Campaigns

How GTM Engine generates personalized outbound content and hands contacts to Instantly for sending.

A campaign in GTM Engine is a reusable, AI-driven outbound content generator. Given an account and a contact, a campaign researches them and produces personalized, multi-step, multi-channel outbound copy — then writes that copy back onto the contact's fields and, optionally, hands the contact off to Instantly for sending.

Under the hood, a campaign is a normal workflow tagged for outreach, so it benefits from the same run history, versioning, and variable model as any other workflow.

What a campaign produces

A campaign generates copy for one or more steps, each on a channel:

Email (subject + body)
LinkedIn DM
LinkedIn InMail
Call script
Voicemail

Generated content is written to the contact's fields, prefixed by the campaign name (for example outreach_campaign, <campaign>_email_subject_1, <campaign>_email_body_1). Because field keys are prefixed by the campaign name, campaign names must be unique.

Delivery modes

When you build a campaign you choose how it's delivered:

Manual — GTM Engine only generates content and writes it to contact fields. You copy or map those values into whatever sequencer or CRM you already use. Available on all plans.
GTM Sending — GTM Engine sends each Live Campaign step natively from selected warmed outbound mailboxes.
Direct connected mailbox — GTM Engine sends from selected users' primary Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailboxes for inbound or follow-up use cases.
Instantly — in addition to generating content, the campaign adds each contact to a chosen Instantly campaign as a lead. AI-generated steps pass generated fields as custom variables; templated steps pass the full rendered template as a custom variable and update the matched Instantly step to reference it. Requires a connected Instantly integration (paid-plan integrations access).

Instantly delivery sends inside Instantly. GTM Sending and Direct connected mailbox delivery send through GTM Engine's native campaign engine.

Building a campaign

Campaigns are created from the Campaigns area (under Generate Pipeline) with a short wizard:

Delivery — choose Manual, GTM Sending, Direct connected mailbox, or Instantly (and the target Instantly campaign).
Basics — name, type (outbound / inbound / follow-up), and description.
Build & test — define the steps, channels, per-step guidance, and content mode; dry-run against a test account/contact in the same workspace; then provide feedback per step and apply all feedback in one refinement pass. Steps can be marked “This looks good” so the prompt rewrite avoids changing them.

Email steps support three modes: Full AI generates a unique subject and email-safe HTML body at send time, Plain Text stores a Liquid-enabled raw text body and sends true text/plain email through native delivery, and HTML stores a Liquid-enabled email-safe HTML body that can be pasted, designed, or drafted with Genie. Plain Text sends do not use HTML-only open pixels or click rewriting.

Genie can help operate the builder too: it can switch between Setup and Build & test, select a sequence step, choose GTM Sending or direct-connected mailboxes, adjust per-step wait timing/cadence, move the step workspace between Configure and Test, and change an email step between Full AI, Plain Text, and HTML before drafting or refining the content.

Enrollment

When a campaign runs for a contact, that contact is enrolled — recorded in a vendor-agnostic enrollment table. Enrollment happens as a side effect of running the campaign:

For Instantly delivery, the contact is recorded as enrolled after it's added to the Instantly campaign.
For Manual delivery, bulk enrollment records a manual enrollment so you still get a roster of who's been processed.

Enrollment counts and (for Instantly) live performance metrics are surfaced on the campaign, contact, and account views. Contacts already enrolled in a campaign are skipped on re-runs to avoid wasted work.

Scheduling a future start

When you enroll one or more contacts manually — from a campaign's roster, or via Enroll in Campaign on the Accounts/Contacts record pages — you can choose Now or Schedule a future start date and time. Scheduling defers the entire enrollment: the selected contacts are enrolled and the sequence begins on that date — useful for "connect with me in September" — rather than starting immediately.

Scheduled enrollments are saved as soon as you create them and appear in a Scheduled section on the campaign's enrollment roster, showing each contact and its start time. Each pending scheduled enrollment has a Cancel action so you can call it off before it starts. Scheduled contacts don't appear in the main enrolled list until the start date arrives, at which point the sequence begins.

Genie can also enroll a contact now or schedule a future start when it uses the Enroll Contact in Campaign tool. This schedules that contact into the native mirror of a Live Campaign; it is different from a Scheduled Campaign, which is a one-time broadcast to an audience.

Enrolling from record pages

Beyond the campaign roster, you can enroll into a campaign directly from the Accounts and Contacts record pages — both the list pages (via the Actions menu, using your current selection or all records) and each record's detail page (whose overflow menu is labeled Actions). Accounts open the bulk-enrollment planner (pick a campaign and target personas, then enroll each account's contacts); contacts open a campaign picker where you search and select a campaign and enroll now or on a scheduled date.

Sending windows

Each campaign that sends natively (GTM Sending) can define a sending window — a timezone, the days of the week it's allowed to send, and a daily start/end time. Emails only go out during that window. A step whose scheduled send lands outside the window (for example a multi-day delay that falls on a Saturday, or after business hours on a weekday) is automatically held and sent when the window next opens.

You set the sending window in the campaign's Basics step when creating it, and can change it afterward from the Sending window card on the campaign's Overview. If you don't set one, campaigns default to business hours (Monday–Friday, 08:00–18:00).

Task steps and sticky senders

Live Campaign steps can send a message or create a task for the rep instead. Task steps are related to the enrolled contact and can be assigned to the sending mailbox owner, or to the contact owner first and account owner second, falling back to the mailbox owner when the record owner is missing or orphaned. Assigned users receive a task notification.

For GTM Sending, each enrolled contact is also assigned a sticky sending mailbox. Later steps reuse the same mailbox whenever it remains eligible. If that mailbox is disabled or unavailable, GTM Engine falls back to another eligible mailbox owned by the same user, then to any eligible selected mailbox, and saves the new assignment for future steps.

Suppression list

Each campaign can have an optional suppression list — one or more contact audiences whose members are removed from the campaign after the recipient list is built. This is in addition to unsubscribes: use it to exclude competitors, contacts who are in an active deal cycle, or a saved report of people who have opted out.

Each suppression audience uses the same contacts query builder and saved-view picker as your campaign audiences — describe it in plain language and Genie materializes the filter, or add rule chips manually. A live "excluded" count updates as you edit.

Scheduled campaigns: configure it in the Audience step, alongside your recipient audiences.
Live campaigns: configure it in the Basics step when creating, and edit it afterward from the Suppression list card on the campaign's Overview.

Suppression is applied when contacts are enrolled (Live) or when the audience is resolved (Scheduled), and it is re-checked at each send step — so a contact who becomes suppressed partway through a sequence (for example they enter an active deal) stops receiving the remaining emails.

Enrichment

Each campaign has enrichment settings that prepare a contact before it's enrolled or sent to. Three options, all on by default:

Find email if missing — run email discovery when the contact has no address.
Validate email if present — verify an existing address; a hard-invalid result treats the contact as unreachable.
Re-enrich if stale — refresh contacts whose data is older than a threshold (default 60 days).

Any contact still without a reachable email after finding/validating is skipped — no enrollment or send rows are created for it. You configure these settings in the campaign's Basics step when creating it, and can change them afterward from the Enrichment card on the campaign's Overview. They apply when contacts are enrolled (Live) and in the send fan-out (Scheduled). Enrichment is configured per campaign, so the bulk-enrollment planner no longer has its own enrichment options.

Replies (Inbox)

When a campaign sends natively from your own mailboxes (GTM Sending), replies come back into a unified Inbox (under Generate Pipeline → Campaigns). The Inbox shows every reply alongside the contact who replied, the campaign it came from, and the mailbox it landed in, and lets you read the full thread and reply from the same mailbox — filterable by mailbox, sending domain, owner, campaign, status, and unread.

Each inbound reply is classified as Positive, Negative, or Out of office, with a short explanation shown in the thread. Positive and negative replies automatically remove the contact from the sequence, so you never keep emailing someone who already responded. Out-of-office replies keep the contact enrolled and resume the remaining sequence after the return date in the email, or one week later if no date is included. Campaign Analytics breaks reply performance into total reply rate, positive reply rate, negative reply rate, and out-of-office false replies.

Unsubscribes are removed the same way. When a contact unsubscribes, the enrollment moves to an unsubscribed status, remaining steps are skipped, and an activity is recorded on the contact's timeline. Campaign Analytics shows the unsubscribe rate and total, and the Unsubscribed stat is clickable to see exactly who unsubscribed and when.

Credits

Campaigns consume credits for the content generation itself (an AI task) and for any enrichment triggered while building a bulk audience (for example email or LinkedIn enrichment). Handing a contact to Instantly does not itself consume GTM Engine credits — Instantly bears the sending cost. Bulk enrollment jobs are where this adds up fastest, since generation and enrichment run per contact. See Credits and usage for estimates.