Welcome back! 🙌 Now that you're fully set up with lemlist, it's time to dive into creating your first personalised email campaign. In this guide, we’ll walk you through importing your leads, configuring campaign settings, and customising your outreach to boost effectiveness.
We'll also cover how to set up campaign schedules, review leads, and fine-tune every detail to ensure your campaigns are launched smoothly and successfully.
Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your First Campaign
1️⃣ Create Your Campaign
To create a campaign, go to Campaign section and click on Create a campaign button
Once campaign is created you'll have 3 options
👉Create with AI
👉Create Manually
👉Create from a Template
Each option allows for different levels of customisation, depending on your preferences.
2️⃣ Create Your Sequence
👉In a Manual Campaign, you can add steps and conditions for your outreach sequence.
There are 2 Step options 👇
Automatic Steps: Email, LinkedIn messages, Voice Messages, Invites, Visits.
Manual Steps: Call, Manual Task, API call, Send to another campaign.
Conditions can be set based on👇
Lead Information: Has an email address, LinkedIn URL, phone number, or custom conditions.
Lead Actions: Opened an email, clicked a link, unsubscribed, booked a meeting (available with lemcal), or accepted an invite.
You can learn more about conditions here.
👉AI-Driven Campaign Creation
lemlist allows you to generate an AI-powered campaign based on your inputs. Simply follow the steps to add your preferences. You’ll be able to fine-tune and adjust steps as needed.
👉Templates Library
Another option is to use lemlist’s Campaign Templates for pre-designed email or multichannel outreach steps. This can save you time and ensure a professional campaign structure.
3️⃣ Importing Leads for Your Campaign
In the Lead List section, lemlist offers various import options to get your leads into the system quickly. Here are the available methods:
CSV Upload
People Database
Manual Entry
CRM Integration (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce)
Zapier Integration
LinkedIn Extension
API Integration
Import Limits:
CSV: Max 40,000 leads in batches of 10,000.
API Call: Max 40,000 leads, added individually.
HubSpot/Pipedrive: Max 10,000 leads.
Salesforce: Max 2,000 leads.
LinkedIn: Max 999 leads (LinkedIn), 2,500 (Sales Navigator).
Chrome Extension: Max 40,000 leads at once or in batches.
Troubleshooting LinkedIn Sales Navigator Limits
LinkedIn Sales Navigator has a maximum import limit of 2,500 leads per campaign. To manage larger lists, consider splitting them into batches of 2,500 or fewer and creating multiple campaigns. Ensure you use a fresh search URL, as saved searches (with 'savedSearchId' in the URL) are not supported by lemlist.
If you’re struggling with finding leads, check out our in-depth guide on how to find anyone's email.
💡 Import Options:
Enrichment: Choose to enrich your leads with email, LinkedIn, or phone data. If LinkedIn URLs are missing during uploads, it may be due to improperly formatted CSV files or limitations on enriching leads during active campaigns. Enrichment is only available for leads that are not yet launched. Resolve this by manually adding URLs or using our enrichment tool to find URLs.
Duplicate Options: Control how duplicates are tracked within your campaign. The default setting prevents duplicates within the same campaign.
LinkedIn import example:
You can select the enrichment option, and how you want duplicates to be handled:
CSV import example:
4️⃣ Configuring Your Campaign Settings
By clicking on the gear icon ⚙️ you’ll open campaign settings.
There are 4 main sections:
General settings
Tracking settings
Schedules & launch
CRM integration
👉 In General Settings, you can:
Add Tags: Optional for better campaign organisation.
Pause Campaign on Actions: Automatically pause a lead’s progress if they’ve replied to an email or LinkedIn message, booked a meeting, or clicked a link.
Create Tasks: Automatically create tasks when a lead replies or clicks a link.
Share Campaign: Allow others to view or duplicate your campaign steps by sharing the campaign link.
👉 In the Tracking Settings, you can:
Track email opens, link clicks, and replies for accurate performance analysis.
To track email clicks, ensure that you set up a Custom Tracking Domain.
👉 In the Schedules, you can:
Edit or add multiple schedules based on your preferred sending days.
Important: Only the days you select as sending ones will be counted in the delays you set in your sequence, between steps.
Ex: If you have selected only Mon-Wed as send days, the delay will only count them, not all days of the week.
Pro tip: The minute delay you set is valid only for new leads, meaning the first steps in your campaigns. The rest will be sent according to delays, limits, actions, etc.
5️⃣ Launching Your Campaign
Before launching, review each lead and make final edits as needed. If you want to customise steps for a specific lead, these changes will apply only to that lead.
The launch section is used for launching the campaign, but you can also preview how your sequence will look for each lead.
This will open this pop-up window:
If you realise a mistake, you can reverse launch your leads if they haven’t yet started the campaign.
Check more here.
Troubleshooting Common Lead Import and Enrichment Issues
If you encounter errors while importing leads:
Update your Chrome browser to the latest version.
Clear your browser’s cache and cookies:
Open Chrome settings and select 'Delete browsing data.'
Check 'Cookies and other site data' and 'Cached images and files.'
Click 'Clear data.'
Restart your browser and try uploading again. For G-Sheet imports, verify your mapping setup or consider using the lemlist G-Sheet Addon. If campaign steps requiring LinkedIn URLs are skipped due to missing information, use conditional paths to optimise workflows for leads both 'with' and 'without' URLs.
Video Guides
In case you’re a video person, here’s a quick demo which shows how to generate your campaign in more detail: