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How to send an email campaign

Write a campaign to the contacts who agreed to hear from you, schedule it, and follow what came back.

Updated 2026-10-17

Outreach sends email campaigns to your own contacts, for example a "Spring servicing" offer to last year's customers. Otto can draft it; nothing leaves until you approve it. It is under Growth → Outreach.

Make a campaign

  1. Open Outreach and press New campaign. It has five steps: Setup, Audience, Message, Schedule and Review.
  2. Setup: give it a Name and pick the Goal: Book meetings, Promote an offer or Share an update. Say what you are offering; you can pick it From your price list.
  3. Audience: choose Anyone or Anyone who…, then narrow by stage, owner, tag or when they were added. Press View recipients to see exactly who it goes to.
  4. Message: press Draft with Otto and pick a Tone (Friendly, Professional or Direct), or Edit myself. Shorter and Rewrite change Otto's draft. Tick Send one follow-up if there is no reply and set the Business days to wait, or turn it off.
  5. Schedule: Send now or Schedule for a date and time, set Emails a day, and tick Business days only if you like. Send test to me sends one copy to you.
  6. Review: check From, Replies go to, Audience, Schedule and Pace, then press Schedule campaign. That press is your approval.

What happens next

The campaign shows Scheduled, then Sending, then Sent. Open it to see Queued, Delivered, Bounced, Replies and Unsubscribed for each person. Edit schedule takes back a campaign that has not started; once sending has started, you can only Cancel what is left.

Replies come back into Otto when your own email domain is set up for replies. Until then, mark replies and bounces by hand on the campaign.

Good to know

  • Only contacts who agreed to be emailed are ever sent to, and never an address that bounced. Each person is checked again at the moment their email goes, so someone who unsubscribed in the meantime is skipped.
  • Every email carries your postal address and a link to stop the next one. Otto asks for the address once.
  • If anything changes after you looked at the Review step, you are asked to check it again.

If it doesn't work

  • "Nobody in this audience has agreed to be emailed." — choose a different audience.
  • "Type the whole postal address: street, town and postcode."
  • "Something changed since you looked — the audience or the message. Check it again."
  • "It is waiting for approval. Decline it in Reviews to change it."
  • "Sending is not set up on this server yet." — campaigns cannot go out from this Otto server.