Create a campaign and sequence

By the end of this guide you will have a running cold email campaign in FoxReach: a schedule that respects your leads’ working hours, a set of mailboxes rotating the sends, a two-step sequence with personalization and a follow-up, and a lead list attached to it. The whole build takes about ten minutes the first time. After that it is a two-minute job, and once you know where each setting lives you can duplicate a campaign and reuse it for the next list.

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Before you start

You need two things in the workspace before a campaign can send:

• At least one connected email account. If you have not done that yet, follow connecting an email account to FoxReach. You can create the campaign without one, but you cannot start it.
• Some leads. Import a CSV or add them by hand, ideally with a tag so you can pull the right ones into the campaign later. See importing leads into FoxReach.

If you are brand new, the getting started guide covers both in order.

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Step 1: Create the campaign

Open Campaigns in the sidebar and click New Campaign. The page is titled Create New Campaign and has four cards. Basic Information. Give the campaign a name that says who it targets, like “Cold Email Mastery - AI Agents”. Then pick the Timezone. It defaults to your account timezone, but the right choice is the timezone your leads are in, because the sending window below is interpreted in this zone. Sending Schedule. Under Active Days, click the day buttons to toggle them. Monday to Friday is preselected, which is right for most B2B lists. Under Sending Window, set From and To. The default is 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. FoxReach spreads the day’s sends evenly across this window, so a wider window means a more natural cadence. Sending Accounts. Every connected account is ticked by default, with its health score and daily limit next to it. Untick any mailbox that should stay out of this campaign, or use Clear all and pick the ones you want. Emails rotate across the accounts you leave selected. Sending Limits. The Daily Send Limit is the maximum number of emails this campaign sends per day across all of its accounts. It defaults to 100 and accepts anything from 1 to 5000. The first campaign from a fresh mailbox should sit at 50 or below; raise it once the accounts have warmed up. Click Create Campaign. You land on the campaign page with a Draft badge next to the name.

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Step 2: Write the first email

The campaign page has five tabs: Overview, Sequences, Leads, Accounts and Activity. Open Sequences and click Add First Step. An inline editor appears with a Subject Line field and a body editor. Write the subject, then click Variables next to it to insert a lead field at the cursor. The menu is grouped into Standard Fields (first name, last name, full name, email, company, title, phone, LinkedIn, website), Custom Fields (anything you imported that is not a standard column), and Account Fields (the sender’s signature, name and email). Three syntax details worth knowing before you write:

• Variables look like {{firstName}} and {{company}}. Snake case works too, so {{first_name}} is the same thing.
• Fallbacks cover leads with missing data. {{firstName|there}} renders the first name when it exists and “there” when it does not. In the Variables menu, the field labelled “If the lead has no value, use” bakes the fallback into the tag for you.
• Spin syntax rotates phrasing per send. {Hi|Hello|Hey} picks one option at random each time the step goes out, so no two emails are identical. Keep it to short phrases and never nest one block inside another.

Under the editor is a collapsible dual preview that renders the email twice, once as a lead with every field filled and once as a lead with none. This is where you catch a bare {{company}} that would print an empty gap. If you already have a template, the Load from Template dropdown at the top of the editor pulls its subject and body into the step. Templates are covered in email templates in FoxReach. Click Add Step. A “Sequence step added” toast confirms it, and the step appears as a card.

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Step 3: Add a follow-up

Click Add Step at the top of the Sequences tab. The editor is the same, with two extra fields that only appear from the second step on: Delay (Days) and Delay (Hours). The delay counts from the previous step, not from the first email. Three days is a sensible first follow-up; the follow-up sequence guide goes into spacing for longer sequences. Write a short bump, set the delay, and click Add Step. The card for step two shows “Wait 3 days after step 1” under its subject. Every follow-up is a “send only if no reply” step by default. FoxReach checks for a reply from the lead before each step goes out and skips the rest of the sequence for anyone who has answered. You do not need to configure that; it is how sequences work. Repeat for as many steps as you want. The demo campaign in the screenshots runs five: Initial Outreach, Follow Up 1, Follow Up 2, Follow Up 3 and Last Touch. Three to five is the range most lists respond to.

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Step 4: Add leads

Open the Leads tab and click Add Leads. A panel titled Add Leads to Campaign slides in with a search box, a Status filter, a Tag filter, and a checkbox list of every lead in the workspace who is not already in this campaign. Three ways to pick:

• Search by email, name or company to find individuals, like Alex Morgan at Northstar AI.
• Tag narrows the list to one imported segment. If you tagged your CSV on import, this is the fastest route.
• Select all ticks every lead on the page. If the filtered list runs past one page, a second link selects every matching lead across all pages.

Click Add N Leads at the bottom. Bounced and unsubscribed leads are never sent to even if they are in the list, and leads that failed email verification are skipped as well. You can add more leads later, including while the campaign is running. Removing leads, however, requires the campaign to be paused.

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Step 5: Check the accounts and start

Open the Accounts tab. The mailboxes you ticked when creating the campaign are already here. Use Add Account to attach another, or Remove to drop one. Now click Start at the top right of the page. FoxReach checks that the campaign has at least one sequence step, at least one lead and at least one account, then flips the badge from Draft to Active and shows a “Campaign started” toast. Sends begin at the next minute inside your window. Pause replaces Start while the campaign is active. Pausing cancels everything queued but not yet sent; nothing goes out until you click Start again, at which point leads pick up from where they were.

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How sending works once the campaign is live

A few things happen automatically that are worth understanding before you look at the numbers. The window and timezone are enforced. Sends only go out on the active days, between From and To, in the campaign’s timezone. If you set 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM New York time, a lead in London gets email between 2:00 PM and 10:00 PM their time, so choose the zone your leads live in. Volume is spread across accounts and across the window. Each day’s sends are divided among the selected accounts and paced through the window rather than fired in a burst. You choose the pace under Pacing in the campaign settings (click Edit on the Overview tab; an active campaign has to be paused first):

• Careful, the default: two sends from the same mailbox are at least nine minutes apart, plus a random extra delay of up to five minutes. The right choice for mailboxes still warming up.
• Fast: at least five minutes apart, plus up to two. Only for mailboxes that are warmed up and have a clean sending history.
• Custom: set Minimum gap between sends and Random additional delay yourself.

Under the two fields, FoxReach shows how far apart sends will be and how many emails each mailbox fits in your sending window at that pace; on Careful an eight-hour window fits about 42 per mailbox. If the campaign’s daily limit is more than its mailboxes can send in the window, a warning under the fields says so and suggests the fix: widen the sending window, pick Fast, or lower the limit. Follow-ups come from the same sender and thread as replies. The account that sends step one to a lead is remembered, and every later step to that lead leaves from the same mailbox. Follow-ups carry the In-Reply-To and References headers defined in RFC 5322 and a “Re:” subject prefix, so Gmail and Outlook show the lead one thread. A reply stops the sequence for that lead. The moment FoxReach sees a reply, the lead is marked replied and no further steps are sent to them. Their reply appears in the unified inbox. Bounces are handled for you. A hard bounce marks the lead bounced in every campaign, and if a campaign’s bounce rate spikes, FoxReach pauses it automatically and emails you. By default that happens when 6 of the last 100 emails hard-bounce; you can raise or lower the share, or turn it off, under Pause when bounces reach in the campaign settings. When you start a campaign again after an automatic pause, FoxReach asks whether you have verified the remaining leads. Tick the box and bounce protection stays off for 7 days so a cleaned list can run without being paused on the same old bounces; it still pauses if 15 of any 100 emails hard-bounce. Leave it unticked and the campaign starts with protection on. Limits are checked at every send. The plan’s monthly email allowance, the workspace daily safety cap, the campaign daily limit and each account’s own limit are all checked again just before an email leaves. When any of them is hit, sending resumes when the counter resets. The campaign completes itself. When every lead has either finished the sequence, replied, bounced or been cancelled, the status changes to Completed and you get an email. Adding new leads to a completed campaign puts it back to Active. Two external rules shape these defaults. Google’s Email sender guidelines set the bar for authentication and complaint rates, which is why the pacing and account caps are conservative. The FTC’s CAN-SPAM compliance guide requires an honest sender, a truthful subject and a working opt-out, which is why every lead has an unsubscribe status FoxReach respects across all campaigns.

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Duplicating a campaign

Once one campaign is dialled in, click Duplicate at the top of its page. The copy keeps the schedule, the daily limit, the sequence steps, any A/B variants and the account assignments, and starts as a new draft. Leads are not copied, so open the Leads tab of the copy, add the next list, and click Start.

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Troubleshooting

Nothing is sending. Check four things in order. Is the badge Active, or still Draft? Draft campaigns never send. Is it inside the window right now, on an active day, in the campaign’s timezone? Has the daily limit been reached, either the campaign’s or every account’s? And does the Accounts tab show at least one account marked connected? A banner appears on the campaign page when no account can send. I cannot edit the sequence. Steps, settings and accounts are locked while the campaign is active, and the Sequences tab says “Pause the campaign to edit sequences”. Click Pause, edit, then Start again. Every email not yet sent uses the new content. The daily limit is lower than I set. Gmail and Microsoft mailboxes are capped at 50 sends a day regardless of the account setting, the workspace daily safety cap depends on your plan, and the pacing limits how many sends fit in the window; the warning under Pacing tells you when that is the cap. The lowest cap wins. Compare the account limit, the plan cap on the pricing page, and the window length. A lead stopped getting follow-ups. That is the intended behaviour if they replied, bounced or unsubscribed. Open the lead in the Leads tab to see which one, and check the unified inbox for the reply. Start is refused. The campaign needs at least one sequence step, at least one lead and at least one connected account. The error names the one that is missing.

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Next step

The campaign is live. Replies will start arriving in the unified inbox, and that is where the next guide picks up: working the FoxReach unified inbox. Once a week or so of sends is in, reading campaign results in FoxReach explains which numbers on the Overview and Activity tabs matter and which to ignore. If you are bumping into the daily safety cap or the monthly email allowance, the pricing page lists the email limits on every plan so you can size the campaign to the plan you are on.

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Frequently asked questions