Sorry. You need one cron job for the script to send the follow up messages.
In our previous versions, script used to run using image tag. But this no longer effective if your lists goes above 200 or 500 subscribers and difficult to maintain the regular follow ups. And this image tag activation entirely depends on web site visitors. If a web page is viwed, the image tag activates the message going. Its not reliable, so we removed that feature.