An auto emailer sends a specific email to a specific person the moment something happens in your business, without anyone on your team pressing send. Set one up properly and the emails your staff currently write by hand, the "thanks for your enquiry", the "here is the brochure", the "your proposal is attached", go out within seconds and read the same every time. This article answers one question: which emails should you hand to an auto emailer first, and how do you build the first one on the levelpartner.ai platform.
What an auto emailer does, in plain terms
Every auto emailer has three parts. A trigger, which is the event that starts it. A message, which is the email itself. And a rule about who receives it. On the platform, those three parts live in a workflow under Automation, and the email itself is built in the Marketing area or written directly inside the workflow step.
The difference from a scheduled newsletter is timing. A newsletter goes to many people at a time you choose. An auto emailer goes to one person at the time they act. That makes it the right tool for anything a prospect or client expects to receive straight away.
Choosing the first email to automate
Open your sent folder and look at the last month. You are looking for emails that a person on your team wrote more than five times with only the name changed. Those are your candidates.
In a 60-person firm, the usual list looks like this:
- The reply to a website enquiry.
- The confirmation after someone books a call.
- The pack sent after a first meeting.
- The reminder chasing an unsigned proposal.
Start with the enquiry reply. It has the clearest trigger, the highest stakes for speed, and it is the email most often sent late or not at all. Once that one is live and stable, add the next.
Before you start
- A sending domain connected and verified in Settings, so the email does not arrive from a generic address.
- The form, calendar or pipeline stage that will act as the trigger, already built and in use.
- One version of the email copy, approved by whoever owns the client relationship.
- A test contact record using a staff member's real email address.
How to set it up
- Open Automation, then Workflows, then + Create Workflow.
- Select Start from scratch.
- Click Add New Trigger and choose Form Submitted.
- Name the trigger so colleagues know what it does.
- Set the Form Is filter to your enquiry form.
- Add further filters if needed, then save the trigger.
- Click + and choose the Send Email action.
- Complete From Name, From Email and Subject.
- Write the Email Body and insert the first name custom value.
- Use Send Test Mail, then click Save Action.
- Submit the form as a test contact and read the email.
- Switch the workflow to Publish and save it.
What it replaces in a 10 to 250 person company
Before an auto emailer, the enquiry reply depends on whoever is watching the shared inbox. On a busy Tuesday that might be within the hour. On a Friday afternoon it might be Monday. For a firm with flat revenue, that delay is one of the cheapest leaks to fix, because the lead already exists and the marketing cost is already spent.
The auto emailer replaces the manual first touch, not the human conversation. It confirms receipt, sets an expectation for when a person will call, and gives the prospect something useful to read while they wait. Your team still makes the call. They just make it to someone who has already heard from you.
Say the operations lead estimates each manual reply takes four minutes to find, copy, edit and send. At 120 enquiries, that is 480 minutes, or eight hours a month spent typing the same email. With the auto emailer live, the reply would leave within a minute of each enquiry, and those eight hours could go to calling the enquiries that look qualified. The inputs here are hypothetical.
The time it takes each week
Building the first auto emailer takes an hour or two, most of it spent agreeing the wording. After that, the weekly cost is close to zero. Someone should open the workflow once a week, check the number of contacts who passed through matches the number of enquiries, and read any replies the email generated.
The mistake most people make
They write the auto emailer as if it were a marketing email: a logo banner, three images, a list of services. Someone who has just filled in a form wants confirmation and a next step. Write it like a short note from a person. Plain text, four or five sentences, signed by a name.
Sending the auto emailer from a no-reply address. Prospects reply to these emails with questions, and a no-reply address throws those replies away. Always use a monitored inbox.
When not to use one
Do not automate an email that needs judgement. A response to a complaint, a reply to a detailed brief, or a message to a client whose project has gone wrong should come from a person who has read the situation. If the email would need editing more than half the time, keep it manual and save a template instead.
If you plan to add more than one message after the first, the right tool is a sequence rather than a single email. Our guide to building an email sequence with sensible spacing covers that step, and the article on setting up an email autoresponder covers replies to inbound email rather than form submissions.
Troubleshooting
The email is not sending. Check the workflow is published, not saved as a draft. Then open the contact's record and look at the workflow history to see whether they entered the workflow at all.
The first name shows as blank. The form did not map the name into the contact's first name field. Fix the form field mapping, then add a fallback such as "there" for contacts without a first name.
The email lands in spam. Your sending domain is probably not authenticated. Finish the domain verification in Settings and see our article on configuring the sender behind your automated email.
Some contacts receive it twice. The same person submitted the form twice, or two triggers fire for one event. Set the workflow to allow a contact to enter only once, or remove the duplicate trigger.
Frequently asked questions
Is an auto emailer the same as an autoresponder?
Close, but not quite. An autoresponder usually replies to an email someone sent you. An auto emailer can start from any event: a form, a booking, a stage change in a pipeline or a payment.
Can I send attachments from an auto emailer?
You can link to a file stored in Media Storage, which is more reliable than an attachment. Large attachments raise spam scores and often get stripped by company mail filters.
How many auto emailers should a firm run?
Fewer than you think. Most firms of this size get the value from four or five well-chosen triggers. Each one you add is another email to keep accurate when your services or prices change.
Will prospects know the email is automated?
Only if it reads like it. A short, specific message signed by a real person, sent within a minute, reads as attentive rather than automated.