What stops a campaign sequence for a lead?
A lead's sequence stops when they reply, when their address bounces, when they unsubscribe, when their address is on your do-not-contact list, when you remove them, or when they finish the last step. Each one gives the lead a status you can see on the campaign's Audience tab. Two of them, Stop on reply and Stop on auto-reply, are switches you control in the campaign's Settings tab.
Replies
Under Settings > How it sends there are two switches, both on by default:
- Stop on reply. "Halt the sequence for a lead as soon as they reply." The lead's status becomes Replied and nothing further is sent to them.
- Stop on auto-reply. "Treat out-of-office replies as a stop signal." With it on, an automatic reply stops the sequence like a real one. With it off, the auto-reply is noted on the email but the lead keeps receiving their steps.
If you turn Stop on reply off, a real reply no longer stops the sequence, so the lead keeps getting the next emails. Leave it on unless you have a reason.
Things to know:
- Warmerly finds replies by reading the connected mailbox that sent the email, which it checks every few minutes, and matching the reply to the email it answers. A reply can be missed if it arrives without the reply headers (some forwards, or a brand-new email the person wrote from scratch). If a lead has clearly answered but is still in the sequence, remove them on the Audience tab.
- Replies show up in your Inbox. Open the lead's conversation on the Audience tab to see the sent emails and their reply together.
- Real replies are also what an A/B test counts. Auto-replies are not counted.
Bounces
If a sent email comes back undeliverable (a "mailer-daemon" or "delivery failed" message, or a permanent rejection of the address), the lead's status becomes Unavailable mailbox, the sequence stops, and the address is added to a do-not-contact list so no campaign emails it again.
The label is deliberately neutral. A lead can show Unavailable mailbox even though your own email never bounced, because the address was already known to be dead from a bounce elsewhere, and Warmerly skips it to protect your sender reputation.
Warmerly separates a dead address from a rejected message. If a provider refuses your mail as spam rather than because the address is bad, the lead is not marked as bounced or suppressed. It retries later, and after repeated refusals the mailbox is taken off campaigns while it recovers. See Why does my campaign send fewer emails than my daily limit?.
A high bounce rate damages your domain. Verify lists before importing them, using Prospecting > Email verification in the sidebar (developers: the Verify API).
Unsubscribes
Every campaign email carries an unsubscribe link and the one-click unsubscribe headers that Gmail and Yahoo require. When a lead uses either, their status becomes Unsubscribed, the sequence stops immediately, and the address goes on your workspace's do-not-contact list, so no campaign in that workspace emails them again. See Unsubscribe links.
The do-not-contact list
Right before each email is sent, Warmerly checks the recipient against the do-not-contact lists. A suppressed address is never emailed, in any campaign in that workspace. The lead is marked Unsubscribed or Unavailable mailbox depending on why the address is listed.
Add addresses yourself under Settings > Do not contact (paste one per line or separated by commas, then Add to do-not-contact). It takes effect straight away, which is what you want when someone tells you to stop on a call.
Limits to be aware of: the page is add-only. It does not show you the list and you cannot remove an address from it yourself. If you removed one by mistake, contact support through Warmi in the app. There is more in the Suppression API.
Skipped
A lead can show Skipped. The usual reasons are that the step uses {{ai_opener}} and
Warmerly could not research the lead's website, or that the recipient's server permanently
rejected the message in a way that does not prove the address is dead. Skipped leads are
not sent to further. See AI personalisation.
You remove them or they finish
- Remove on the Audience tab (one lead, or several with the checkboxes) takes leads out of the campaign. They stop receiving the remaining steps. Emails already sent are not affected.
- A lead that reaches the end of the sequence becomes Completed.
- When no lead is left queued or in progress, the whole campaign becomes Completed. See Campaign statuses.
Pausing is different
Pausing a campaign stops all sending for every lead until you resume, but no lead's status changes. A paused mailbox stops sending too. Pausing does not free up a step you want to delete, because leads are still sitting on it.