Follow-up sequences
A follow-up trigger sends a template when something happens to a lead. A sequence is a trigger with more than one step: the first email goes out, and the next ones follow on the delays you set, until the lead answers or the steps run out.
Included on every plan.
Team and personal
Section titled “Team and personal”Templates and sequences come in two kinds.
- Team templates and sequences run for everyone’s leads. Creating and editing them is an admin task by default. On Enterprise, a custom role can be granted the follow-ups capability.
- Personal templates and sequences belong to one member and run only on leads assigned to that member. Every member can create them, up to 20 personal templates and 10 personal sequences each. Managers can read the personal ones of the people they manage, and only the owner edits them.
A personal template or sequence can be your version of a team one. On your leads, Lynqu sends your version instead of the team one, everywhere the team one is used: sequences, automation rules, campaign and event follow-ups. The email also goes out under your name, as every automated email already does for the lead’s owner. To start one, open a team template or sequence and choose Make my version. A copied sequence starts switched off, so it replaces nothing until you have edited it and switched it on.
Leads with no owner always get the team text.
Locked
Section titled “Locked”An admin can lock a team template or sequence, for example compliance wording that must not change. A locked one is always sent as written, and nobody’s version replaces it. A personal version made before the lock stops running, so a lead never gets both.
Switching personal versions off
Section titled “Switching personal versions off”An admin can switch personal templates and sequences off for the whole organization on the Follow-ups page. While it is off, only team text is sent. Existing personal ones are kept and come back into use when the switch is on again.
When someone leaves the organization, their personal templates and sequences are removed and the emails those sequences had scheduled are cancelled.
What starts a sequence
Section titled “What starts a sequence”| Trigger | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Stage change | A lead arrives in the stage you picked |
| Score | A lead’s score crosses your threshold, going up or going down |
| Filter | A lead matches an expression you wrote, such as days_since(captured_at) > 30 |
Filters are checked when a lead changes and once a day, so a time-based condition fires on the day it becomes true, even if nobody touched the lead. The daily check only looks at leads that start to match after the trigger was switched on or its filter last changed, so switching a trigger on does not email every lead that already matched. Imported leads, leads without an email address and unsubscribed leads are never picked up by the daily check.
Audience
Section titled “Audience”A sequence runs for Everyone by default. Set its Audience to one segment and it only starts for leads that match that segment, for example a German-language sequence for DACH leads.
- The audience is checked again before every step. A lead that no longer matches (its company was moved to another country, say) stops, and the cancelled step says the lead left the sequence’s audience.
- A personal sequence can have its own audience (“my DACH leads”). A personal version of a team sequence always has the team sequence’s audience; it replaces the team sequence only where the team sequence would have run.
- In the dry run, a lead outside the audience is answered with a note that the lead is not in the audience segment.
Building the steps
Section titled “Building the steps”Open Organization → Follow-ups, pick a trigger and add steps.
- A sequence holds up to 5 steps.
- Each step is a template plus a delay. The delay counts from the step before it. The first step’s delay counts from the moment the trigger fires.
- Later steps are sent as replies to the step before them, so the whole sequence reads as one thread in the recipient’s mail client.
- A trigger with no steps keeps working as a single email.
The wording, branding and attachments of each step are fixed when that step is scheduled. Editing a template changes the sends that have not been scheduled yet, never the ones already waiting.
Once per lead
Section titled “Once per lead”A trigger fires once per lead. A lead that bounces in and out of a stage does not get the same sequence twice.
Set cooldown days if the trigger should be allowed to fire again for the same lead after a pause. Leave it empty and it never repeats.
One sequence at a time
Section titled “One sequence at a time”A lead runs one sequence at a time. When a second trigger matches while a sequence is still running, its first step waits until the last step of the running sequence would have gone out. If the running sequence stops early, for example because the lead replied, the waiting sequence is checked again at its own send time like any other step.
What stops a sequence
Section titled “What stops a sequence”Every step is checked again at the moment it is due. The remaining steps are cancelled when:
- the lead replies (an out-of-office or other automatic answer does not count)
- the lead has a meeting booked, or had one in the last 14 days
- the lead is won or lost
- the lead unsubscribed, or the address bounced
- someone paused follow-ups for the lead, or pressed Stop
- the lead already received the maximum number of emails for the period
- the lead is no longer in the sequence’s audience
A cancelled step stays visible in Messages with the reason, so “why did this not go out” always has an answer.
A person can still write to a lead by hand in these cases. The compose window shows the same reasons as warnings, for a template or a message you write yourself, and leaves the decision to the sender. Two exceptions: an unsubscribed lead is never emailed, and neither is an address that bounced or is on the suppression list.
Pause and Stop on a lead
Section titled “Pause and Stop on a lead”The follow-ups panel on a lead shows the running sequence, which step it is on and when the next one goes out.
- Stop cancels the remaining steps of that sequence.
- Pause follow-ups cancels the scheduled steps of every running sequence for that lead and stops new automated emails to it while the pause is on. Switching it off does not bring the cancelled steps back.
Both are available to anyone who can edit the lead.
Test before you switch it on
Section titled “Test before you switch it on”The trigger editor has a dry run. Pick a lead and Lynqu answers three questions: would this trigger fire for this lead, if not why not (for example, the lead is not in the audience segment), and when would each step go out. Nothing is sent and nothing is written.
Replies
Section titled “Replies”Replies to tracked emails come back to Lynqu. A reply:
- lands on the lead’s timeline and in Messages
- stops the sequences that are running for that lead
- is forwarded to the inbox of the person who sent the email, and that person is notified. When an AI employee sent the email, or the sender has left the organization, the lead’s owner gets the forward and the notification instead, and the organization’s owner when the lead has no owner.
Automatic answers, such as out-of-office messages, do not stop a sequence and are not forwarded.
Reply tracking is on by default. An admin can switch it off under Settings → Privacy & tracking → Engagement tracking → Reply tracking. With tracking off, new emails carry the sender’s own reply address, so replies go straight to them and Lynqu does not see them. A sequence then does not stop when the lead replies. A reply that still arrives for an email sent before the switch is passed on to the sender and not stored.
Reply text, subject and sender are kept for 90 days, then deleted. Attachments are never stored. The timeline entry that says a reply arrived stays.
A/B variants
Section titled “A/B variants”Test versions of a team template against each other. Open a team template and choose Add variant. A variant starts as a copy of the template; change what you want to test, often only the subject line.
- Each variant gets a share of the template’s automated sends, in percent, and the rest goes to the template itself.
- A variant can be limited to one segment: the template for everyone, and a variant tried only on DACH leads.
- A lead in a segment can get a variant for everyone or a variant for that segment, so the two together add up to at most 100 %. That keeps each printed share true for the leads it applies to. The one exception is a lead in two segments that both have variants of the same template: the shares are used in the order the variants were created, and the later ones can be cut short.
- Which version a lead gets is fixed per lead and template while the shares and the lead’s segments stay the same, so a retry, or opening the email again in Messages, always shows the same version.
- The test is per template. In a three-step sequence, a lead can get variant B at step 1 and the plain template at step 2.
- A rep’s personal version takes that rep’s leads out of the test: they get the rep’s version. A lock stops personal versions, not tests. A locked template still runs its variants.
- Variants are used by automated sends: sequences, automation rules, campaign and event follow-ups. They are never offered when someone sends a template by hand.
- Pause a variant by setting its share to 0. Promote the winner: its text is copied onto the team template and the variant is removed.
Variants are team templates, so adding and editing them takes the follow-ups capability (admins by default).
On the Performance tab, each variant sits under its template with its share and audience. Filter by a segment to see which version wins inside it. A variant is ranked after 20 delivered emails that carried reply tracking, like any other row. There is no significance test, so treat a close result as a tie and let the test run longer.
Performance
Section titled “Performance”The Performance tab on the Follow-ups page shows how each template, sequence, sequence step, person and AI employee performs. Everyone sees their own emails. Managers can switch to the people they manage, admins to the whole organization.
| Column | Means |
|---|---|
| Delivered | Emails sent, minus those that bounced |
| Reply rate | Emails that got a reply from a person, out of the delivered emails that carried reply tracking. Emails sent while reply tracking was off (or before it was switched on) are left out, so they cannot pull the rate down. Automatic answers do not count. This is the column the ranking uses |
| Open rate | Emails opened at least once, out of delivered. Shown only when open tracking is on |
| Click rate | Emails with at least one tracked link clicked, out of delivered |
| Booked | A meeting was booked with the lead within 14 days of the email |
| Won | The lead was won within 90 days of the email |
Each outcome is credited to the email that was sent, on the day it was sent, so every rate compares like with like. Booked and won go to the last email the lead received before the meeting or the win.
A row needs 20 delivered emails that carried reply tracking before it is ranked. Below that it shows its numbers with a note, because a handful of sends proves nothing. Emails sent while reply tracking was off do not count toward the 20, since no reply could be recorded on them.
Group by Segment to see which segment replies, books and closes most. The Segment filter narrows any grouping to one segment, or to emails to leads in no segment. An email counts toward the first segment its lead matched when the email was sent, even if the lead changes later. Emails sent before segments existed count as “Not in a segment”.
Your own versions sit under the team template or sequence they replace, so you can compare them directly. The totals are kept after the emails themselves are deleted, so the tab can show a whole year.