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Using an Audience in a Campaign
By the end of this lesson you'll have a campaign reading from a live Audience segment, with an exclusion segment, a cooldown window, and a workspace blocklist behind it. You'll also understand why Sequencer never asks you to upload a list.
👥 People, Not Tables
Open New campaign and the first choice you make is People or Tables.
Use People. Tables is how the first version of Sequencer worked, and it still works well, but every new capability is being built on the Audiences side, whether that's company audiences or people audiences. Cooldowns, exclusions, and blocklists only work off audiences.
Pick your segment from the list and you're set. This lesson uses one called Safe-to-Send list.
This course assumes you already have an audience segment with email addresses on it. If you don't, our standard enrichments get emails and other signals onto the audience record, and the Audiences course in Clay University covers building segments end to end.
⏱️ Just-in-Time Enrollment
Most sequencers work off a list you exported, which means the moment you hit export, that list is frozen in time. Whatever was true about those people on the Tuesday you pulled the list is what the campaign believes for the next week, two weeks, six weeks, whatever.
Clay checks eligibility right up to the moment of send. When it's a lead's turn, Clay confirms they still belong in the segment, pulls the latest enrichment data, uses that to personalize the message, and sends. All of it automatically.
We call this just-in-time enrollment. Everything on the audience record, including signals like a job change or a fundraise, is the freshest data available rather than a snapshot that went stale two weeks ago.
It also un-enrolls
Hover the segment in Lead setup and the tooltip tells you that leads who exit the segment will be paused. That can be turned off in settings.
So just-in-time enrollment works both ways. If someone stops matching your criteria halfway through a sequence, they stop getting emails automatically.
For example: you've got four people at one company in a campaign. One of them replies, a rep picks them up, and the account is now a live opportunity. You want the other three to stop getting cold emails, and if your segment is built to exclude accounts with active opportunities, they do.
That is something you cannot do with a static list.
🚫 Exclusions
Open Configure exclusions on the campaign. Two controls live here, and they prevent two different failures.
Exclude by segment. Pick one segment whose members never get sequenced in this campaign. The typical one is your customer list: people who already pay you should not be receiving cold outreach. It's a setting you configure once rather than a rule you police.
The cooldown window. The number of days a lead waits before any campaign can sequence them again: None, 30, 60, 90, or a custom number of days. This works cross-campaign. Three campaigns running at once and one prospect who fits all three would otherwise mean three cold emails in a week from three different people at your company.
🛑 The Global Blocklist
The Blocklist link in the exclusions modal takes you to the blocklist itself, which lives under Campaigns alongside Sequences, Email accounts, Sender variables, and Account orders.
It sits at the workspace level, so it applies across every campaign you run rather than campaign by campaign.
Each row is one email address or domain that should never get an email from you, ever, with the date it was added. You can filter by Type, search the list, and add entries yourself with Add to blocklist. Most of what accumulates here you never touch: unsubscribes get added automatically.
With cold outbound, not everyone is going to be happy that you emailed them, and if someone asks not to be emailed you need to listen. The blocklist is how that request gets honored without anyone having to remember it.
🔁 What a Static List Costs You
On a static list, every single thing in this lesson is something a person has to remember to do. Check that the customer list is excluded. Check whether another campaign already hit this prospect. Pull out the people who converted.
Built off an audience segment, all of that happens automatically.
🚀 What's Next
You've got a campaign reading from a live segment, an exclusion segment set, a cooldown window, and a blocklist acting as a guardrail so the people who should not be hearing from you don't.
Next we start writing, beginning with the two things the AI needs to know before it can produce anything worth sending: what your business is, and what Clay knows about each lead.
