Creating A New campaign

To create a campaign go to the left-hand side click on the arrow. Once in the campaign overview, you’ll see the ‘+ ADD NEW” button on the top right.

As a next step type in the name of your campaign. We suggest adding target audience parameters such as title, industry/niche, geo in the campaign name (e.g. Marketing Director_Advertising Agency_US) so you can more efficiently find and optimize your campaigns down the line.

Once you’ve typed in your campaign name click the blue Continue button and it will bring you to the next step.

Now it’s time to add leads.

Adding Leads To A Campaign

Click on either one of the blue Import buttons to upload your leads.

As a next step select the method with which you’ll upload the leads. CSV, entering Emails manually or through Google Sheets import. More lead import methods will be added down the line.

Let’s take a look at the CSV upload method first.

CSV Lead Upload

Click to upload your .csv file with your leads. As a best practice, make sure that the leads in the list you’re uploading are all verified.

Instantly will automatically detect the columns of your file and attribute a variable for each.

Double-check everything and you can use the drop-down menu to attribute the right variable for each one of your values.

Bulk Insert Manually

To bulk insert or copy-paste, a list of email addresses simply paste it into the box and click on the blue button “Import emails >” below it.

Google Sheets Import

To import a lead list via google sheet make the google sheet publicly accessible and then paste in the URL.

To avoid formatting issues:

Select all your rows and columns with Ctrl/Cmd + A, and then
Click Format → Number → Plain text

Finally, import your spreadsheet

Creating Sequences

First Email and Follow-Up Steps

Paste in your body copy and subject line into the first email that your leads will be receiving.

To add a step in your cold email sequence simply click on “Add step”. You can also adjust the time delay between the steps. In Step 1. you can define how many days Instantly should wait before sending Step 2.

You can add as many follow-up steps as you’d like, although we recommend a maximum of 3-4 steps for most cold outreach campaigns.

Previewing And Testing Email Steps

To preview any email in your sequence and test it click on the eye icon on the bottom editing section.

A pop-up will appear where you can automatically see the preview of that email step. And in the top left, you can also send out a test email to an email address you specify.

Inserting Variables And Other Editor Functionalities

Variable in the subject line

To insert a variable into the subject line click on the bolt icon next to the top-right blue Save button.

Variable in the body copy

To insert a variable in the body copy click on the bolt icon in the bottom editing section.

How To Add And Use Custom Variables

You can also import Custom Variables which will later show up in your email copy editor as the header name of that column. For example, if you have a column with Title it will upload that as a Custom Variable, which you can later use in the copy as {{Title}} to dynamically insert the title of that contact.

When you upload custom variables they will show up as options in the email when you’re adding your variables in the email copy. Simply select the custom variable you want to use from there.

Adding Links/URLs

To insert a link into the body copy highlight the text that you want to hyperlink or select the link icon in the bottom editing section.

Insert Unsubscribe Link

If you want to add an unsubscribe link at the end of your emails click the respective icon in the bottom editing section, then click “Insert Unsubscribe Link”.

Cold Email Templates

Using Saved Templates

If you’re not quite sure what to write we also provide templates to get the creative juices flowing. To find the templates simply click on the template icon in the bottom editor section.

Once you click the template icon a pop-up will appear with a wide selection of templates that Instantly provides to you as well as your own custom templates that you have saved in the past.

This allows you to set up a campaign even faster.

Saving Your Own Custom Templates

Once you’ve created your own email copy or made adjustments to an existing template you can save that new version as a new template for future use as well.

Schedule

Changing Sending Days And Sending Timing

In the Schedule step of the campaign wizard, you can adjust the days of the week and the time frame in which Instantly sends to your leads.

Options

Adding Email Account And Changing Daily Sending Limit

In the Options section of the Campaign wizard, you can select which email account to use for the sending and decide on the maximum number of emails to send per day.

You can also disable Open Tracking, Stop Sending emails on reply and the Use smart send functionalities, although we recommend keeping these enabled.

Do a final check of your campaign setup and then hit the “🚀 Launch” button.

Advanced Email Body

Placeholder Values

When a mail merge variable isn’t available for a lead, we replace it with an empty string. However, you may want to have a default value for such cases.

Placeholder values are helpful when a mail merge variable isn’t available for a lead.

Here’s how you can use them:

Hi {{firstName | there,}}

In the above example, ‘there,’ will be used if the variable ‘firstName’ isn’t available for a lead.

You may also insert more than one placeholder value and the algorithm will pick one randomly.

Hello {{firstName | there, | friend,}}

Spintax

Creating variations of sentences or words is pretty straightforward and can help you generate even more diverse email bodies for your leads.

{{RANDOM | Hello | Hi | Greetings!}},

Liquid Syntax

To use conditional logic with your email body, you may use Liquid syntax.

💡 This feature is currently in Beta - please contact us if you run into any issues

Using email open status

There are two special variables that you can use to change your email body according to whether a lead has opened your previous email steps:

sequence_email_opened - Check if any of the previous steps (in the sequence) were opened
last_email_opened - Check if the immediately previous step (in the sequence) was opened

{% if sequence_email_opened %} I see that you opened my email. Yay! 😃 {% else %} 😕 Please open my emails. {% endif %}

You may, of course, combine the above format with other variables:

Hi {{firstName}}, {% if sequence_email_opened %} Here's a special discount code for you. {% else %} Don't miss out on this deal for {{companyName}} {% endif %}