Campaign Hero: Your First Campaign in Four Steps

Campaign Hero is the outreach side of the product. Upload a list, tell it the goal, and it drafts the outreach and runs the sequence. This article covers the Home page and the four steps that get your first campaign out.

The Campaign Hero home

If your workspace runs Campaign Hero without Conference Hero, Home is campaign-centric: a getting-started checklist, four numbers (active campaigns, emails sent in the last 7 days, leads, meetings this week) and your most recent campaigns with how many emails each has sent. Unread replies, reply rates, and the latest replies join Home once reply tracking is available. Workspaces that run both products keep the event-centric Home and reach campaigns from the sidebar.

Step 1: connect your mailbox

Campaigns send from your own Gmail or Outlook, never from a shared address. Connect it under Integrations → My Email. New mailboxes ramp up over ten days so your domain reputation stays intact. See connecting your email.

Step 2: import a list

On Lists, click New list and drop a CSV or Excel file. AI maps the columns, splits combined names, and keeps extra columns such as Segment or Region as attributes on the list. A PDF or image works too: AI pulls out the people and you review them before they're added. Leads are deduplicated by email across the workspace, so re-importing never creates duplicates. See lead lists.

Step 3: create a campaign

Campaigns → New campaign opens the builder on the Audience step. Name the campaign first, in the card at the top: you can't choose how to write it or move on until it has a name. On the Template step you choose how to write it: Empty Campaign, From a template, or AI follow-up (a personal AI-written email per lead, sent from each lead owner's inbox after they review it; see AI follow-up campaigns). Campaign Hero ships four outbound templates that need no event: Cold Outreach, Nurture, Re-engagement, and Event or Webinar Invite.

The builder starts with who you're sending to. On the Audience step, pick where the leads come from:

• A list - members of one or more lead lists.
• Conference leads - the leads from one conference (only with Conference Hero).
• All leads - any lead, narrowed by filters.

Then narrow it down if you want: your leads or the whole workspace, temperature, accounts, job title, score, a past meeting, and (with Conference Hero) Only leads from one conference. The preview shows exactly who's in, with each lead's job title, company, email and owner (plus score and temperature with Conference Hero). Click a column header to sort by it, and untick anyone you want to leave out. Only leads with an email address count, and you need at least one of them selected to move on. If nobody matches, the empty preview lets you fix it in place: reset the filters, or import leads without leaving the builder. For a conference, the imported leads are linked to that conference and join the audience. Otherwise the spreadsheet becomes a new list and the campaign goes to it. After that come Template, Sequence, and Review, where you pick a sender and activate. Before you activate, the Who sends these emails table on the Review step shows the mailbox the emails go out from, with leads and emails per lead owner and a total. A regular campaign sends every email from one sender, including to leads a teammate owns; to have each owner send to their own leads, use an AI follow-up. Guardrails (per-lead weekly caps, unsubscribe links, send windows, bounce auto-pause) apply to every campaign. See AI follow-up campaigns.

Next to the name you can add an optional description (an internal note your leads never see) and an optional target date - for example, the first day of an event you're building the campaign around. With Conference Hero, there's also an optional Related event: the conference a list or all-leads campaign is about. It never changes who gets the campaign. It fills {{conferenceName}} for leads who aren't linked to a conference, tells booking links which conference a booked meeting belongs to, and labels the campaign. A campaign that sends to a conference's leads uses that conference as its event. When a target date is set, each sequence step can anchor its send timing to it: instead of "3 days after the previous step," a step can fire "7 days before the target date." Pick the anchor per step under Send timing in the Sequence step. Steps without a target-date anchor keep the usual timing, relative to when the campaign goes live.

Merge fields: personalize without blanks

In the Sequence step, Insert field (next to Subject and Body) adds a merge field such as {{leadFirstName}}, {{company}}, {{title}}, {{conferenceName}}, the sender's name or {{booking_link}}. Your workspace's custom fields are listed there too, as {{custom.<field>}}, so anything you imported or added under Settings → Custom Fields can go into an email.

Give a field a fallback for leads without a value: {{company|your team}} sends "your team" when the lead has no company. Above the steps, Conference Hero checks every field you used against the leads you picked and tells you how many are missing a value (for example "{{conferenceName}} is empty for all 25 leads"). Add fallback fixes it for every step at once. For {{conferenceName}}, picking a Related event on the Audience step fills it for leads without a conference.

An email is never sent with a gap. If a lead still has no value and the field has no fallback when the email is due, that email is held back and listed as failed with the field it's missing. Fill in the data or add a fallback, then use Retry failed sends on the campaign page. A misspelled field (one that doesn't exist) stops the campaign from starting until you fix it.

Manual steps and reminders

An email step can be Manual instead of automatic: it's held until you press Send now on the campaign page, so you can check the copy and the leads first. Under Send timing, set Remind me to how many days after the previous step (or after activation, for the first step) you want to send it. With a target date set, pick Around target date and Remind me to send it to be reminded on, say, 7 days before the event.

When the step is due, the person who created the campaign gets a reminder within a few minutes: in the app, by email, and as a Slack DM when Slack is connected. With Remind me set to 0 days, that's as soon as the previous step is sent. Home lists every manual step waiting for you, with how many emails are held and since when, plus the ones coming due this week. The campaign page shows the due date next to each held email. One reminder covers a step for the day, so you aren't pinged for every lead that reaches it. Turn each kind off under Profile → App Notifications, Email Notifications or Slack Notifications (Manual Campaign Step Due). Nothing sends on its own: the emails wait until you press Send now.

Step 4: turn on your booking link

Replies that say yes should turn into meetings without email tag. Open Meetings → My Booking Link and switch the link on. Connect your personal calendar too, so everything on it counts as busy and invites come from your own address. Drop {{booking_link}} into any sequence step and each sender gets their own link. Guardrails let you cap bookings per day and set different hours per weekday. See meetings and booking links.

Adjusting a campaign after it starts

You can still fix a sequence after it goes live. On the campaign page, each step that hasn't sent yet has an Edit button. Open it to change the subject, the body, and the timing (how long after the previous step this one sends). Timing and copy changes apply to everyone who hasn't reached that step yet; emails already sent are unaffected. If you shorten or lengthen the delay, any pending sends for that step are rescheduled to match. Once a step has started sending, it locks, so edit the later steps while they wait. To stop everything, use Pause; reordering or removing steps still needs a fresh draft.

Measuring what's working

Open Reports in the sidebar for the Campaign Performance dashboard - workspace-wide numbers across every campaign, over the last 7, 30, 90, or 180 days. It shows emails sent, verified open rate, click rate, and bounce rate. Treat opens as directional only: Apple Mail and corporate scanners auto-open emails and inflate them, so the report counts verified opens and labels them as such, which makes clicks the firmer engagement signal. Email figures count emails only. LinkedIn messages and logged calls show in a channel mix card once you use them. You also get an engagement funnel (sent, opened, clicked), a sends and opens trend line, deliverability health (bounce and unsubscribe rates, mailbox warm-up, sending-domain and per-mailbox daily caps), a per-campaign table with each campaign's event, goal progress and A/B winner, an Accounts reached table (the companies your campaigns touched, how many people and campaigns per company; click one to open it), and a per-rep table sorted by volume. The Companies list also gets a Campaigns column, so you can sort accounts by how many campaigns reached them. Download it as PDF or Excel from the top right. If your workspace also has Conference Hero, this sits as the "Campaign Performance" tab alongside the other reports.

Reply rate and positive-reply rate are coming soon. Replies land in each sender's own mailbox and aren't tracked yet, so they don't appear on Home, the campaign page, or the report. When they arrive, reply rate becomes the headline number.

Bounces work the same way for now. When an email sent from Gmail or Outlook bounces, the delivery-failure notice lands in the sender's own inbox, which Conference Hero can't read yet. So bounce figures only cover campaigns sent from a verified sending domain and addresses rejected the moment we try to send, and every bounce figure carries a note saying so. Keep an eye on your inbox for "Delivery Status Notification" emails, and stop the sequence for any lead whose address bounced.

Related

• Reply inbox - coming soon: where replies will land and how categories work.
• Plans, products, billing, and settings - which products your workspace has.