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Sender Accounts and Settings
Your message is built. This lesson is everything between a finished sequence and a live campaign: which inboxes send it, when they send it, and what happens the moment you launch.
📤 Choosing Senders
Open the Sender accounts tab. The first thing on it is a projection: expected to finish in this many days, at this many emails a day.
That number comes off your inboxes' daily limits, and those limits decide how long a campaign takes. If the projection looks wrong, the fix is more inboxes or a smaller segment, not a setting on this page.
Below it is how leads get distributed, and there are two modes.
Even distribution
The default. Leads spread evenly across every account you've selected, and Clay matches the provider per lead behind the scenes, so Gmail prospects get Gmail senders. For straight cold outbound, leave it here.
Round robin by rep
You map a field holding a rep's email, and Clay rotates through that rep's accounts only. Use it when reps own territories and you want a prospect's mail coming from the person who's going to work them. What that buys you shows up two lessons from now, when those replies route back to the rep who owns them.
One toggle to be deliberate about, Skip lead if sender is not present:
- On, a lead with no matching rep doesn't get enrolled
- Off, they get a sender at random
🕐 The Schedule
Open the Settings tab. Three modes:
- Optimized for deliverability, the default: weekdays, business hours, and a minimum gap between emails
- Send immediately
- Custom schedule
The reasoning behind that default is a little different from what other tools will tell you. The goal is not to hit some optimal moment when people check email. Nobody checks email at a specific time.
The goal is to look like a person. Somebody doing outbound sends a few emails, does some research, sends a few more. If you have no idea how to protect your deliverability, the one thing to emulate is a normal human being.
Send immediately still means minutes, not seconds. If you need to hit a form fill in ninety seconds, use something built for that.
📄 The HTML Decision
Your emails default to plain text, and for cold sending, leave them there. We covered why earlier in the course: the formatting you give up is formatting nobody was going to be impressed by. Hyphens work instead of bullets, and a raw URL renders as a link in every major client.
HTML exists for legitimate reasons, mostly a formatted call to action or an unsubscribe link. If you turn it on, do it knowing what it costs.
What's disabled while HTML is off
Three toggles sit greyed out on this tab:
- Track email opens
- Track link clicks
- Enable unsubscribe link
All three say requires HTML.
So the most deliverable configuration is also the one with no tracking and no unsubscribe link. Make that trade on purpose.
You're not losing much on tracking. Open rates are unreliable across the industry now, because some providers preload images and others block the request entirely, so that number was lying to you before this. On unsubscribes, your reply handling and your blocklist do that job, which the next two lessons cover.
🔁 Enrollment
Four settings, in the Enrollment section:
- Pause lead on segment exit: on by default, and it's the behavior from the audience lesson. Leave it on.
- Trigger cooldowns: makes enrolling here count against a lead's cooldown elsewhere.
- Pause leads at the same company on reply: one person at an account replies, everyone else at that account stops.
- Follow-up percentage: governs how much of your daily capacity goes to follow-ups rather than new first touches.
🚪 What Launch Commits You To
Open Launch campaign and read the terms before clicking anything:
- After launch, the order of your sequence cannot be changed
- To modify an active campaign, you pause it first
- Changes only affect leads that haven't already been sequenced
Changing a sequence mid flight corrupts your analytics, because half your leads got one experience and half got another.
What you can change is copy. Pause, edit, resume.
The cost estimate
The same modal prices the campaign: leads, actions, credits. That's the cost chip from the AI snippets lesson doing its arithmetic across your whole list, so you see the number before you commit rather than after.
You can also set a credit budget to cap what a campaign is allowed to spend.
🚀 What's Next
You can now choose senders and read the capacity projection honestly, set a schedule built to look human rather than to catch some imaginary open window, make the HTML call knowing it takes tracking and the unsubscribe link with it, and read exactly what launch locks.
Next we'll look at a campaign that's been running for a week and read what it's telling us.
