Outfunnel allows you to create automated drip and multi-stage lead nurturing campaigns that integrate seamlessly with your CRM. We call these types of email campaigns, sequences. If you are looking to send single email campaigns, see here.

Some examples of when our email sequences feature would be useful:

You can use these triggered email sequences to engage segments defined in your CRM and stop the campaign automatically when the prospect opens, clicks, and/or replies. Email opens and clicks will be automatically recorded back in your CRM.

This article covers:

Before diving right in and creating your first email sequence campaign, there’s a couple of things you need to do.

1. Define your campaign’s recipients

2. Authenticate your domain (optional, but highly recommended)
If you want to keep your emails out of your recipients’ spam folder, we highly recommend verifying your domain. This way, email providers and clients can be confident the message was sent by us with your permission. Learn more about authenticating your domain.

3. Set up reply tracking
This helps to fully understand the success of your campaigns. Learn more

Step 1: Go to Outfunnel > Campaigns and click on the Create new sequence button.

Step 2: Give your sequence a name, choose the recipients (Pipedrive person filter; Copper contact tag, contact type or lead status; HubSpot CRM List; Outfunnel segment)

Step 3: Now it’s time to start adding those email messages to your sequence. Click Add an email

Once you’ve got the basics sorted, it’s time to start adding your content using the visual editor. You can format text, add images (we recommend max 600px wide images that are under 500kb in size) and links, and personalize your message using “merge fields”. Click Personalize and you’ll be greeted by a list of all the CRM data fields you can use to add that personalized touch to your emails.

If you'd like to send emails with more elaborate designs, you can import any 3rd party email template into Outfunnel. First, create a template and then select the HTML editor from the Template dropdown. Learn more about using custom design/HTML in Outfunnel.

Outfunnel will automatically add an unsubscribe link to the footer of every email – a legal requirement in many parts of the world (plus, it’s just good practice). You won’t be able to send a campaign without it. You’re more than welcome to customize the wording/size and/or set up a new default footer.

Please note that the unsubscribe link does not render in test emails but it will turn into a unique unsubscribe link when you send out the campaign.

Step 4: Next, to add another message to your sequence, click Back to sequence then click Add an email. Once again, enter the basic info and add your content, as we just covered above.

Step 5: Now you’ll want to add a delay to each of your messages. Enter the number of days and hours you would like to delay your messages by in their respective fields.

The first email delay is based on when a person matches the segment you’ve defined above. All the subsequent delays are from the previous message. Please note that the delays are also subject to the sending schedule that you can customize.

Outfunnel checks it every hour, so setting a “0” delay for the first message will, in practice, result in a delay of 1 to 60 minutes. Delays for all the following emails are exact.

Note: You can also insert fractions of hours. In order to do this, you just need to divide the number of minutes you want by 60 and insert the result. For example 15 minutes / 60 minutes = 0,25 hours. So for a 15 minutes delay, you'd need to input 0,25 in the hours.

PS: The delay time will keep being counted if you pause the sequence. This means that an email that has a 2-day delay will be sent out as soon as the campaign is reactivated if it has been paused for 2 days or more.

Step 6: Now, it’s time to review your sequence campaign’s settings, by clicking Settings at the bottom of the page.

Looking good?

Go ahead and click that big, green Activate sequence button, then confirm that you definitely want to go live, by clicking OK in the confirmation box.

💡 Check out our single email campaigns feature if you’re not looking to create an automated email sequence.

💡 Track responses. We highly recommend activating reply tracking to have an additional data point to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns.

💡 Threaded emails. Outfunnel does not yet offer a native threading functionality but if you use the same subject line then most email providers will thread the email automatically.

💡 Deleting a filter/list/segment from the CRM. Once you delete a filter/list/segment from the CRM that is targeted for a sequence, the sequence stops sending.

💡 Outfunnel automatically records email engagement in your CRM as an activity. Emails opened, clicked, replied, bounced, unsubscribed are recorded as a custom activity (that you can later filter in your CRM). You can also customize how email engagement is recorded in your CRM.

💡 The recipient list is auto-updated. Outfunnel checks the target segment (once per hour for Pipedrive and HubSpot; real-time for Copper) to validate whether each contact should keep receiving the campaign. Once a contact doesn’t match a segment anymore (because data had been changed in the CRM), they will be removed from the sequence.

💡 For maximum deliverability, warm up your emails with Outfunnel. If you’re sending campaigns to several thousand or tens of thousands of contacts at a time, we’d suggest starting with a few smaller campaigns first. For example:

💡 Unsubscribe means unsubscribe. Any contacts that unsubscribe are automatically removed from the list of people you can send emails to via Outfunnel, even if they match the filter that is used for triggering a campaign.

💡 If you use Outfunnel to send emails, you can also automatically get the benefits of our web visitor tracking feature as well as lead scoring software. This way you’ll see what leads are interested in your website, and have this recorded in your CRM as well – giving your sales pitch that extra edge.

💡 Keep images below 600px and under 500kb in size. Outfunnel does not currently compress the images in the composer when you add them to the email so we recommend using a tool like https://tinyjpg.com/ to compress the images in advance so that they are under 100kb (the smaller the image, the faster it loads in the inbox)

💡 Looking for some critical email functionality? We hear you. We’re making the email feature better every day (and that’s literally, and sometimes including weekends.) If you’re missing something, there’s a good chance we’re working on this already. If you have specific questions, please give us a shout.

💡 Read more about running successful drip email campaigns or sign up for our B2B email marketing crash course to level up your automated marketing efforts.