New Feature: Zapier Integration (Early Access)

Got a new feature to tell you about. SendRecurring now connects to Zapier.

If you already use Sheets, Airtable, HubSpot, or a hundred other apps, you can create and manage recurring email or SMS reminders without copying everything into SendRecurring by hand. A new row, a new deal, a form submit — Zapier can turn that into a reminder on your schedule.

This is early access: the integration is private for now. If you want in, email me and I’ll invite your Zapier account.

What you can do

From a Zap, you can:

  • Create an email reminder (to / cc / bcc, subject, body, schedule)
  • Create an SMS reminder
  • Update an existing email reminder
  • Pause or resume an email reminder

Schedules are the same ones you already know in SendRecurring: every N days, weekdays, weekly, monthly, yearly, and so on.

How to connect

  1. Email me at conrad@sendrecurring.com and ask for the Zapier invite (include the email on your Zapier account).
  2. Accept the invite in Zapier.
  3. In SendRecurring, go to Settings → API Keys and create a key. Copy it once — we only show the full key at create time.
  4. In your Zap, add a SendRecurring action, connect your account, and paste the API key.

API keys are available on Basic and Pro plans.

Example: Google Sheets → recurring email

A simple Zap that works well:

  1. Trigger: Google Sheets — New Spreadsheet Row
  2. Action: SendRecurring — Create Email Reminder

Map columns like To, Subject, and Body from the sheet. Pick a schedule (for example monthly on the 1st at 9:00 AM).

Tip: set external_id to something stable from the row (like the row number or a unique ID column). If Zapier runs again for the same row, we update that reminder instead of creating a duplicate.

Why bother?

A lot of people already keep “who needs a reminder” in a spreadsheet or CRM. This keeps SendRecurring as the thing that actually sends on a schedule, while the other tools stay the source of truth for the data.

Same reminder engine as the website — Zapier is just another way to create and manage them.

What’s next

We’ll keep polishing based on real Zaps. Public listing in the Zapier directory comes later; for now it’s invite-only so we can help anyone who hits a snag.

If something’s confusing, broken, or you’ve got a workflow you want to automate, please email me.

Happy Sending!

conrad@sendrecurring.com

New Feature: Dead Man’s Switch

Got a new feature to tell you about. SendRecurring now has a Dead Man’s Switch.

If you’ve never heard of one: it’s a check-in system. You set it up, we email you on a schedule to confirm you’re okay, and if you don’t click the link, we send a message you wrote ahead of time to people you chose. Quiet in the background until it’s needed.

How it works

  1. You write a private message (the payload), pick one or more failsafe email addresses, and choose monthly or yearly checks.
  2. On that schedule, we email you a “confirm you’re okay” link.
  3. Click it and you’re good until the next check. No login required for the click itself.
  4. If you don’t confirm, we send a few reminders over about two weeks. Still nothing? Your payload goes out to the failsafe contacts and the switch is marked as triggered.

That’s it. Pretty straightforward.

Encrypted payloads

Your message is encrypted at rest in our database. We only decrypt it when you view or edit the switch, or when it’s actually delivered to your failsafe contacts.

Why bother?

Most of what SendRecurring does is reminders for life’s regular stuff: bills, invoices, meetings, “hey remember to do the thing.” A dead man’s switch is for the other category – stuff you want someone to know if something happens to you. Passwords, instructions, wishes, “here’s where the important folder is,” whatever you wouldn’t want left unsaid.

Plans

  • Basic — 1 dead man’s switch
  • Pro — up to 3
  • Free — not included (you’ll see the button; upgrading unlocks it)

These check-ins, reminders, and failsafe emails do not count against your regular monthly email quota.

Where to find it

Log in, go to Manage, and you’ll see a Dead Man’s Switch button next to New Email / Poll / Text. There’s also a writeup here if you want more detail: https://www.sendrecurring.com/dead-mans-switch

If something’s confusing, broken, or you have ideas for how this should work, please email me.

Happy Sending!

conrad@sendrecurring.com

Free SMS Quota Change

Due to rising SMS costs, suspected spam, and a proliferation of free accounts, we have reduced the text quota on the Free plan from 5 texts per month to 1 text per month.

We believe that 1 text per month is sufficient for a Free account to validate that the feature works.

Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

PSA: Changed Outgoing Text Phone Number

Just wanted to let you all know that the outgoing number for all text messages from SendRecurring is changing to 213-214-0476. For you global users, that is a United States number, so make sure you add a +1 in front of any filters that you had in place for it or in any address book entries.

Let me know if you have any questions! conrad@sendrecurring.com.

8 Ways Recurring Emails Will Make Your Life Easier

SendRecurring is more than just a reminder service – it’s a useful tool that can increase your productivity both at work and in your daily life. Here are eight ways some of SR’s users have used recurring emails and texts to make their lives easier.

  1. Payroll Submission RequestsWhether payday is every friday, every 1st and 15th of the month, or in other increments, sending a reminder to yourself (or your employees) is a great way to make sure everyone submits their hours on time. SendRecurring has custom scheduling options that allow you to send emails whenever you want. 
  2. Rent Reminders to Yourself (or Your Tenants)
    Sometimes the months fly by, and before you know it you’re a day late on rent. Avoid late fees and frustration by sending a monthly reminder a day or two before you need to turn in your rent check. This is also a great tool for landlords who want to send a friendly reminder to tenants. 
  3. Weekly or Monthly Meetings
    Remind your co-workers, classmates, church quorums, PTA, or other groups of weekly or monthly meetings. Include any special instructions so they remember to bring important papers, think of questions in advance and do some brainstorming before the event. 
  4. Notes to Self for Daily, Weekly, Monthly Tasks
    If you’ve got a client or class whose assignments you turn in on a recurring basis, send yourself repeating reminders. This works great for any daily, weekly, or monthly tasks you need to stay on top of. 
  5. Yearly Birthday and Anniversary Messages
    Keep track of friends’ and family members’ birthdays, anniversaries, and other special dates with a yearly reminder. Simply set the email up to send once a year, and you’ll never forget to buy a card again! 
  6. Remind Clients to Pay Invoices
    Sometimes clients get busy and forget to pay for services rendered. Send a professional reminder to clients of unpaid invoices. 
  7. Self-Help like Fitness Reminders, Inspiring Messages
    Stay inspired by reminding yourself to do your daily workout, make healthy meal choices, call a loved one, or keep a happy demeanor. Pick a mantra and send it to yourself every morning or once a week to feel the positive vibes.
  8. Receive More Votes
    Social media contests are all the rage, but it can be annoying to both you and your friends to keep sharing the same link over and over. Instead, set up a recurring email reminding them to vote daily, and include your link in the body of the email.

Take advantage of all the ways recurring emails can help make your life easier! Whether you’re sending reminders to your contacts or to yourself, you can see an increase in productivity.

Start sending reminders with a free SendRecurring account here.

If you’ve got a success story from using SendRecurring, email us to be featured on the blog!

SendRecurring Spring 2016 Feature Updates

We have been hard at work on several new features for SendRecurring in 2016!

Contacts

Contacts have been requested several times. They are in now and make it SIMPLE to include previously used email addresses and phone numbers when creating reminders. Email addresses can either be autocompleted as you type or can be inserted in bulk by clicking on the TO, CC, or BCC buttons and working from contact popup. Contacts can be edited in Settings.

Screen Shot 2016-05-02 at 2.08.39 PM

End Dates

When SendRecurring first launched reminders were based on Start and End date, this was changed with the move to the on/off system. But the users spoke out! Many of you wanted the old End Date function back and here it is. Just specify an end date and your reminders will be turned off if the next send would schedule for a time later than that date.

Reference Numbers

A lot of users wanted a way to differentiate between reminders that have the same subject, reference numbers/phrases do exactly that! Enter a reference number or phrase in the text box (near the subject box) and the reference number will appear in the manage view, just before the subject.

Filtering

Filtering has been added on the Manage page. Type into the filter box to see your reminders magically vanish/reappear based on what you type. This makes browsing long lists of reminders and finding what you need a SNAP. The following fields are filtered: recipients, subject, reference number, and content.

Plan and Pricing Updates

We have again updated our plans and pricing. The biggest changes are the removal of the Unlimited plan and addition of yearly billing options. The Unlimited plan had to be removed due to several accounts of abuse, and no real benefit as 99% of users were well under unlimited. The Pro 10,000 plan has been created in its place to meet the needs of users, please contact me if you need a plan with more quota than that!

Yearly plans have been implemented but are not advertised just yet. If you want to be billed annually just let me know. There is a discount included for doing this!

Screen Shot 2016-05-02 at 1.22.05 PM

 

So many of these are user-requested features so hopefully this encourages all users to reach out and suggest things they want in SendRecurring.

Happy Sending!

The #1 Productivity Hack for Procrastinators is …

There are more than six billion people in this world and I am willing to bet that the majority of us are probably procrastinators. It is just an easy habit to fall into. Think of procrastination as if it were like quick sand. It is easy to stumble and sink into and hard to get out of. Not to worry though, here are some tips that can help pull you out of the procrastination pit.

 

1.Set an abundant amount of alarms.

As a procrastinator, you all know the feeling of waiting until about fifteen minutes passed your alarm to actually get up. Set several alarms to force you out of bed and to give you time to transition from morning yawns and sighs to being ready for a new day. Also, make hitting the snooze alarm harder to hit to make you get out of bed with each alarm.

Curated from 15 Productivity Hacks For Procrastinators – Full News

Now I don’t want to outright call myself or SendRecurring users procrastinators, but let’s face it, we all lie somewhere on the procrastination spectrum. This article caught my eye and I was pleasantly surprised by the number one recommendation to be more productive: Set an abundant amount of alarms!

SendRecurring has been created from the ground up to be the best way possible to do just that, whether it is through emails or texts. I recently found a fantastic use-case for SendRecurring that allowed me to be more productive.

I was faced with the problem of uploading my young family’s five plus years worth of videos to the cloud service we had FINALLY decided on using (Amazon Cloud drive btw). The problem is that we have over 70 GB of footage between the two of us for that time period (a lot).

After some math I realized this would take upwards of 100 hours with our connection so I needed to split the upload into many sessions, which I planned to only do during the evenings so our connection was decent during the day. This turned out to be time consuming work because every evening I have to

  1. Remember to do this!
  2. Figure out where I left off
  3. Start the upload

All in all it’s about a 10 minutes of time, so not too bad. However at the end of the evening, after unwinding from work, and watching an episode or two of a good show, it is REALLY tempting to put off anything like this in favor of just… procrastinating.

So to solve this for myself I setup a text message reminder to send to me every 9:30 PM, just about an hour before I actually go to sleep:

textremindervideos

And here is the result.

wp_ss_20150625_0001

Guess what? It worked. 100% satisfied with how SendRecurring performed, and it led me to some crazy actions….

TEXTING IS BACK FOR ALL ACCOUNTS! CHECK IT OUT NOW!

Happy Reminding

NEW Changes to Price Packages

After almost a year of fine tuning and research, we have made some changes to Sendrecurring’s price packages to increase the level of service available to you, our awesome customers.

The former plan options:

Price Package Info Image

Demo (FREE) – 100 emails per month

Basic ($4.99) – 500 emails per month

Pro ($14.99) – 5000 emails per month

 

The new plan options, and an overview:

Price Package Info Updated

 

Trial (FREE) – The Demo account has been redubbed Trial, and is now limited to 100 emails sent. It does not reset at the beginning of each month like the Demo did, which means when you reach 100 emails, you’ll need to upgrade in order to send more emails. Our main reason for this change was to curb spamming, which will benefit everyone and reduce the amount of disgruntled email receivers.

Basic 500 ($9.99) – Basic 500, previously Basic, includes 500 emails per month, as well as open rates, statistics, and customization.

Pro Unlimited ($19.99) – The Pro Unlimited is the best value of all the packages. Previously, users were limited to 5000 emails per month. Now, Pro Unlimited account holders have unlimited emails each month.

 

Recurring Text Message Reminders

You may have noticed that the new package options do not include recurring texts. We have temporarily suspended recurring texts for new users. If you are an existing user and your paid package included text messaging, you’ll still be able to send and edit those texts. But if you’re a new user or need to upgrade your account, texting will not be available.

 

To sign up for a free account or to upgrade your account, view our price options. If you have any questions about the new pricing options or any of the included services, feel free to email any questions to conrad@sendrecurring.com.

How to send a recurring email [TUTORIAL]

I feel sheepish. Let me explain. We run a recurring email service over here. Recurring texts and polls are bonus features, but the primary function of Sendrecurring is emails. I realized recently that I wrote a tutorial a while ago explaining how to create a recurring poll, but never made a tutorial explaining the main ability of the site: emails! Duh, Tess.

I figured that Sendrecurring’s really user-friendly format and intuitive interface meant I didn’t need to explain how to create an email. Only, of course I think it’s intuitive because I’ve seen it built from the ground up, and it’s hard to see flaws in your baby, et cetera. Right? This post will explain the simple process of scheduling a recurring reminder email, and if you already knew how to do it, hopefully you’ll learn something new that will help you get the most out of all of Sendrecurring’s features.

Without further delay, we’re off.

First, login to your account. Once you’re in your account’s “Manage” page (or home page), click “New Email” as shown below.

Click New Email

You’ll be taken to the email form, where you should fill out the form according to the numbers below.

Create a new email

 

1. Enter your recipients into the “To” field. Make sure to use proper email address format (example@email.com), and separate email addresses with commas.

2. Enter the subject of your email into the “Subject” field. This is what contacts will see in their inbox.

3. Select your send preferences.

4. Compose your email in the composition box.

5. Save your email and it will send according to the date and time you indicated.

Pretty easy, right? You can customize fonts and select various send options. Happy sending, and don’t hesitate to send questions to conrad@sendrecurring.com.

Exciting NEW UPDATES You’ve Been Requesting!

We’ve received several emails lately requesting some new recurring time options:

Hello Conrad,

Is it possible to send non recurring email? I’m planning to setup an IT calendar with all the deadlines for user accounts, license expirations etc…

I don’t need recurrence of email but an email sent as a reminder.

And another,

I am having one issue and this is purely the way I schedule jobs and not an issue with your software. What you have is the ability to send every (1), (2), (3) or (4) weeks. Sometimes there are extra days and even a fifth week that throws everything off. What I need and would like to see as an addition to your software is a way to schedule by choosing first, second, third or fourth followed by the day of the week. So what you would end up with is “first Wednesday” of the month, “second Monday” of the month and possibly “first and third Tuesday” of the month etc…

And another,

What would actually work best for us is to be able to send an email on say a specific Tuesday of every month as an example. These emails are for monthly server updates and our schedule adheres to that. 3rd Wednesday, 4thTuesday, etc. If I could send the emails like this that would work best. As is, I will have to log in every month and reset the days they send out.

We figured for every person who asked, there were at least 50 others who could use the feature but wouldn’t ask for it. So Conrad got to work immediately and added two new timing features that we think are great.
One time only send
The first is a one-time send option. If you have a non-recurring reminder or email, you can now click the “One Time Only” box on your toolbar and… yep. It will only send once.
The other feature he added was a bit more complicated, but opens up a whole slew of new send options.
First Weekday of the month
Now you can select the first, second, third, fourth, and even fifth weekday of the month (example: first Sunday, third Thursday, Fifth Saturday, etc.).
Already, we’ve received several emails expressing thanks for the service and these new features.
Dear Conrad,
I just wanted to thank you for sendrecurring.com. I need to track a few things and I created forms to do it, and I just send the URL to myself every day. That way I fill out the form every day and I never forget!
I’ve been using it for months now and I have a great dataset.
Thanks so much.

And another,

Wow, lighting fast. Well done!

Really appreciated.

And another,

Wow, that was pretty fast. I was expecting a much longer delay.

Thanks for that really super fast update, that was fantastic.

Guys, here’s the thing. If you send Conrad an email requesting a new feature, expressing a concern, or asking a question about Sendrecurring, he’ll get back to you really fast and fix the problem. Usually within a couple hours, but if not, it’s almost always the same day. So shoot your questions (and compliments?) over to conrad@sendrecurring.com and he’ll send a speedy reply. If we’re able to fix a bug or add a feature because you brought it to our attention, we’ll probably feature your question on the blog, which actually ends up helping lots of people!