Create a new outreach campaign

Updated May 2026

You'll learn how to: Build a multi-step outreach campaign from scratch and start enrolling contacts into it.

Time: 15-30 minutes for a thoughtful first campaign. Future campaigns can be cloned in 2 minutes.

Prereqs: Your workspace plan includes Campaigns. Email account is connected (and Chrome extension if you're including LinkedIn steps).

Steps

In the secondary nav of the left sidebar, click Campaigns.
Click + New Campaign (top-right).
The Campaign Wizard opens. Walk through:

Step 1: Name and goal

Name (e.g. "Q3 cold outreach to UK Heads of Marketing").
Goal (e.g. "Book a 15-minute intro call").
Owner (defaults to you).

Step 2: Audience filter

Define who is eligible to be enrolled:

Pick filter conditions on contact fields (ICP score, tags, rhythm membership, last activity, custom fields).
Preview shows the current count of matching contacts.

Audience filters define eligibility, not auto-enrolment. You enrol contacts manually (via the bulk Add to Campaign action) unless you turn on auto-enroll.

Step 3: Cadence (the steps)

Add the steps in order. For each:

Channel: Email, LinkedIn message, LinkedIn connection request, Wait (delay-only with no action), or Manual touch (reminder for you to do something manually).
Delay from previous step (e.g. "3 days after step 1").
Subject + Body for email steps. Supports merge fields ({{first_name}}, {{company}}, etc.).
Message body for LinkedIn steps.
Skip conditions: "skip this step if recipient replied" is on by default.

Typical first campaign has 3-5 steps. 7-step monsters often perform worse than a tight 3-step sequence.

Step 4: Send strategy

Send window: business hours only / 24/7 / custom.
Per-day limit: how many new sends per day (respects your provider's daily caps).
Pause on reply: on by default.
Trickle vs blast: spread sends over hours or send all in one batch.

Step 5: Review

Final review of audience size, step count, schedule.
Click Save as draft if you want to enrol manually later, or Activate to make it live.

Activate vs draft

Draft: campaign exists but isn't running. No sends fire even if you enrol contacts.
Active: campaign runs for enrolled contacts according to the schedule. New enrolments fire when their step timer is reached.

You can flip between Draft and Active any time. Pausing an Active campaign stops new sends but doesn't remove enrolled contacts.

After save

The campaign appears in the Campaigns list. From the list you can:

Edit (steps, audience, schedule).
Clone (handy for variants of the same campaign).
View analytics (open rates, reply rates, conversions per step).
Enrol contacts: either from the campaign's own enrollment action, or from the Contacts table via Add contacts to a campaign.

If something goes wrong

Symptom: "+ New Campaign isn't there." → Fix: Your plan may not include Campaigns. Check Settings > Account.
Symptom: "Audience filter shows 0 contacts." → Fix: Either your filters are too narrow or you have no matching contacts. Loosen the filters or add contacts first.
Symptom: "Email step rejects my message body." → Fix: Check for merge fields with typos. {{firstname}} (no underscore) won't resolve; {{first_name}} (with underscore) will.
Symptom: "I activated but no sends are firing." → Fix: Check the send-window settings. If you set "business hours only" and it's currently outside business hours, sends queue for the next window.
Symptom: "I want to test the campaign on myself before enrolling real contacts." → Fix: Most workspaces support a "Test send" action on the campaign edit screen. Use that to send the step to yourself before flipping to Active.