How to build your first email sequence, start to finish

Plan, Build, Launch. What each stage is actually asking you, and what to check before the first email goes out.

The sequence wizard has three stages, and each one decides a different thing. Plan decides the shape. Build decides the content and the timing. Launch decides who receives it and when it starts. Knowing which question you are answering makes the whole thing much faster.

Stage 1: Plan

Name the sequence after the audience and the motion, not the month. "Retail buyers, cold" still means something in six months. "September campaign" does not.

This is also where you set the sending schedule. Weekday mornings in the recipient's timezone is the default worth keeping. How many steps and how far apart is its own decision, and worth making before you continue.

Stage 2: Build

The canvas is the sequence itself, read top to bottom. You add steps, and between them you add waits.

1. Add your first email step Select a template or write the body inline. The step inspector on the right is where the subject, body and settings live.
2. Add a wait A wait is a real step, not a property of the email after it. Without one, two emails send back to back, which is the most common first-sequence mistake.
3. Add the remaining steps Alternate email, wait, email, wait. Read the canvas top to bottom when you finish and check no two emails sit adjacent.
4. Add conditions where they earn their place Branching on whether someone opened or clicked lets a sequence respond rather than recite. Start simple and add these on the second version.
5. Preview as a real contact The preview renders merge fields against an actual record. This is where you find out that half your list has no company name.

Stage 3: Launch

Launch asks three things: who, from where, and when.

• Who. A segment or a hand-picked set of contacts. Which list type you enroll changes the behaviour more than most people expect.
• From where. The mailbox that sends. A mailbox with no warmup history sending two hundred cold emails on day one is how a domain gets flagged.
• When. Immediately, or scheduled. Scheduling exists so a sequence built on Friday afternoon does not start at 6pm on Friday.

Before you press launch

1. Enroll yourself first and watch step one arrive. It takes five minutes and catches most errors.
2. Check the recipient count. If it is wildly different from what you expected, the segment is wrong, not the sequence.
3. Confirm the exit conditions include a reply.
4. Read the canvas top to bottom once more, looking only at the waits.

Do

• Write templates before you open the wizard.
• Put a wait between every pair of email steps.
• Preview against a real contact, not a made-up one.
• Enroll yourself before you enroll anybody else.
• Start small. Fifty contacts tells you almost everything two thousand would.

Don't

• Do not launch to your whole list on the first run.
• Do not send from a brand new mailbox with no warmup.
• Do not build and launch in the same ten minutes. Sleep on the copy.
• Do not skip the preview because the template looked fine in the editor. Merge fields fail against real data, not in the editor.

Can I edit a sequence after it has launched?

You can change steps people have not reached yet. Steps already sent are history and stay as they went out.

What happens if someone replies mid-sequence?

With a reply exit condition set, their remaining steps stop. This is why the exit rule is worth checking before launch rather than after.

Can two sequences run against the same contact?

Technically yes, and it is almost always a mistake. Two sequences means two unrelated threads from the same company arriving in the same week.