Getting started: from signup to your first send

Getting from a fresh SEMAOS account to your first sent email takes four steps: finish onboarding, connect your Gmail or Outlook mailbox, import your contacts, and send. Most people finish in about 15 minutes. This article walks through each step and explains the choices you'll hit along the way.

Which signup option should I pick?

The register page has two buttons, and the difference matters.

Start free asks for no credit card. You get 1 seat, 2 active sequences, and unlimited sending through your own connected mailbox (Gmail or Outlook). The free plan has no platform sending, so broadcasts and custom sending domains aren't available on it.

Start 30-day trial collects a card through Stripe but charges nothing during the trial. Every feature is unlocked for 30 days — 8 seats, unlimited active sequences, and your own custom sending domain — with 1,000 SEMAOS platform sends for the whole trial (not per month). Sends through your own connected mailbox stay unlimited.

If you mainly send 1:1 outreach and sequences, the free plan is a real working setup rather than a demo, because your mail goes through your own mailbox either way. Pick the trial when you want to evaluate broadcasts, teammates, or higher volume.

What does onboarding ask for, and why?

Onboarding asks for two things, and you can't send until both are filled in.

The first is your company name, which appears in your account and becomes the default sender identity for your team.

The second is a physical mailing address, which gets printed in the footer of every email you send. This one isn't optional. The CAN-SPAM Act requires a valid postal address in commercial email, and SEMAOS refuses to send any message without one. A registered agent or virtual office address works fine.

How do I connect my mailbox?

Go to Settings → Mailbox and pick Google or Microsoft. You'll go through the provider's standard OAuth consent screen. SEMAOS never sees your password, and you can revoke access from your Google or Microsoft account at any time.

Once connected, your 1:1 emails and sequence emails send from your own address, through your own mailbox, and replies land in your regular inbox. SEMAOS caps mailbox sending at 400 emails per day per user, deliberately under both providers' own limits, and pauses then resumes the next day when you reach it. The mailbox guide covers the cap, reply detection, tracking defaults, and reconnecting.

How do I import contacts?

Open Contacts and click Import from CSV. The wizard maps your file's columns to contact fields and auto-detects the common headers (email, first name, last name, company, title, phone).

Three things are worth knowing before you upload. When an email address in your file already exists as a contact, you choose what happens: skip the row, overwrite the contact, or merge fields. Files up to 50 MB, around 150,000 rows, import through an async pipeline, and you can leave the page while it runs. Rows that fail validation don't block the rest of the import; you get a downloadable error CSV listing exactly which rows failed and why.

What should my first send be?

You have three options, from smallest to largest.

A one-off email from any contact's page is the quickest way to test, and sending one to yourself is a reasonable first move.

A sequence is a multi-step outreach flow with delays and conditions. Start with two or three steps. The first step must be an email.

A broadcast sends one email to a whole list at once. Broadcasts go through the SEMAOS platform channel, so they need a paid plan or trial.

A good first exercise: import a small test list that includes your own address, then enroll it in a two-step sequence. When you answer your own email, you'll see reply detection stop the sequence, and the engagement data shows up as it accrues.

What happens after I send?

Opens and clicks show up on each contact and in the analytics dashboard. Every contact gets an engagement score from 0 to 100, recalculated nightly, which you can sort and filter by.

One caveat is worth learning early: open rates are approximate in both directions. Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates them, and clients that block images undercount them. Clicks and replies are the signals to trust.

What do I see when I log in?

Logging in takes you to your dashboard. It's built to answer "what needs my attention today," so it leads with decisions rather than with a report.

There are four parts to it.

Alerts show up only when something needs you. There are three: your connected mailbox has used 80% or more of its daily send budget, you have contacts loaded but no sequence currently running, or you're still sending on the shared platform domain rather than one of your own. When none of those apply, the band isn't there at all.

The setup checklist tracks the five steps from connecting a mailbox to launching your first sequence. It disappears for good once you finish all five.

Last 7 days shows sent, delivered, open rate, click rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate, each compared against the 7 days before. Use the "View analytics" link for longer ranges, per-sequence funnels, and broadcast breakdowns.

Active sequences lists what is sending right now, with the number of contacts still active, completed, and replied for each.

A few warnings deliberately follow you onto every page instead of living only here: an account that's paused or read-only, a mailbox connection that needs reconnecting, and a bounce rate high enough to throttle your sending. Those stop mail from going out, so you see them wherever you happen to be working.

From here, the deeper guides cover each area: connecting your mailbox, sending channels, importing contacts, building sequences, broadcasts, A/B testing, engagement scores, deliverability, custom sending domains, plans and limits, and unsubscribes and compliance.