestone.
- Subscription renewals: Notifications are sent to remind customers about upcoming subscription renewals.
Setting up recurring emails can foster better brand trust with customers and eliminate room for manual errors.
For instance, your subscribers may look forward to your email newsletter, but the campaign might have completely slipped off your mind. It can result in decreased subscriber trust and higher unsubscribe rates if the pattern continues.
Scheduling emails in advance will save you the embarrassment and keep customer loyalty intact.
The Advantages of Sending Recurring Emails
Recurring emails offer a multitude of benefits for businesses and individuals.
Here’s a breakdown of how it helps:
- They save time: Automating repetitive tasks helps you focus energy and resources on other critical matters.
- They improve consistency: Scheduling emails ensures the information consistently reaches your audience and helps maintain a uniform brand voice.
- They enhance efficiency: Recurring emails reduce errors for repetitive tasks, and automate routine communication.
- They increase engagement: The frequent and consistent presence in recipients’ inboxes keeps your brand top of mind and increases engagement.
- They help you stay up-to-date: You can schedule the emails and forget about them instead of constantly having to send reminders and follow up with teammates manually.
Recurring emails are especially helpful in an organizational setting to remind employees of the upcoming deadline or report submission.
You can also use them to send various types of emails to retain customer attention and increase marketing revenue, like the ones below.
What Type of Emails are Best as Recurring Emails?
Although recurring emails are helpful for recreating and sending the same type of messages, not all emails are best sent as recurring messages.
Certain email types could require more flexibility and personalization. For example, recurring emails are not meant for urgent or time-sensitive emails. Similarly, data that changes frequently, such as stock prices or weather reports, might not be suitable as a recurring email.
The table below showcases the ideal types:
| Type of occasion | Example |
|---|---|
| Personal use | ‣ Outing reminders ‣ Bill due dates ‣ Birthdays ‣ Anniversaries ‣ Medical appointments |
| Business use | ‣ Weekly or monthly newsletters ‣ Sales performance reports ‣ Follow-up emails ‣ Weekly or daily team summaries ‣ Drip or promotional campaigns ‣ Event invitations ‣ Educational content ‣ Troubleshooting guides for customer queries |
We’ll review the business email types in detail to better understand the nature of recurring emails.
1. Company Newsletters
If you want to stay consistent, email newsletters can be a great way. They help you pass on company updates, promotions, and industry news to keep your customers’ interest alive. You can use recurring emails to send important information on a regular basis.
2. Follow-up Emails
Follow-up emails allow you to gain customer trust by maintaining consistent communication. You’ll typically follow up after someone purchases your product or seek a customer satisfaction rating after resolving their queries.
3. Reminder Emails
Reminder emails can help you navigate the email marketing customer journey by guiding users toward specific actions. You can remind people to complete an email survey, check appointment schedules, or use their birthday coupons.
Overall, any email that requires constant updates or reminders is good as a recurring email.
Crafting and sending them is similar to setting up abandoned email campaigns — you typically compose the email and set the recurrence pattern.
How to Set Up a Recurring Email in 8 Steps
While the technical steps can vary with different email clients, here are the basic best practices for setting up a recurring email.
1. Define your Goal
Determine what you want to achieve with the recurring emails. It could be onboarding new customers, nurturing subscribers, or sending promotional emails. Clearly define measurable objectives such as increasing engagement, driving sales, or improving customer retention.
2. Choose an Email Marketing Platform
Select a reliable email marketing service that supports recurring emails. For example, Campaign Refinery allows clients to micro-segment their email list and set up recurring emails in a few quick steps.
Thoroughly understand the platform’s features to set up proper automation workflows. Here’s a guide to help you choose the right automation platform in 2024.
3. Segment your Audience
Divide your email list based on demographic, psychographic, or relative segmentation. This helps you focus your messaging on the right audience, addressing all their requirements.
You can target each customer segment with relevant recurring emails to increase personalization. For example, you can incentivize regular shoppers who have expressed interest in certain products or added items to their shopping carts.
4. Plan your Email Sequence
Map out the structure of your recurring email. Do you want to send it daily or bi-weekly, and what will your recurring email contain?
Pay attention to the subject line and email content in particular. Misleading or irrelevant content can confuse consumers and likely increase unsubscribe rates.
5. Create Compelling Content
Ensure the content is valuable, informative, and aligned with your overall marketing goals. Each email should have a specific action you want the recipient to take. For instance, your reminder emails can contain links to relevant pages where customers can take action.
6. Design your Email
Use professional looking email campaign templates to maintain professionalism and brand trust. Most email service providers offer pre-built templates that can be customized to fit your brand image.
Campaign Refinery’s built-in campaign library contains sophisticated templates adhering to email design best practices. All templates are automatically optimized for mobile email marketing.
You can also include high-quality visuals and videos to make your recurring emails stand out in a rather crowded inbox.
7. Set up Automation
Utilize your email service provider to schedule recurring emails based on specific timelines. For instance, if you regularly send team updates every Thursday evening, you can set up recurrence for this timing to stay consistent with updates.
8. Test and Optimize
Watch out for your recurring email performance and test it before sending. You can send it to yourself or your team to check for errors and optimize it for better readability.
Continually monitor the email campaign metrics such as open rates and click-through rates to understand what works best.
While these are general guidelines, the set-up pattern for recurring emails will vary with each email client.
Let’s learn how to schedule emails on major email clients such as Gmail and Outlook.
How to Send a Recurring Email on Gmail?
Unfortunately, Gmail does not have a built-in feature that lets you send recurring emails. However, you can still schedule the message to be sent later.
Note that this option schedules the current email message and is not an automation tool to set up for the future.
Follow the steps below to set recurrence in Gmail using a third-party tool:
- Compose a new email in Gmail,
- Craft the message,
- Click the ‘Send Later’ button on the left corner,
- Select schedule recurring message.
Setting up recurring emails in Gmail is simple, but you might have to master a few key principles to do it correctly. The best way is to download a third-party tool such as Boomerang, Gmelius, or Right Inbox.
How to Send Recurring Emails on Outlook?
Here are the steps to create a recurring email in Outlook:
- Open Outlook and click on the ‘New email’ button to compose a message,
- Write the email,
- Click on the ‘Options’ tab at the top of the window,
- Click on the ‘Delay delivery’ button and the ‘Properties’ window will open,
- In the properties window click on the ‘Do not deliver before’ dropdown and select the recurring option,
- In the recurrence section, choose the frequency for your emails,
- Click ‘OK’.
- Click the ‘Send’ button to schedule the recurring email.
Note that the recurring email feature is only available on the Outlook Desktop version.
Recurring Email Best Practices
Recurring emails can be a powerful tool to retain customer interest, but it’s important to use them effectively.
Be mindful of these best practices to stay consistent with your customers:
- Have a purpose: Understand the need to send a recurring email, whether its for newsletters or team reminders.
- Keep it concise and relevant: Maintain the similar structure and length for all recurring emails. This will help customers remember your brand and stay in-tune with your email content.
- Personalize when possible: Use recipient’s names or refer previous interaction to create a lasting impression. People are more likely to associate with brands that remember and value them.
- Optimize email frequency: Consider audiences’ preferences and their available times. Sending a recurring email at this time will increase the chances of people taking the desired action.
- Test different send times: Analyze email open rates to determine the best time to send the email.
- Avoid overwhelming recipients: Respect the recipient’s time and find a balance that keeps audience engaged without overwhelming them. Too many emails can lead to unsubscribes or emails being marked as spam.
- Create urgency or curiosity: Without being misleading, consider promoting urgency through regular offers or countdown timers. Be careful, though, since too much urgency can overthrow customers.
- Include clear calls-to-action: Although recurring emails could look similar, including specific calls-to-action for each will improve the chances of people taking action.
- Maintain compliance: Ensure you comply with relevant regulations regarding email marketing, including proper consent and providing options for easy unsubscribes. Campaign Refinery includes a true-one click unsubscribe in all emails clients send out.
With the above tips, you can create a recurring email strategy that keeps your audience engaged, sparks curiosity, and drives the desired outcome.
Ensure you use a reliable email services platform to schedule your emails. Below, we’ll review the tools that will help you set up recurring emails with ease.
Tools for Setting Up Recurring Emails
We’ve compiled a list of third-party tools compatible with email clients. If you’re using an ESP, the built-in automation tool will take care of your recurring email needs.
| Tool | Platform Compatibility |
|---|---|
| Boomerang | Gmail, Outlook |
| RightInbox | Gmail |
| Yesware | Gmail, Outlook |
| Hubspot | Gmail, Outlook |
| Mailchimp | Email marketing platform |
| ActiveCampaign | Email marketing platform |
| Campaign Refinery | Email marketing platform |
While the above tools can refine the process of setting up recurring emails, a reliable platform like Campaign Refinery can elevate your email marketing results.
Set Up Recurring Email With Campaign Refinery for Best Results
Campaign Refinery is a robust email marketing platform with advanced features for setting up and managing recurring emails. And much more!
By becoming our client, you can:
- Create complex automation sequences with recurring email components.
- Build reusable email templates for consistency.
- Target and combine specific audience segments with our advanced and exclusive ‘Audience Groups’ feature.
- Track and analyze recurring emails’ performance through a one-view email analytics dashboard.
More importantly, you can enjoy the highest email deliverability rate on the market. This ensures your emails reach your intended recipients, increasing the likelihood of them taking action.
Our clients have consistently noticed a 600% increase in inbox placement rates after moving to our platform.
Apply and become our client today to enjoy premium features and better email marketing results!
