Building and running sequences

A sequence is a multi-step outreach flow: emails, waits between them, and conditions that branch on what the contact did. Sequence emails send through your connected mailbox, from your address, paced under the 400-per-day cap, which is what makes a sequence feel like personal follow-up rather than a campaign.

What are the building rules?

The builder enforces three structural rules rather than letting a broken sequence fail at runtime:

1. The first step is always an email. A sequence that opens with a wait or a condition has nothing to wait on or measure.
2. A condition step must follow an email step, because conditions evaluate that email's outcome.
3. Condition jumps only point forward. A jump back would loop a contact through the same steps forever, so the builder won't let you create one.

Waits are in days or hours, and long waits are exact: a step scheduled for Thursday runs Thursday.

What can conditions branch on?

Whether the previous email was opened or clicked, and the contact's engagement score against a threshold you set. Each condition has a yes-branch and a no-branch, and either branch can continue to the next step, jump forward to a later step, or end the sequence. One caveat worth carrying in from the open-rates guide: opened-based conditions inherit open tracking's blind spots, so branch on clicks or score where the decision matters.

How do contacts get enrolled?

Enroll individual contacts from their pages, or enroll a list. Dynamic lists evaluate their filter at enrollment time, so "everyone whose score is above 60" means above 60 right now, not whoever qualifies later. Suppressed, opted-out, and invalid-email contacts are skipped at enrollment and again at every send, on the same checks every channel runs.

You can also schedule a sequence start for a future date and time instead of launching immediately. The scheduler interprets the time in your browser's timezone, and says so next to the field.

What stops a sequence for a contact?

Four things: a detected reply (on Outlook, with reply detection enabled), completing the final step, a manual unenroll, or the contact becoming suppressed. The reply exit is the one that matters most in practice; it's the whole reason sequence sending lives on the mailbox channel, where replies land in your real inbox and can be matched to the thread.

Pausing a sequence freezes every enrollment where it stands; resuming picks them all back up immediately, including steps whose time already passed while paused. While it's paused the enrollments read as Paused, and nothing sends. Note that if a scheduled start passed while you were paused, everything becomes due the moment you resume.

How many sequences can be active?

That's a plan limit: 2 on Free, 5 on Solo, 10 on Starter, unlimited on Team and Business. Drafts and paused sequences don't count against it. Activating one past the cap returns a clear error naming the limit; the plans guide has the full table.

Do I need templates before I start?

No. Every email step has a New template button next to its picker, so you can write the email where you are instead of leaving to the Templates page and losing the sequence you were building. It opens the same simple editor the Templates page uses, and the template you save is selected on the step straight away and available everywhere else afterwards.

Sequence emails use the simple editor rather than the drag-and-drop one, on purpose: a sequence step is a personal, one-to-one message, and plain text with light formatting reads that way. Broadcasts are where the designed layouts belong.

Insert merge field sits in the editor's toolbar and works in the subject line and preheader too — the token goes wherever your cursor was. When you pick one it asks what to use if that field is empty, so {{contact.first_name}} becomes {{contact.first_name | there}} and a contact with no first name reads "Hi there," instead of "Hi ,". You can skip it, and fields that are always filled in (the unsubscribe link, the date, your mailing address) don't ask.

Can I copy a sequence?

Yes. Duplicate appears on every sequence in the list and on the sequence's own page, whatever its status. That includes archived ones, which is the only way to get an archived sequence's work back into use.

The copy carries the description, the from-address, and every step. Condition branches still point at the steps they pointed at before, so a copied sequence branches the way the original did. It arrives named "Copy of" the original and opens in the builder. If you already have a copy by that name, the new one is numbered ("Copy of Welcome (2)") so the two are never confusable in the list.

Duplicate asks you to confirm first, because the copy is saved as soon as you agree. Sequences can be archived but not deleted, so an unwanted copy is easier to avoid than to get rid of.

Some things stay behind. The copy is always a draft, whatever the original was, so copying alone can't push you past your active-sequence cap. Enrollments don't travel either, because a contact is enrolled in one specific sequence, so the copy's stats start at zero. Neither does a scheduled start: by the time you copy a sequence its start time has usually passed, so the copy runs as soon as you activate it unless you set a new one.

Can I delete a sequence?

Yes, once nothing is moving through it. Delete sits next to Duplicate on every sequence in the list and on the sequence's own page, and it works whatever the status: draft, paused, archived, even active. What it checks is enrollments, not status. If contacts are still working through the sequence, or are paused partway and due to resume, Delete is unavailable and says how many are left. Unenroll them, or wait for them to finish.

Deleting removes the sequence and its enrollment records, and it can't be undone. The emails it already sent are kept. They stay in your send history with their recipients, subjects and results, and their unsubscribe links keep working, because a sent email is a record of something that happened and doesn't belong to the sequence any more. What you lose is this sequence's own reporting: the enrollment counts and the per-step numbers.

Archiving is the gentler option and does something different: it stops the sequence and keeps everything, including the reporting. Contacts still working through it are ended, so an archived sequence has no one active in it, but the record of who went through stays on its View enrollments page. Archive when you're finished with a sequence but want its numbers. Delete when you want it gone.