Campaigns are the heart of OutreachFlow. Once you have a list of target websites and a connected sending mailbox, a campaign takes over the entire guest-post outreach process sending cold emails, following up, reading and classifying replies with AI, negotiating prices, and closing deals all without you having to write a single email manually.
This guide walks you through setting up your first campaign from scratch, what every setting does, and what to expect once the campaign is live.
Before You Begin There Are Two Prerequisites
A campaign needs two things to run:
1. A connected email account OutreachFlow sends emails directly from your mailbox, so you need at least one sending account connected before creating a campaign. If you haven’t done that yet, read our guide: How to Connect Your Email Account to OutreachFlow Using Custom SMTP/IMAP
2. A list of target websites Campaigns pull their prospects from a List. A list is simply a saved collection of websites you want to reach out to. Go to My Lists in the sidebar to create one and add websites to it either by importing from a saved search or by manually adding sites from the databank.
Once both are in place, you are ready to build your campaign.
Step 1. Name Your Campaign
In the left sidebar, click Campaigns, then click New Campaign in the top-right corner. Give the campaign a clear, descriptive name something that tells you what it targets at a glance (e.g. “SaaS Blogs — May 2026” or “Tech Niche — Paid Placements Q2”). You will see this name everywhere across the app, so make it specific.
Step 2. Choose Your Source List
Under Source List, select the list of websites you want this campaign to reach out to. Every website currently in that list will be enrolled as a prospect, and any new websites you add to the list later will be picked up automatically on the next scheduler cycle.
Tip: You can point multiple campaigns at the same list, but a website will only be contacted by one campaign at a time. Plan accordingly if you are running campaigns with different outreach styles.
Step 3. Select Your Sender Accounts
Under Sender Accounts, choose one or more email accounts to send from. If you select multiple accounts, OutreachFlow will spread the sending load across them automatically, respecting each account’s individual daily and hourly sending limits.
Important: The campaign will not send anything if no sender accounts are selected, or if all selected accounts are paused or disconnected. Always verify the accounts you select show a Connected / Active status.
Step 4. Configure Sending Behaviour
This section controls when and how fast the campaign sends.
Daily Sending Limit
Sets the maximum number of outreach emails the campaign sends per day across all sender accounts combined. Start conservatively 20 to 30 per day is a healthy baseline for a new or recently warmed-up mailbox. You can increase this over time as your sender reputation builds.
Max Contacts per Website
Some websites list multiple contact emails. This setting caps how many of those contacts OutreachFlow will try before marking the website as exhausted. Setting it to 1 means it only tries the primary contact; setting it to 3 means it will try up to three contacts before giving up.
Send Window
Set the start hour and end hour for when emails go out (in your account timezone). Emails scheduled outside this window are held and sent when the window opens next. This makes your outreach look human nobody sends cold emails at 3am.
A typical setting is 08:00 to 17:00 on business days.
Weekdays Only
Toggle this on to skip Saturdays and Sundays. Most guest-post editors work weekdays only, so this avoids emails sitting unread over the weekend and keeps your reply windows predictable.
Step 5. Set Up Approval Mode
Approval mode gives you a human review step before any email goes out.
- Off (default): OutreachFlow generates and sends emails automatically as scheduled. This is the fully hands-off mode.
- On: OutreachFlow drafts each email and queues it for your review. You approve (or discard) each draft from the campaign’s Drafts tab before it is sent.
Approval mode is useful when you are running the campaign for the first time and want to verify the AI-written emails match your tone before anything goes out. Once you are confident in the output, you can turn it off.
Step 6. Configure Negotiation Settings
This section controls how OutreachFlow handles price negotiations when a website replies with a quote.
Negotiation Mode
- Auto Send: Once a vendor quotes a price, the system automatically sends counter-offers without your involvement. This is the fully automated path.
- Draft Review: Counter-offers are drafted for your approval before being sent. Use this if you want visibility and control over every negotiation turn while still letting the AI handle campaign emails automatically.
You can mix these for example, auto-send campaign emails but require review on counter-offers. Both settings are independent.
Counter-Offer Discounts
This is your negotiation ladder a sequence of discount percentages the AI will work through when negotiating price.
For example, setting [40, 25, 15] means:
- When a vendor first quotes a price, OutreachFlow counters at 40% off their quote
- If they reject that, it counters again at 25% off their original quote
- If they reject again, it tries 15% off
- After the ladder is exhausted, it sends a final offer; if that is rejected, the deal is marked as lost
The math is straightforward: if a vendor quotes $200 and your first discount is 40%, the counter goes out at $120. OutreachFlow rounds counters to the nearest $5 for amounts over $10 so they look natural to the recipient.
Set your ladder based on the margins you are targeting. A tighter ladder (e.g. [20, 10]) moves faster; a wider one (e.g. [50, 35, 20]) leaves more room to negotiate downward.
Step 7. Build Your Campaign Steps
Campaign steps define the sequence of outreach emails OutreachFlow sends to each prospect. You need at least one step, but a typical campaign has two to four.
Each step has:
- Step type:
Initial(the very first email to a website) orFollow-up(sent if there is no reply after a set number of days) - Outreach style: the tone and intent of the email. Common options include:
- Free Guest Post — offer to write a guest post at no cost
- Paid Placement — inquire about their paid placement or sponsored post rates
- Negotiate Price — open a direct price discussion
- Follow-Up — a gentle nudge after no reply
- Wait days: how many days to wait after the previous step before sending this one. For example, a follow-up with
wait_days = 5goes out 5 days after the initial email if no reply has arrived.
A sensible starting sequence
| Step | Type | Style | Wait |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Initial | Free Guest Post | — |
| 2 | Follow-up | Free Guest Post Follow-Up | 5 days |
| 3 | Follow-up | Paid Placement | 7 days |
You can add, reorder, or remove steps at any time while the campaign is in Draft status. Once a campaign is active, changes to steps only affect prospects that haven’t been reached yet.
Step 8. Save as Draft and Review
Before activating, save the campaign as a Draft. This lets you review all your settings without anything being sent. Go back through each section and double-check:
- The correct source list is selected
- At least one sender account is connected and active
- Your sending window and daily limit look right
- Your counter-offer ladder reflects your actual budget targets
- You have at least one campaign step
Step 9. Activate the Campaign
When everything looks good, click Activate. The campaign status changes from Draft to Active and the scheduler takes over from this point. Within the next few minutes, OutreachFlow will begin enrolling websites from your list as prospects and queuing them for the first send.
What Happens After You Activate
You don’t need to do anything for the campaign to run — but it helps to understand what OutreachFlow is doing in the background.
Prospects move through a pipeline
Every website in your list becomes a prospect with a status that advances as the outreach progresses:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Queued | Enrolled and waiting to be scheduled for sending |
| Waiting Reply | First email sent, waiting for a response |
| Negotiating | Vendor replied with a price; counter-offer cycle is in progress |
| Deal Won | Agreement reached — the campaign closed this one |
| Deal Lost | Vendor declined or negotiations broke down |
| No Response | All follow-up steps and contacts were exhausted with no reply |
| Replied | A reply arrived that needs your attention (more on this below) |
The AI reads and classifies every reply
When a reply lands in your mailbox, OutreachFlow reads it, classifies the intent (interest, pricing, terms, decline, spam, out-of-office, and many more), and routes it automatically. In most cases, the right next action send a counter, send a follow-up, mark as won, mark as lost — happens without you lifting a finger.
Some replies need a human
Occasionally a reply is ambiguous or falls into a category that requires your judgement a vendor asking an unusual question, a reply in an unexpected format, or a situation the AI flags for review. These land in the Replied status and stay there until you review them in the campaign’s Conversations tab. OutreachFlow will not auto-respond to these it waits for you.
Monitoring Your Campaign
Once the campaign is running, check the campaign detail page to stay on top of things.
Prospects tab: the full list of every website being contacted, their current status, last action, and next scheduled action. You can filter by status to quickly see who is negotiating, who is stuck, and who has gone quiet.
Conversations tab: the full email thread for every prospect. You can read every email OutreachFlow sent and every reply it received, in order.
Drafts tab: only visible when approval mode is on. Lists emails waiting for your approval before they are sent.
Events tab: a detailed audit trail of every decision the system made for every prospect. Useful when you want to understand exactly why a prospect moved to a particular status.
Tips for Better Campaign Results
Warm up new mailboxes first. If the email account you are using is new or hasn’t sent much recently, run it through OutreachFlow’s warmup process for two to four weeks before pointing a campaign at it. Cold sending from a cold mailbox leads to poor deliverability. See the Warmup guide for details.
Keep your list targeted. A list of 50 high-quality, relevant websites will almost always outperform a list of 500 loosely matched ones. The AI writes personalised emails, but relevance is still a human job.
Start with a low daily limit. Begin at 20–30 emails per day and ramp up gradually over two to three weeks. This mimics natural human sending behaviour and protects your sender reputation.
Check in on “Replied” prospects daily. These are the leads that need your attention. The longer they sit, the colder they get.
Review your counter-offer ladder before launch. Once a negotiation starts, the ladder for that prospect is fixed. Make sure your percentages reflect the budgets you are actually working with.
Use draft review mode for your first campaign. Read the AI-generated emails before they go out. After a few days you will have a feel for the quality and can switch to auto-send with confidence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I add more websites to the list after the campaign is already running? Yes. Any website you add to the source list will be enrolled as a new prospect on the next scheduler cycle (every 5 minutes). Prospects already in the pipeline are not affected.
Can I pause the campaign? Yes. You can pause the campaign at any time from the campaign settings. Prospects already scheduled will not be sent until you resume. Individual sender accounts can also be paused independently.
What happens if a sender account gets paused mid-campaign? OutreachFlow skips paused accounts automatically and continues using the remaining active accounts in the sender pool. If all accounts are paused, sending stops until at least one is resumed.
Can I run multiple campaigns at the same time? Yes — subject to your plan’s email account and campaign limits. Each campaign runs its own independent pipeline.
What counts as a “Deal Won”? The AI marks a deal as won when the vendor agrees to the price in your offer and confirms the placement details. At that point the negotiation thread is locked and the terms are stored on the prospect record. Any further coordination happens outside OutreachFlow.
If you have any questions or run into anything unexpected, our support team is here to help.