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Cold outbound means reaching people who have never heard of you and never opted in to hear from you, and doing that at scale.

That job belongs to a specific person. The Sequencer is built for whoever operates outbound at your company: marketing ops, growth, demand gen. It is not built for a rep working a named account.

What it isn't:

• Not a marketing email platform. Your newsletter stays where it is.
• Not inbound routing. If your concern is speed to lead, this is not the tool for that.

Cold outbound and deliverability both get their own lessons next, in Lessons 2 and 3.

🌐 Where Your Email Comes From

You buy the domains you send from right here inside Clay, with Clay credits.

To find the flow:

1. Go to Email accounts and choose Add an email account
2. Buy the managed accounts from here. Technically you can send from your own domain, but we recommend you don't, and Lesson 5 covers why
3. Search a domain variant and pick names close to your brand. If your company is Clay, you're looking at something like youshouldgetclay.com
4. Specify the number of weekly sends you plan to do, and Clay recommends how many domains that takes

The domains you buy are real Gmail or Outlook accounts registered on your behalf, and Clay warms them for about three weeks before you send anything real. That warming window is the reason you buy inboxes well before you need them.

Buying inboxes and bringing your own are Lessons 4 and 5.

🎯 Choosing Who You Send To

From Campaigns, you'll go to New campaign. We recommend sending to a People audience rather than a table. You can still use a table if you want, but the segment is the better default, and this assumes you're familiar with how Audiences work. The Audiences course in Clay University covers that.

With Audiences, Clay checks who belongs in this campaign right up to the moment before the send. So if a lead books a meeting, becomes a customer, or stops matching your criteria for any reason, they stop getting emails, even mid-sequence.

Inside the campaign you also get a set of exclusions:

• Exclusions: Audiences you want to leave out
• Cooldown window: the number of days to wait before a lead can be sequenced again, so you're not dropping someone into multiple campaigns at once
• Blocklist: the list unsubscribes are automatically added to

Just-in-time enrollment, exclusions, cooldowns, and the blocklist are Lesson 6.

✍️ Building the Sequence

You can set up to four messages, set the wait times in between, and decide whether the messages after the first send go out as a reply on the same thread or start a new one.

Four things go into the copy:

• Variables: pull data in on a per-lead basis
• AI snippets: write the parts you leave blank, using context you give it about your business
• Spintax: rotates phrasing, so 10,000 sends aren't 10,000 identical emails. You can rotate words like "hey," "hello," and "what's up"
• Spam check: scores your whole sequence live as you write it

Your credit costs sit up in the top right, so the price of the campaign is visible while you build it.

Variables and AI context, snippets and spintax, A/B testing, and sequence building are Lessons 7 through 10.

📮 Sender Accounts and Settings

The inboxes you bought show up under Sender accounts. By default Clay spreads the leads evenly across all the domains you bought, then matches Gmail prospects to Gmail senders and Outlook prospects to Outlook senders.

Under Settings, the schedule defaults to weekday business hours with a gap between each send. The reason is the whole strategy in one line: you're trying to look like a person sending email, because that's what gets delivered.

Distribution, schedule, and what launch locks are Lesson 11.

📊 Reading What Happened

Once the campaign is running, Analytics is where you live. You'll see emails sent, replies, bounces, and how far leads got through the sequence.

• The funnel across the top tells you how many leads were processed, how many enrolled, and how many finished
• Results split across an A/B test, so you can read each variant separately
• The Replies tab categorizes replies automatically: do not contact, info request, not interested, wrong person

Global analytics tracks all sorts of things, but two numbers matter most: reply rate and bounce rate. Alongside them, engagement analytics breaks your replies into positive, negative, and neutral.

Then there's bounce rate by domain, and this is the one to watch closely. A high bounce rate on a domain is the early warning sign that it's wearing out and needs to be swapped.

Campaign analytics is Lesson 12, and the global cross-campaign view is Lesson 14.

📥 When Someone Writes Back

Replies land in a global Inbox inside Clay.

• The reply goes out from the same account that sent the original, so the thread stays intact from the prospect's side
• Assign that inbox to a rep and the reply routes to that rep, who can answer from their own inbox or from a draft they approve inside Slack
• Categorize, forward, and blocklist right from the individual reply, in the kebab menu

Everything that happens in a campaign also lands in a Clay table, under Events. That means you can build automations on top of all of it, like Slack notifications or even automated replies.

From your side: buy the domains, point the campaign at a segment, write one sequence, and let it run. Domains, an audience, a sequence, senders, a schedule, analytics, and an inbox: seven pieces, one campaign.

Replies and routing, the global inbox, and campaign events are Lessons 13, 15, and 16.

🚀 What's Next

You've now seen the whole machine: where your sending domains come from, how a campaign reads its leads from an audience, what goes into the copy, how sends are distributed and scheduled, which two numbers tell you the campaign's health, and where replies land.

Next, we start at the beginning with what cold outbound email actually is, and how it's different from every other email in your inbox.

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