Campaigns as experiments
Cold email automation
A sequence that sends message two no matter what is a broadcast. Automation worth the name branches on what the person did.
The first message is plain text with no links, no images and no tracking, short enough to read on a phone. It is the message most likely to be filtered, so it carries the least a filter can object to.
What happens next depends on the person. Someone who never opened gets one nudge on day 3 and another on day 8. Someone who opened and did not reply gets a different, shorter message. Someone who replied leaves the sequence at once, because the worst thing automation can do is send a scripted nudge to a person who already answered.
Every campaign runs as an experiment. Each branch is measured per segment and per message against real Gmail and Outlook, and a change that does not move the numbers is rolled back. Volume is never part of the experiment; the cap comes from the reading.
The sequencer is a component inside the system, not the system. It sends what the base, the reading and the classification tell it to.
Questions
How many messages in a sequence?
Three at most for the never-opened branch, two for the opened branch, and none once there is a reply. More than that trades reputation for diminishing replies.
Is the copy personalized?
With facts that have a source. Every personalization comes from a field with provenance, so nothing in the message is a guess about the company.
This page is part of outbound engineering, the practice of running B2B outbound as a measured system.
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