​
1. Set up your outbound email infrastructure

​
Add dedicated outbound email accounts

To run outbound at scale, you need multiple mailboxes. This is critical for deliverability. Most email providers, especially Google and Microsoft, restrict sending volumes to around 20–40 emails per day per mailbox to prevent spam. To send high volumes (e.g. 10,000+ emails/month), you will need multiple fully independent email accounts. These must be actual Google Workspace or Microsoft Office accounts — aliases and shared mailboxes will not work. 

Info: To calculate how many email accounts you’ll need for your outbound campaign, refer to our detailed Email Account Sizing Guide. It includes benchmarks based on daily volume goals, warming constraints, and deliverability best practices. 

​
Warm up each email account

Email warming is mandatory. Sending cold emails from fresh accounts without warming is guaranteed to land your emails in spam. Warming simulates natural email behavior — sending, receiving, and replying to emails — to build trust with spam filters.

We recommend MailReach, though any professional warming provider will work. Once connected, warming providers automatically send emails to other mailboxes they control and reply back, thus simulating realistic engagement.

There are two phases to warming:

  • Initial warming period (before you start outbound): Run warming for 6–8 weeks before sending real emails.
  • Ongoing warming (during outbound): Continue warming indefinitely to maintain a healthy sending reputation.

​
Connect your email accounts to FirstQuadrant

Once your outbound email accounts are fully warmed up and configured, connect each one to FirstQuadrant.

You can add an unlimited number of email accounts to your workspace. This is particularly important for high-volume sending, as FirstQuadrant will intelligently rotate senders across your configured accounts to stay within daily sending thresholds.

To connect:

  • Navigate to Settings → Integrations → Email Accounts
  • Click Connect email account and follow the authentication flow for Google Workspace, Microsoft Office 365, Exchange, or other supported providers
  • After connecting, assign the email account to the correct team member (this affects signature, sender name, and ownership)
  • Make sure the correct sending configuration (daily limit, ramp-up, content identifier, reply-to) is defined for each mailbox in Advanced Settings

Every connected mailbox must be properly configured before launching campaigns to ensure performance and deliverability.

​
Add content identifier to exclude warming emails

In FirstQuadrant, go to Settings → Integrations → Email Accounts and select your outbound account. Under Advanced Settings, add the content identifier used by your warming tool. This tells FirstQuadrant to ignore those warming emails. If you skip this step, warming emails will pollute your inbox with irrelevant contacts, and you’ll waste AI credits on sequences that are not meant to be sent.

​
Configure sending limits and ramp-up duration

Still in Advanced Settings, set:

  • Daily sending limit: Define the max number of emails this account can send in one day (e.g. 20–40).
  • Ramp-up duration: Set to 35 days to gradually increase sending from 0 to your defined daily limit. This protects your domain reputation and prevents sudden spam flags.

You can also set the reply-to address, a minimum wait time between emails, and overwrite the AI suggestions behavior on a per-email basis.

Info: Refer to the Email Deliverability Guide for full best practices on DNS setup, domain strategy, and mailbox hygiene.

​
2. Build your prospecting audience

​
Start a new import with prospecting

Once your infrastructure is ready, the next critical step is to define who you’re reaching out to — your target audience. This is arguably the most important part of any outbound campaign. If you get your prospecting wrong, no amount of great copy or email infrastructure can save the campaign.

To get started, go to Imports and click New import → Prospect.

FirstQuadrant uses Apollo’s data to power the prospecting module. This allows you to filter across millions of companies and professionals. While powerful, Apollo’s schema defines which filters are available — these include:

  • Job title / role (e.g. founder, CTO, marketing lead)
  • Company size (e.g. 11–50, 51–200 employees)
  • Industry / vertical
  • Location / HQ
  • Funding stage or revenue tier
  • Keywords or department tags

After applying your filters, FirstQuadrant will show how many contacts match your criteria. You can preview and adjust filters before continuing.

Info: For a detailed walkthrough of how to use the prospecting tool — including all filter types, Apollo-specific limitations, and tips for refining your ICP — refer to our dedicated Prospecting Helpdesk Guide. 

​
Configure import settings and qualification

Once your filters are set, you’ll move to the Import Settings screen. This is where you fine-tune the quality of your audience — and it’s where most of the real value is generated.

​
Why qualification matters

Outreach is expensive: you only have limited bandwidth, reputation, and credits to reach the right people. The qualification layer ensures that you’re not just importing contacts who look like a fit on paper, but that they actually meet deeper criteria unique to your ICP.

Adding multiple layers of qualification at this stage leads to significantly better conversion rates later on.

​
Qualification questions

These are custom logic questions that FirstQuadrant’s AI will research using Perplexity for every contact before importing them. For example:

  • “Has the company raised funding in the last 2 years?”
  • “Does the company have a product-led growth motion?”
  • “Does the website mention a partner program?”
  • “Is this a B2B saas?”
  • “Are they remote friendly” etc. 

​
Qualification rules

In addition to open-ended questions, we strongly recommend enabling all default qualification rules for outbound:

  • Company website is up and accessible
  • Contact’s email address is verified
  • The email is professional (i.e. not Gmail, Yahoo, etc.)
  • Exclude any contact already in your workspace

This helps eliminate invalid or low-quality entries from polluting your campaign.

​
Set as inactive

Set your import to Inactive. This prevents the contacts from triggering automated follow-ups until you’re ready to use them in a campaign.

​
Import cadence

If you’re dealing with large audiences, consider enabling recurring imports (e.g. 100 leads per month). This way, a single prospecting effort can sustain your campaign pipeline for months — no need to constantly revisit audience building.

​
3. Create and configure your outbound campaign

Once your audience has been carefully built and qualified, it’s time to configure and launch your outbound campaign. This is where everything comes together — your warmed-up infrastructure, your curated contact lists, and your messaging strategy.

Navigate to Campaigns and click Create campaign to begin.

​
Step 1: Select senders

Start by selecting all the outbound email accounts you’ve connected. These should be fully warmed up and correctly configured.

Each mailbox will be used to distribute outbound emails in parallel, and FirstQuadrant will manage distribution across mailboxes automatically. This helps you stay within deliverability-safe limits while scaling outreach.

​
Step 2: Assign your audience

Now assign the audience you imported during your prospecting and qualification steps. These contacts should already have been vetted by your qualification questions and rules.

This audience is the foundation of your campaign. Only well-qualified leads should be included here — if you’re unsure about the quality of your contacts, revisit your import settings first. Your performance downstream will depend heavily on how tight and well-qualified this audience is.

​
Step 3: Create your outbound email sequence

This is where you design what your recipients will receive — the emails themselves.

Use the Sequence Builder to define:

  • A personalized first-touch email
  • Follow-up messages (typically 2–4)
  • A/B variants of the sequence

Recommendations for effective sequences:

  • Use AI personalization fields like {first name}, {company name}, {pain_point} — but also test how far you can push it (e.g., {company_blog_topic} or {relevant_news})
  • Test multiple sequence types:
    • A: Short and direct
    • B: Narrative-driven or story-based
    • C: Problem-solution framing
    • D: Industry-specific insight

Test a minimum of 2–4 variants so you can gather comparative data. Small changes (e.g. subject line or tone) can lead to large performance differences.

Info: Read the campaing guide for more detailed instructions on how to create sequences and campaign.

​
Step 4: Configure campaign automation options

Under campaign settings, you can control automation levels.

We strongly recommend enabling:

  • Autopilot: Sends emails without requiring manual approval. Crucial for scale — otherwise you’ll manually approve hundreds of emails.
  • Autopilot exception for existing conversations: Keeps Autopilot active except for contacts with a prior email history (e.g. past clients, friends). In those cases, FirstQuadrant pauses and lets you review the message before it goes out.
  • Contextual adjustment: Allows the AI to adjust tone or wording based on historical email threads (if available).
  • Open tracking: Turned on by default and generally should remain active for outbound campaigns.

These automation settings are especially important when managing large-scale campaigns involving thousands of emails. They ensure that FirstQuadrant handles most of the manual overhead while preserving safety checks where needed.

Once the above steps are completed, you can move on to launch — which we’ll cover next.

​
4. Launch and monitor your campaign

Once your campaign is configured and launched, FirstQuadrant will start sending emails based on the parameters and ramp-up settings you’ve defined. You can monitor performance and adjust strategy through the Analytics → Campaignsdashboard.

​
Understand ramp-up behavior

If you’ve enabled ramp-up in the advanced email account settings (highly recommended), your campaign will begin sending at a low volume and scale up over the defined duration (usually 35 days). This protects your sender reputation and helps maintain long-term deliverability.

During this phase, you should expect relatively low daily email volume per mailbox. As volume increases, your reply rate and engagement metrics will normalize.

Additionally, keep in mind:

  • Most recipients will not reply to your first message.
  • Response rates usually increase after the second or third email in a sequence.
  • If your follow-up delays are spaced over multiple days (e.g. 3–5–8), your campaign results will only begin to show after 1–2 weeks.

​
What to look for in analytics

Navigate to Analytics → Campaigns, where you’ll find granular breakdowns of:

  • Open rates: Can signal subject line quality and deliverability
  • Reply rates: The key metric for outbound performance
  • Click rates: Useful if you’re including call-to-action links
  • A/B test results: See which sequence variants are performing best
  • Deal creation: This is the ultimate success signal. A deal is created when a contact replies positively, requests a demo, or self-signs up.
  • Company-level results: See which companies are responding most and where your message resonates

You can also break results down by sender mailbox to see if any address is underperforming, or by industry segment or contact title to identify patterns.

​
Be patient, iterate strategically

Good outbound takes time. Many teams expect immediate results, but outbound is inherently iterative. After 2–3 weeks, once you have a baseline of performance, you can:

  • Pause underperforming sequence variants
  • Adjust qualification filters if the audience is weak
  • Add stronger CTAs or rewrite subject lines
  • Increase volume or add more imports if initial engagement is strong

Outbound should be viewed as an ongoing process — not a one-time blast — and FirstQuadrant is designed to give you the levers to optimize every part of it.