AI Follow-Up Campaigns After the Booth

Updated October 12, 2026·Following Up·Share on X

After a day at the booth you have a stack of warm leads and a narrow window to reach them before they forget the conversation. AI follow-up campaigns generate a personalized email for every captured lead at once. Each draft goes to the lead's owner to review and edit, then sends from that person's own inbox, so the follow-up feels like it came from a human, because it did.

Ways to start

Campaigns → New Campaign opens the campaign builder on its first step, Audience. Start by naming the campaign in the card at the top; the rest of the builder waits until it has a name. Then pick the leads: a list, a conference's leads, or all leads, narrowed by filters. AI follow-ups work for any of them, not only conference leads.

On the next step, Template, choose how to write it. Three choices sit side by side and the one you pick opens below:

Empty Campaign - write each step yourself (AI can still draft or polish any step).
From a template - your team's saved templates, the playbook library, and starter sequences, with a search box.
AI follow-up - one personal email per lead, written by AI. This article covers it.

Shortcut from a conference: once a conference is live or over, its page shows Follow up with N leads at the top. It opens the builder with that conference's leads (everyone's, not only yours) as the audience and AI follow-up already picked.

Who sends each email

Each email goes out from the lead's owner, from their own connected Gmail or Outlook inbox, after they review it. A campaign can include leads owned by different people: everyone reviews and sends their own.

Before anything is written, the AI follow-up panel lists each owner with their lead count and whether their inbox is connected. Leads are left out, and flagged, when:

Their owner has no connected inbox (or was deactivated). Ask them to connect Gmail or Outlook under Integrations → My Email, then click Re-check.
They have no owner. Assign one on the Leads page to include them.

Up to 100 leads get drafts per run. If the audience is bigger, narrow it on the Audience step.

Choosing what the emails should do

The panel looks at who's in the campaign (a conference that just ended or is coming up, a list, how many already heard from you, met you, or have notes) and suggests three angles, like "Follow up after CES" or "Pick the conversation back up". Click one to fill in the instructions, goal, tone and length, change anything you like, or write your own. Click New suggestions for fresh ideas.

Generating the drafts

Click Write N drafts and Conference Hero writes one personalized draft per lead, using everything your workspace knows about that lead:

Who they are - name, title, company, location, company size, your custom fields, and the extra columns from the campaign's lead lists (like Segment or Region).
The company - its website and industry, the AI account snapshot, and your team's notes on the account.
Where you met - the conferences they're on and how they were captured, plus the notes captured at the booth. When the campaign is about one conference (its leads, or its related event), the draft is written about that one.
Meetings - what happened in past meetings and any meeting already on the calendar.
Team notes - the notes on the lead's Notes tab.
The conversation so far - emails you sent and received, campaign emails, their replies, LinkedIn messages, and logged calls.

So a follow-up picks up where the conversation left off: it answers what they said, doesn't repeat an offer you already made, and won't ask for a meeting that's already booked. Internal details, like scores, stage and your team's notes, shape the draft but are never quoted to the lead. If the campaign agent has researched a lead, the draft also opens on the strongest signal it found (a recent hire, funding, launch, or event) and follows the campaign goal.

While the drafts are written, a progress bar counts them as they land ("37 of 100 written") and estimates the time left from the actual pace. A batch of 100 takes about three minutes. Each draft is saved as soon as it's written, and the review page opens when they're all done. If a draft can't be written, the bar says so and you can write it again on the review page.

The style preset (goal, tone, length, greeting) applies to the whole batch and is remembered, so if you regenerate a single draft later, it keeps the same voice as the rest of the batch. Every draft, including a regenerated one, is written by the same model, so a regenerated draft is never a step down from the first one.

Reviewing, then confirming and sending

The review page has two steps: Review drafts, then Confirm and send. Nothing is sent until you confirm.

At the top of the review step, Who sends these emails lists each owner's mailbox with how many emails go out from it and how many still need review. Below it, drafts are grouped by owner, with yours first. For each draft you can:

Edit the subject and body inline.
Regenerate it if the angle is off.
Discard it.

When a draft was built from research, the review card shows which signal it leaned on ("Based on: Hiring - opened 3 SDR roles"). Click Use a different signal to pick another one and regenerate the draft around it. This is the fastest way to steer a draft without rewriting it by hand.

When you're happy with them, click Approve my drafts (or, if you are an Admin, Approve all for everyone's). That opens Confirm and send, a last summary before anything goes out:

The campaign, its event, and how many emails will go out.
Each sending mailbox with its number of emails and roughly how long until the last one is out.
What isn't in this send: drafts that weren't written, drafts whose owner has no mailbox connected, and teammates' drafts they'll review themselves.

Click Send N emails to approve the drafts and start sending, or Back to drafts to keep editing. Only the lead's owner or a workspace Admin can edit, regenerate, discard, or approve a given draft.

Sending: from the owner's mailbox, paced to look human

Approved drafts send from each lead owner's own connected Gmail or Outlook, so messages appear in the sender's Sent folder and replies come back to their inbox. Everyone needs a connected mailbox before their drafts can send.

Sends are staggered per owner rather than fired all at once: each mailbox sends one email every 60 to 90 seconds, and mailboxes send side by side. They respect each sender's business hours and warm-up ramp, so pacing looks natural and stays on the right side of spam filters. Confirming schedules the sends; the pipeline handles the rest.

Campaign templates

Save any campaign's sequence as a reusable template with Save as template on the campaign, then apply it to future events. There are two kinds:

Playbook library - curated templates available to every workspace.
Your workspace templates - private templates your team saved, shown at the top of the picker.

You pick the audience first, then the template. Applying a template creates a draft campaign with that audience, so you can rename it and edit the steps before it goes live. When the audience is a conference's leads, a library template's event timing is lined up with that conference's dates. Templates copy the sequence and goal only, never the leads, audience, sender, or schedule.