Setting up campaigns for success

Most people send cold emails, but very few actually get replies. And the difference almost always comes down to how you set up your campaigns. If your campaigns aren't structured the right way, you'll end up with low deliverability, wasted leads and a ton of time spent for nothing. The good news is, getting this right isn't complicated, you just need to know the steps.

In this practical, I'll show you exactly how to set up campaigns inside instantly, so your emails land in inboxes, get opened, and actually drive conversations. We'll cover the key settings, the common mistakes to avoid, and the little tweaks that make a big difference in reply rates. By the end, you'll know how to launch campaigns to get real results. Let's dive in.

Here we are inside the campaigns tab instantly, and this is where you launch your new campaigns. That's the easy part. When you're in here, all you have to do is hit add new, and that will prompt you to create a new campaign. You put in a campaign name that is descriptive of the campaign that you want to launch, and you hit continue.

That's it. Now your campaign is created, but now the more difficult part.

We usually start by adding leads to a campaign, but you can also start by already writing the sequences so they're in place, but because the leads that comes first will start there. Now there's a few different ways you can add leads to your campaign.

You can upload a CSV, maybe you've gotten a CSV from a tool like Phantom Buster, or you've downloaded something from another database, you want to bring that into instantly.

You can do that using the Upload CSV function, you map the right fields to the right columns, and you're good to go. You can also use SuperSearch, which is our own internal database where you can start finding leads that match your requirements.

You can enter them manually, so if you have people that maybe you've spoken to at a conference and you want to add them here, you can add them manually. Or you can link up directly with Google Sheets. Maybe you have a Google Sheet sitting somewhere in Google Drive, and you've already done the work there, all the emails are there, you can easily sync that to your Instantly campaign. Next up is the real fun part, and that is sequences.

This is where you'll write your sequences. Now, can be intimidating staring at a blank screen like this, and that's why there's several AI tools right here at the bottom that are part of Instantly. Once you click those, you can use the AI Sequence Writer. And once you have a sequence, maybe you've used the AI Writer or you've written it yourself, you can use the SpinText Writer to then add SpinText.

If you're not sure what SpinText is, sure you look that up inside of our help desk because it's really helpful for deliverability. Then lastly, you can check your sequences and make sure that there are no spam words in there. Those are words that are commonly picked up by spam filters to deny your email entry into the inbox.

When you start the AI, Sequence Writer will ask you general information about your company, for example, the company name, which in our case is instantly.

And then it will go through the process of asking you more information about what it is that you're looking to achieve, what the sequence is for who it is, and also what your main value proposition is. That's the great part about artificial intelligence. You can just put the information in there, and it will output sequences that are personalized and tailored to your audience based on what your business does. Instantly also has automated A to Z testing. What that means is you can add different variants. You could, for example, use for something simple as testing different subject lines, where maybe your subject line would be subject number one, and then the other one would be subject number two.

And then you can see which one gets the most opens and you can then turn on the one that has the most opens and turn off the one that has the least opens. If you want to see what your email looks like, you can always hit the preview button right here. You can see exactly what the email would look like. You can select a specific lead here, you can see how their name populates, or how maybe the variables populate that you've uploaded to the campaign.

You can send a test email right here, just to see exactly what it looks like showing up in your inbox, and you can check your deliverability score, which will perform a test to see how well your inboxes are set up, and how your email performs, based on common spam filters. You can insert different variables, such as the first name, last name, company name, but also custom variables right here, and you can add them to your template. There are other options down here that will help you write sequences and set up emails that perform better. For example, it's common best practice to send emails in plain text only.

You can do that from here.

You can set up different schedules here. For example, you can have schedules that include the weekend, schedules that don't include the weekend or different time zones, and you can maybe test what works best for your audience. This part is pretty straightforward, so I'm not gonna spend too much time on this tab. Then under options, this is where you would want to spend the most time.

Here you can select the accounts you want to use, You can add multiple accounts and instantly will automatically rotate through different accounts, making sure that you're only sending a few emails per account per hour to optimize your deliverability. You can have different functions enabled, such as stop sending emails or reply. That means the moment someone replies, you will no longer send the follow ups that were in your sequence. You can add open tracking.

You can turn it on or off. It's common best practice to turn it off even though maybe it feels like flying blind a little bit. Some spam fillers do pick up on specific links and open tracking and they will now again enter into the inbox. Then there are some other recommended delivery optimization tools that we've baked into instantly based on millions of data points.

We recommend sending your email as text always, so not having HTML in there, or at least sending your first email as text only, and then maybe in the follow ups you can add links that are clickable. But having that first email as text only, that always helps a lot with getting into the inbox. Then you can set up a data limit, so the maximum number of emails to send per day for this campaign. And then it's time to go into the more advanced options.

You can manage CRM ownership. You can have different campaigns for different salespeople on your team or for different people in your company in general. And you can set the owner here for leads that are generated from this campaign. You can have different tags for your campaigns.

You can use that to manage your campaigns, to group them together. Maybe some campaigns are lead generation campaigns, others are lead magnet campaigns, others are sales campaigns, maybe others are multiple funnel campaigns. You can use custom tags to organize that. Then there are the sending patterns setters, which are really important as well.

It's recommended to have a longer gap between emails. So that means after email one has been sent, the next email it will take, for example, at least nine minutes before sending that, which is common best practice again for staying out of spam. And you can add another randomization in there, because if you send an email every ten minutes on the top, that's also something that's pretty easily picked up on by spam filters. You can set a maximum of new leads that you want to contact per day.

You can prioritize reaching out to new leads. So what that means, it will reach out to all the new leads first, sending the first step of your sequence first, and the moment everyone on your list has received that first step, then it will start sending out the follow ups. Again, this is something that is a pretty popular feature, because you'll find that most people, they will reply to your first email, then your follow ups, you'll see a big drop off. So having that first email go out and prioritizing your sender capacity that way is a great way to generate more leads early on.

Then there's the option of automated A to Z testing. We already went over that a little bit earlier where we looked at these different variables that we could set up, maybe for subject lines or maybe for the actual email. You can set a winning metric here that is most important. For example, we looked at different subject lines.

We can set Open Rate as the winning metric, and then it will prioritize the best performing variant automatically, which again is a really popular feature that we have. Then there's Provider Matching. This is something that is at times a little bit of a moving target, but we've seen that Outlook to Outlook, for example, delivers better than Google to Outlook. And if you have different inboxes, you have maybe some Gmail inbox or some Outlook inboxes, you can match those providers and say, if we detect that the lead you want to send to has an Outlook inbox, then from my Outlook inbox, send the email to that lead, and that way you're matching your ESP and your email service provider.

You can enable that here, or you can set up custom rules where you could say, I only want to send Google to Google, Google to others, Outlook to Google, etcetera. You can set your custom rules there. At times, you're contacting multiple people within the same company, in the same campaign, and what you can do here is you can enable company reply stop. When someone within that company replies, you can stop emailing everyone within that company to avoid any confusion.

Same goes for auto replies. We recommend leaving that off, but some people turn it on because sometimes there's an out of office email and you want to stop sending emails to that person. You can do that from there. Then there's the unsubscribe link header.

That is an option that you could add to your emails. It's supported by some email providers to allow for one click on subscription. There are some rules and regulations around that, for example, California, Europe. Make sure that you're read up on those.

If you have questions, ask our team. But you have this option right here to automatically insert that. Then there are risky emails. Because we see a lot of different emails, we're sending millions of emails per day, we have a pretty good idea of what risky emails are and which emails you maybe shouldn't send to.

If you still want to send to those risky emails, you can enable it from here, you can override that function, you can disable what we call bounce protect. We recommend not doing it because having a high bounce rate is something that will get your domain representation ruined pretty quickly. Then lastly, there are CC and BCC options. You could, for example, add your colleagues there, but also the BCC option is something that CRM sometimes use to allow you to sync every single email that you're sending to your CRM.

For example, if you want to use HubSpot, but not our native HubSpot integration or closed CRM, then you can use the BCC option right there. Once all of that is set up, your campaign is ready to start hitting the inbox and generating leads for you. If you still have questions around campaign setup or deliverability, make sure you contact our support team.

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