Sometimes setup of the account can be challenging, that's why we prepared a step-by-step guide to make it easier for our users.

For your convenience, we also added a video step-by-step guide here

Enabling IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) in Gmail allows you to access your emails from other email clients or applications.

Connecting your Google Workspace account to Instantly using OAuth authentication allows seamless access and integration between the two platforms. Follow these step-by-step instructions to set up OAuth access in your Google Workspace account and connect it with Instantly.

Steps to Connect Your Google Account with OAuth Method:

Open your Instantly account in one browser tab and your Google Workspace account in another tab within the same browser window.

Before proceeding with OAuth setup, ensure that IMAP access has been enabled for all relevant email accounts within your Google Workspace. Check this article.

Your Google Workspace account is now connected to Instantly. You can add additional accounts from the same Workspace using the OAuth method by repeating the login process with the same OAuth settings.

Please check this guidance to connect your Google accounts using App Password method.

You need both IMAP ((Internet Message Access Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) enabled to connect an O365/Microsoft account to Instantly. It's not permitted to connect only SMTP for sending emails as our warmup is a peer-to-peer network consisting of real accounts that must both send and receive emails.

In order to track certain things like email opens (for example - and link clicks in the future), we insert special code into the body of your emails. That special code is generally in the form of a URL - for example. xyz.inreg1.com/[code]

Now while we keep changing that URL every once in a while, that same domain is used by every Instantly customer - unless you setup a custom tracking domain.

When you setup a custom tracking domain, the special code that we insert will use your specified domain instead of ours. And so it will be unique - which helps ensure that your sending reputation and deliverability are completely isolated from the rest of the accounts.

Think of it as bringing your own toothbrush on a road trip rather than using one

that's shared by multiple people. Only you get to use it, which prevents any dental problems that you could get by using a shared one.

When you add a custom tracking domain, it essentially works as a proxy/mask for

the tracking end-point and it isolates your sender reputation from the rest of the

user base... and so in a nutshell, always use a custom tracking domain.

Start off by going to the settings for the email account

There are a couple of different ways to organize your custom tracking domains:

The warmup functionality mimics human conversations between email accounts.

Think of it as you emailing back and forth with your friends - on autopilot.
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But in this case, your ‘friends’ are other Instantly.ai users who have also enabled the warmup feature. You can be sure that all of them will open your email and a high percentage will write you back with a ‘thoughtful’ and positive sentiment.
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The emails written by the Instantly AI algorithm signal to Google, Outlook, and others ESP’s that your email account and sending domain is relevant and legitimate.

This increases the likelihood that the messages that are sent to the cold leads in your outreach campaigns will also actually land in their inbox and subsequently be opened and replied to.
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The bottom line is that the warmup will improve the deliverability of your cold email accounts by mimicking human conversations in the Instantly.ai user pool.

On top of the deliverability benefits, your outreach email accounts will also stay alive for longer and the likelihood of you ‘burning’ through an account is significantly lower.

To enable the warmup functionality go to your Email Accounts section and click on the flame icon on the right-hand side for each email account.

Methods to Enable Warmup:

You can change the warmup settings of each email account by clicking on the ‘Settings’ icon.

In Instantly, there are two types of warmup settings:

To create a campaign, go to the left-hand side and 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, and 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.

Click on either one of the blue Import buttons to upload your leads. Next step choose the preferred method for uploading your leads, such as CSV file upload, manual email entry, or importing from Google Sheets, more lead import methods will be added down the line.

Check this detailed guidance to upload your leads using a CSV file.

As a best practice, make sure that the leads you’re uploading are all verified. You can also check how to verify your leads here.

Simply select the filters you need, and once happy with the result, select the number of leads and click "Add to campaign".
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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.

To import a lead list via Google Sheets, make the Google sheet publicly accessible and then paste the URL. Check this guide to upload your leads using Google Sheets.

To avoid formatting issues:

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

To add a step to 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.

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. In the top left, you can also send out a test email to an email address you specify.

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

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

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.

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.

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”.

If you’re not quite sure what to write, we 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 provided 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.

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.

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.

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 auto-reply, or send emails as text only. Check all the campaign settings here.

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

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:

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.

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

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

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:

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