Sequences
Sequences is a release-flagged feature, currently being rolled out — it is not available in your workspace yet. This page says what it is for, and grows with the feature.
What it is for
Sequences is for one-to-one selling. A rep writes a short sequence — a first email and the follow-ups after it, each a set number of days apart — and enrolls people from the CRM in it. Every email goes to one person, as a message from the rep rather than as a campaign.
It is not a way to send one message to an audience. That is what email campaigns are for, sent from your site's sending identity to a segment of your contacts.
Sent from your own mailbox
A sequence sends from the rep's own mailbox, connected to the workspace through the rep's Google account. The email leaves from that address, sits in that rep's sent mail like any other, and a reply comes back to the same inbox — which is what makes it a conversation between two people rather than a broadcast.
Where it lives
Sequences is a tab of its own at the organization level, beside the CRM. It has three sections: All sequences, Mailboxes and Compliance.
Opening it takes the Use Sequences permission, which owners and admins hold by default. A custom role can grant it to other members of the organization. A collaborator added to particular sites cannot open it, because Sequences covers the whole organization.
Connect a mailbox
Each rep connects their own Google mailbox in Sequences → Mailboxes:
- Select Connect with Google and choose your Google account.
- Google asks you to let Aglyn send email on your behalf and read your email. Allow both. Sending is how a sequence's messages go out as you; reading is how a reply or a bounce is noticed, so a sequence stops when somebody answers. If either is left unticked, the connection is refused and nothing is saved.
- You come back to Mailboxes with the mailbox listed as Active.
The access Google grants is stored encrypted and is never shown to anyone, administrators included. Connecting the same Google account again updates the mailbox you already have and keeps its settings. Each member can connect up to five mailboxes.
If Mailboxes says connecting a Google mailbox isn't configured, your deployment has no Google OAuth client set up. On a self-hosted install, see Environment variables.
Send-as address and display name
A mailbox sends as one address: the account's own, or an alias Gmail has already verified for it — one added under Settings → Accounts → Send mail as in Gmail and confirmed there. Only addresses Gmail lists as verified are offered. To use a new alias, add it in Gmail first, then connect the mailbox again so the new alias is seen.
If the same address is waiting for verification under Your sending addresses, connecting the mailbox verifies it there too, because Gmail has already confirmed you can send as it.
The display name is the name recipients see beside the address.
Daily cap, warm-up and sending window
- Daily cap — the most the mailbox sends in one day. It starts at 20 and can be set up to 50.
- Warm-up — a newly connected mailbox ramps up: at most 10 a day in its first week, 20 in its second and 30 from its third. The daily cap still applies, so a mailbox capped at 20 never sends more than 20. Warm up gradually is on for every new connection; the member who owns the mailbox can switch it off for one that has sent mail for years and already has its reputation, and it then sends at its cap from that day. Switching it back on starts a fresh ramp.
- Sending window — the days of the week and the hours the mailbox sends in, read in the mailbox's timezone. A message that comes due outside the window waits for the next opening.
Google Workspace itself allows each user 2,000 messages and 2,000 unique external recipients a day, aliases included; the caps here keep a mailbox far below that.
Status and health
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Active | The mailbox can send. |
| Paused | Somebody paused it, or it paused itself — see below. Nothing sends from it until it is resumed. |
| Reconnect required | Google stopped accepting the connection — the password changed, access was removed from the Google account, or an administrator revoked it. Nothing sends until you connect the mailbox again. The member who connected it, and the organization's owners and admins, are emailed the moment this happens, with a link to this page. |
| Disconnected | The mailbox was disconnected. Nothing sends from it until it is connected again. |
Health shows the last seven days: messages sent, bounces and replies. A mailbox that has never sent shows zeros and No sends yet.
When a mailbox pauses itself
Bounces are the first sign that a list has bad addresses in it, and mailbox providers judge a sender by them. So a mailbox pauses itself when:
- two of its emails hard-bounce in one of its days;
- more than 3% of its last 50 emails hard-bounced, once at least 25 of them are in that window — under that, one bounce would be the whole rate, and a single blocked address is not a list problem; or
- a reply called one of its emails spam. That pause is meant to last a week, and the card says when the week is out.
The card says why, with the date, and a line is written to your organization's activity. The member who connected the mailbox, and the organization's owners and admins, are emailed the moment it pauses: the reason in the mailbox's own words, how many enrollments are waiting on it, and a link to this page. Re-check the addresses in the mailbox's sequences, then select Resume. Only bounces that arrive after you resume are judged again.
Test, pause and disconnect
- Send a test to myself sends a short plain-text message from the mailbox to its own address, so you can check it arrives. Type another address in Test address to send it there instead: a test to your own address never leaves Google, so it carries no authentication result — a test to an outside mailbox you can read is the one whose original source shows whether the send-as domain's DKIM, SPF and DMARC pass. Only the member who connected the mailbox can send one, and at most five an hour.
- Pause stops the mailbox sending; Resume starts it again.
- Disconnect removes the mailbox and deletes its stored access, and tells Google to revoke that access. If another connected mailbox still uses the same Google account — a shared inbox two members connected — the access is left in place for that mailbox. You can always remove access yourself from your Google Account's third-party connections.
Organization owners and admins can change the settings of, pause and disconnect any member's mailbox — a departing rep's mailbox has to be stoppable by somebody. Other members manage only their own.
When a member deletes their account, the mailboxes they connected and the access stored for them are deleted, and Google is asked to revoke it; when an organization is deleted, Google is asked to revoke the access of every mailbox in it. Access another connected mailbox still uses is left in place for that mailbox, as with a disconnect.
Compliance settings
Every email a sequence sends ends with a footer saying who sent it, where they can be reached by post, that the email is a sales email, and how to stop more of them:
Example Co LLC · 100 Example St, Springfield, IL 62701
This is a sales email from Example Co. Not interested? Reply "no" and I won't email again.
The United States' CAN-SPAM Act requires those things of a commercial email, so the footer is added to every email after your text — no template or merge field can leave it off. You set what it says in Sequences → Compliance:
- Legal name — your organization's legal name, as the footer prints it.
- Brand name — the name the solicitation sentence uses, when it isn't the legal name. Leave it empty to use the legal name.
- Postal address — a valid physical postal address: a street address, a post office box registered with the US Postal Service, or a private mailbox registered with the US Postal Service under its rules for commercial mail receiving agencies. Write it over as many lines as it takes; the footer prints them on one line.
No sequence can be activated while the legal name or the postal address is empty, and an email with neither is never sent.
Allowed countries
The countries a sequence may send to at all, United States by default. Every sequence sends only to the countries both it and this list allow, so taking a country off here takes it off every sequence at once.
The others are off because the law is different there. Canada, the United Kingdom and most of the European Union require a consent basis that an email to someone who never contacted you does not have. So a cold email — to someone who never filled in a form, signed up, ordered or booked with you, or wrote to you — never goes outside the United States, whatever this list says. Add another country only for people who came to you first.
Do not contact domains
The domains no sequence emails anyone at, whoever enrolls them. Your organization's do-not-contact list holds addresses — a person who replied "no", used the unsubscribe link, or was marked do-not-contact on an enrollment — and, beside them, whole domains:
- Add one yourself — a company that asked not to hear from you, or one
whose mail gateway you know blocks you. Type the domain (
example.com; an address at it works too) and select Add domain. - Added for you — when an email hard-bounces because the recipient's mail gateway refused it (Barracuda, Proofpoint, Mimecast and the like say so in the bounce), rather than because the address is unknown, the domain is added here with the bounce's reason. That kind of bounce is the whole company's verdict on the sender, and the next person there would bounce the same way and count against the mailbox's bounce rule.
Every address at a listed domain is refused in Check people and again before each send, with the domain named. Take a domain off with its Remove button; both changes are written to your organization's activity. Domains of public mailbox providers are never added automatically.
Sequences
A sequence is the emails, and the tasks between them, one person gets from one rep. Sequences → All sequences lists each one with its mailbox, its status, and how many people it has enrolled, and how many of them are still active, replied, bounced or opted out.
Build a sequence
Select New sequence, name it, and choose the site whose CRM the people you enroll are contacts of and the mailbox it sends from. A sequence sends as the member who connected its mailbox, so only that member, or an organization owner or admin, can edit or activate it.
The Mailbox list offers the mailboxes you connected, and an owner or admin every mailbox in the organization. A disconnected mailbox is never offered. When exactly one of your own mailboxes is active, a new sequence starts on it. With none, connect one first.
A sequence holds up to eight steps, of which up to four are emails:
- Email — a subject and a body, or a CRM
email template whose body is sent. Insert merge
fields — the contact's first name, company or job title, your own name, the
site's name — and
{{enrollment.personalLine}}, the sentence you write for each person when you enroll them. Every email after the first replies in the first one's thread unless you turn Reply in the same thread off, in which case it starts a new thread and needs its own subject. - Task — a LinkedIn touch, a Call or a To-do for you, with a title.
Each step waits a number of business days after the one before it — up to 30, and at least 1 between emails — counted in the mailbox's timezone. The first step can wait 0 days: it goes at the next opening of the sending window. By default a sequence sends in its mailbox's sending hours; Sending hours sets hours of its own for this sequence.
Campaigns files the sequence under one or more of the site's campaigns, the way a form or a landing page is filed under one. Everyone you enroll from then on joins those campaigns on their own record — a lead at the top of its document, a contact on the site's facet — and what the sequence produces is counted on each campaign's page: people enrolled, first emails sent, replies, meetings booked from a sequence link, and enrolled leads that converted. A campaign the sequence joins later does not claim the people already in it, and one it leaves keeps what it was credited with. Filing a sequence under a campaign changes nothing about who is enrolled or what is sent.
Add a mail-client unsubscribe button is off unless you turn it on. On,
every email the sequence sends carries the List-Unsubscribe header, so the
recipient's mail app shows its own Unsubscribe button. That is the easiest
way out for them, and people who have it mark fewer emails as spam, but Apple
Mail, Gmail and Outlook then label the email as coming from a mailing list — a
poor fit for one-to-one email. Off, the footer's "reply no" line is the way
out, and it is on every email either way. See Unsubscribe.
The Preview beside the editor shows each email as it would reach a sample contact, with the real footer, and the editor lists anything that stops the sequence from being saved beside the field it is about.
Activate, pause and archive
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Being written. Nothing is sent, and nobody can be enrolled. |
| Active | Enrolled people get each step when it comes due. |
| Paused | Nothing is sent. Activating it again picks up where each person was. |
| Archived | Final. Everyone still in it is stopped, and it takes no one new. |
A sequence can be activated only while its mailbox is Active in Mailboxes. A paused mailbox has to be resumed, and one that says Reconnect required connected again, first. Activation also needs the legal name and postal address from Compliance settings. Until both are in place, the sequence's page says what is missing and Activate stays unavailable. If an active sequence's mailbox is paused or needs reconnecting, nothing is sent from it until the mailbox is active again.
A draft nobody was ever enrolled in can be deleted; once anyone has been enrolled, archive the sequence instead. After the first enrollment you can still reword a step and add steps at the end, but not remove, reorder or change the kind of a step, or move the sequence to another site or mailbox — people in it are partway through those steps. Start a new sequence to change them.
Enroll people
Select Enroll people on an active sequence, and choose them from a saved Contacts or Leads view, by searching your contacts at the sequence's site, or from the Leads tab — the site's open leads — up to 50 at a time. Enrolling reads your contacts and leads, so it takes the Manage data permission as well as Use Sequences.
A lead is enrolled as it is, with no contact made: the emails read the
lead's name, company and title wherever the steps say {{contact.firstName}},
{{contact.company}} or {{contact.title}} (and {{lead.…}} reads the same
fields), the sends and replies land on the lead's page, a call step files its
task on the lead, and a reply moves a lead from New to Working. When
the lead converts, its enrollment carries on
as the contact's — same thread, same place in the steps — so a person is never
enrolled twice by being two records. A lead that already converted, one whose
address is already a contact, and one closed as unqualified are blocked with
the reason: enroll the contact, or reopen the lead.
Before anything is enrolled, each person is marked:
- Eligible — enrolled as they are.
- Needs you — enrolled once you've written their personal line and confirmed what's asked below.
- Blocked — not enrolled, with the reason: a personal mailbox, which a cold email never goes to; an address outside the allowed countries, or in no known country; on the platform's or your site's suppression list after a bounce, a complaint or an unsubscribe; opted out of sales email from the site; on your organization's do-not-contact list, or at a domain on it; a member of your workspace; a customer, unless the sequence includes customers; already in a sequence; or a lead that converted, is already a contact, or was closed as unqualified.
Cold contacts
A contact is cold when nothing on your site shows they came to you: no
form, sign-up, order or booking, and no email from them. A lead is judged the
same way: one that wrote in through a form or booked is not cold; one you
imported or added by hand is. For each cold
contact you write a personal line — one sentence on why you're writing to
this person now, which the sequence puts where {{enrollment.personalLine}}
is — and confirm three things only you can know:
- This is a US business address.
- They or their company published this address, or they gave it to us — never guessed from a name, and never bought.
- This address was verified as deliverable.
Each confirmation is stored on the enrollment with who made it and when.
Enroll checks every person again as it enrolls them, so someone who unsubscribed a moment ago is refused even though they were eligible when you looked. A person goes through a sequence once: they can't be enrolled in the same sequence again, even after it finishes.
Enrolling someone in a sequence that is in a campaign files them under that campaign too: the enrollment records the campaigns as they stood, the lead or contact gains them on its own record, and the campaign's page counts the person under Enrolled from that moment. Their first email, a reply, a meeting booked from a link in a sequence email and a lead's conversion are each counted there once as they happen, and the person's page says the sequence is where they came from when nothing else is credited first.
Enrollments
A sequence's Enrollments tab lists everyone in it: their status, the step they're on, when the next one is due in the mailbox's timezone, when the last one went, and why they stopped when they have. A person enrolled as a lead is marked Lead until the lead converts. For each one you can:
- Pause and Resume — nothing is sent while they're paused.
- Stop — they get nothing more from this sequence.
- Mark do-not-contact — puts the address on your organization's do-not-contact list, which every sequence checks before every send, and stops them in every other sequence too.
How sends are scheduled
Every 15 minutes, the steps that have come due are sent, from each rep's own mailbox:
- In the sending hours of the sequence, or of its mailbox, read in the mailbox's timezone. A step that comes due outside them waits for the next opening.
- Within the day's limit — the daily cap and the warm-up — spread across the sending hours, so a day's emails do not all leave in its first half hour. One run sends at most five emails from a mailbox, follow-ups before first emails.
- After every check again. Everything enrolling checked is checked again before each email — the do-not-contact list, the suppression lists, the site's sales-email opt-outs, whether the person became a customer or joined your workspace — because a person enrolled on Monday can unsubscribe by Thursday.
Each email is sent once: two runs that overlap never send the same step twice, and never go over a mailbox's cap between them. It is filed on the contact's timeline in the CRM as an email from the rep, and a task step becomes a CRM task for the rep, due the day it comes due.
Nothing is sent while your organization's legal name or postal address is missing, or while a mailbox is paused or needs reconnecting — those sequences wait.
What stops a sequence
Each connected mailbox is read every 15 minutes for what came back:
| What happens | What it does |
|---|---|
| The person replies | Stops the sequence (Replied), files the reply on the contact's timeline with a line saying the sequence stopped, and gives the rep the task Reply from their name. |
| An out-of-office reply | Keeps the sequence going, and moves the next step to at least five business days after the reply. |
| They ask not to be emailed — a reply such as "no" or "unsubscribe", or, when the sequence adds the mail-client unsubscribe button, that button's link or a message to the unsubscribe address | Stops the sequence (Opted out), puts the address on your do-not-contact list, unsubscribes it from the site's Sales outreach email, and stops it in every other sequence. |
| The email hard-bounces | Stops the sequence (Bounced) and puts the address on your do-not-contact list and on the platform's suppression list. When the bounce says the recipient's mail gateway refused it rather than that the address is unknown, the whole domain goes on the list too, and the enrollment says so. |
| A check refuses them before the next email — a customer now, a member of your workspace, on a suppression list | Stops the sequence, saying which check. |
| The mailbox is disconnected or removed, or the member who connected it leaves the organization | Stops the sequences that send from it. |
The next email needs something the contact doesn't have — a first name for {{contact.firstName}} | Pauses the enrollment, naming what is missing. Fill it in and select Resume. |
A reply that arrives after the sequence finished, or after it was stopped, is still read: the enrollment moves to Replied, or to Opted out when the reply asks not to be emailed.
Every verdict a list takes is written on the person's record too: the lead or the contact carries an email state — Bounced, Blocked by their mail gateway, Unsubscribed, Marked as spam, Do not contact — and the email the sequence sent reads Bounced on their timeline. A member marking an enrollment do-not-contact stamps the record the same way.
The sequence's own turns are on the record's Activity as well, signed Sequences: Enrolled in the sequence when a person is enrolled, with the campaigns the enrollment filed them under, and stopped: they replied or stopped: they opted out under the last email it sent. A bounce adds no line of its own — the sent email already reads Bounced.
Unsubscribe
Every email a sequence sends ends with the footer's "reply no", and a reply asking not to be emailed stops the person everywhere. An email with no footer, or with no legal name or postal address to put in it, is never sent.
A sequence with Add a mail-client unsubscribe button turned on also
carries two more ways out, in the email's List-Unsubscribe header:
- a one-click unsubscribe link, which Gmail, Yahoo and most mail apps show as an Unsubscribe button;
- an unsubscribe address — the rep's own address with
+unsubscribeadded — for mail apps that unsubscribe by email.
The setting is off by default, because the header is what makes mail apps present an email as coming from a mailing list. Gmail and Yahoo require it of bulk senders — 5,000 or more emails a day — which a mailbox sending a sequence is not. With it on, an email whose link cannot be made waits rather than going out without it.
Either one stops the person's sequences, puts the address on your do-not-contact list and unsubscribes it from the site's Sales outreach email. The link needs no sign-in, shows a plain page saying it is done, and keeps working for good — including after the setting is turned off, and after Sequences is paused for your workspace.
When a person is erased from your workspace, their enrollments are deleted with them. Their do-not-contact entry stays — it holds no address, only a one-way key — so they are never emailed again.