Build a Campaign from Scratch

Create personalized, multichannel outbound campaigns that create warm conversations

Written By Kevin Lawrie

Last updated About 1 month ago

The campaign builder is a wizard with five sections: Details, Senders, Campaign Flow, Leads, Schedule. That's a map of where settings live, not a description of your outreach sequence. Inside Campaign Flow, you can add as many steps as you want, in whatever order makes sense for your use case. Nothing about the builder limits you to a fixed number of steps or a fixed structure.

Before you start

A new campaign starts as a draft. Nothing sends until you activate it, so it's safe to build, adjust, and review before going live. Once a campaign is active or paused, opening it takes you to Results instead of back into this builder. If you need to rebuild an active campaign from scratch, duplicate it first to get a fresh draft.

Section 1: Details

Start by naming the campaign, then configure the settings that apply across the whole thing.

Setting	What it does
Cross-campaign duplicate check	Controls whether the same lead can be enrolled in more than one campaign at once. Options: block only if active in another campaign (default), block if ever enrolled, block if previously completed or replied, or allow re-enrollment.
Limit emails per company	Caps how many leads from the same email domain can be enrolled in this campaign, typically somewhere in the 2 to 5 range.
Reply sentiment detection	Always on. Classifies replies as Interested, Not Interested, Re-engage, Wrong person, and similar categories.
Reply AI Agent	Toggle on, pick an agent, choose which sentiments trigger it, and choose a mode: Suggest or Full Autopilot. See [Enable Reply AI Agent on a campaign].
End campaign when someone replies	On by default. Cancels remaining steps the moment a lead replies, on LinkedIn or email.
Stop campaign for company on reply	When enabled, one reply can end other active enrollments at the same company. Requires end-on-reply to be on.
Out-of-office pause	Number of days to pause a lead's sequence when an OOO auto-reply is detected. An OOO doesn't count as a real reply.
Max emails per day	An optional campaign-level send cap. Stacks with whatever limits are set on individual mailboxes.
AI writer	Enables `[[AI:...]]` blocks in your sequence copy, and lets you choose which connected LLM powers them.
Slack notify on Interested	Optional. Sends a Slack alert the moment a reply is classified as Interested.
CRM outreach and status sync	Optional if a supported CRM is connected.

💡 Tip: You don't need to configure every setting here before moving on. Most of these have sensible defaults, and you can come back to Details at any point while the campaign is still a draft.

Section 2: Channels and Senders

Answer the question every campaign starts with: what type of campaign is this?

Channels	What it uses
Social only	One or more Social Sender seats
Email only	One or more connected mailboxes
Social + Email	Both, with each mailbox paired to a Social Sender

See [Assign Social Senders and understand rotation], [Assign mailboxes for Email only campaigns], and [Link mailboxes with Social Senders for Social + Email] for the full detail on each.

⚠️ Note: Switching a campaign's type after you've assigned senders clears the previous channel's assignments. Choose your type before you build anything else.

Section 3: Campaign Flow

This is where you build your actual sequence, and it's the part of the builder with the most freedom. There is no fixed number of steps, no required order, and no formula you have to follow.

On Social only and Social + Email campaigns, the building blocks available to you include public engagement actions (viewing a profile, following it, reacting to or commenting on a post), an invite step, and a wide set of post-invite actions, direct messages, voice notes, InMail, Send Email, and Push to Integration. Use as many or as few of these as your use case calls for, in whatever order you want. Add ten steps or add two. Nothing in the product enforces a specific count or sequence.

The one real structural moment is the invite step itself. If your flow includes an invite, that step is where a genuine branch gets created: the lead either accepts or doesn't, and what happens next can differ depending on which. Everything before the invite and everything after it, on both sides of that branch, is yours to design. Even the branch itself doesn't have to change much about your approach; plenty of campaigns run the same kind of follow-up on both sides.

On Email only campaigns there's no invite step at all, since there's no connection to accept. The flow is simply however many Send Email steps you choose to build, spaced out however you like.

For each Send Email step, you'll configure:

Subject line
Body, plain text or Rich HTML
Wait time before the step runs
Threading, whether follow-ups continue the same email thread
Opt-out method
Merge tags, Spintax, and AI writer blocks where available
Preview and test

See [Build a Signal-driven Campaign Flow] for how to think through sequencing your own flow, and [Social Campaign Actions and Configuration Reference] for every available action and what it supports.

Section 4: Leads

Choose how people enter the campaign: paste, CSV, CRM import, Signal, or auto-enrolled sources like new connections and profile visitors when Social is in play.

Whatever source you use, make sure your leads carry the fields your channel mix requires:

Campaign type	Required per lead
Social only	LinkedIn profile URL or username
Email only	Name, email address, company
Social + Email	LinkedIn profile URL or username, and email address

After import, review your skip reasons. Duplicates, opt-outs, bounce suppressions, and company email limits will all cause a row to be skipped rather than enrolled.

See [Add Leads to a Campaign] for the full breakdown of every source.

Section 5: Schedule and Activate

Set your active days, active hours, and timezone. The campaign only sends within that window, across every channel it uses.

Before activating, review any mailbox ramp badges shown here, a mailbox still ramping toward its daily limit will send less volume than its target for the first stretch of the campaign.

Click Activate.

From here, day-to-day management happens in Results and the Unified Inbox.

Best practice

Treat your first live campaign as a working draft even after it goes live. Launch small, watch the inbox, review results, then improve the flow based on what you learn. That approach consistently beats trying to build the perfect campaign before you have any live data.

It also beats trying to build the most elaborate flow on day one. A short, simple sequence you understand completely will teach you more than a long one you had to guess your way through.