Scheduled reminders allow you to automatically send messages (through email or SMS) to contacts when certain criteria are met. For example, you can set up a reminder email to be automatically sent to participants the day before they attend an event.
Scheduled reminders can be created by navigating to Administer > Communications > Schedule Reminders or on the Schedule Reminder Tab during the creation of an event.
When you click on Add Reminder under Administer > Communications > Schedule Reminders. The exact options that are visible depend on the Entity chosen (Contacts, Activities, Memberships, Events, Contributions) but all scheduled reminders are fairly similar. The general process is:
1. Give your reminder a Title that will help you identify it.
2. Select the required Entity. The options you can base your scheduled reminder on will be displayed in the adjacent window. This a multi-select field, so you could choose to include more than one option in this field. Depending or your selection in this middle field a third set of option will appear in the right box.
3. Choose When to send the reminder. This can be a set date or an amount of time before or after the start or end of your chosen entity.
4. Check the Repeat box if you want to send this reminder more than once to the same group of people. This gives you choices about the interval of repetition and when the repetition should end.
5. Check Record activity for Automated Email if you want a record of the contacts who received this reminder.
6. Fill in From Name and/or From Email.
7. Limit or add to your recipient list. You can use the Limit To to make sure to only send the reminder to contacts that are in a specific group.
8. Choose to send your reminder as an email, an SMS. (The SMS option will only be available if you have set up an SMS Gateway)
9. Compose your message. You can use Message Templates or write the message from scratch.
10. Click Save when you are are done.
Here's a video demonstration on creating a scheduled reminder for an event.
Click here to see another article on exactly how to set up a follow-up email to get sent out after someone signs up for the newsletter.