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Outreach

Outreach is how and when an agent starts a conversation, rather than waiting to be messaged. One idea covers every form of it:

Send a predefined message, with its Playbook and Goal, to one or more people, who may be known now or named later.

Three things follow from that sentence, and everything else in this area is built from them.

What it is
An Outreach The reusable reason to reach out: an opener, a Playbook, a Goal, a class. It has no audience.
An audience Who receives it: a person named on the spot, a list you pick, or rows arriving on a linked sheet.
A send One message to one person, created when an Outreach meets an audience. The send is the row you inspect, count, and cancel.

Separating the Outreach from its audience is what lets you write the reason once and send it to one person this morning and two thousand next week.

The three ways to send

An Outreach reaches people in one of three ways. The Outreach itself is identical in all three.

Way to send Who it reaches When to use it
A single send One person, named by you on their record or by your systems through the API. A quote follow-up, an arrival message, anything your own system triggers.
Automated Outreach Every new qualifying row on a linked Google Sheet, continuously. One named rule per lead source. Leads that land in a sheet from lead ads, a website form, or a team that curates them.
A Campaign A list of People you pick, staged and started as a unit. A bulk send with a beginning, an end, and a report.

Where each part lives

The three things that produce sends are defined side by side under Build · Outreach, one tab each: Outreach, Automated Outreach, and Campaigns. Each one's controls are on its own page there: an Outreach's on/off switch, a rule's Enable, Run now, and Dry run, and a Campaign's Stage, Start, Pause, Resume, and Cancel.

What they produce is read in Monitor · Sends, one list of every send whatever created it. Filtered to one Campaign, it shows that Campaign's progress and totals above the rows; filtered to one Automated Outreach, it shows the rule's runs and whether it is keeping up. Cancelling a queued send is the one action there.

What an Outreach holds

An Outreach carries four things and says nothing about who receives them.

  • Opener. The first message the person receives, chosen from the agent's message templates and sent exactly as written, with {person.firstName}-style fill-ins substituted at send time. No model writes the opening line.
  • Playbook. What the agent does once the person replies. It is written inside the Outreach and belongs to it: the agent knows the Playbook exists only in a conversation this Outreach started, and never wanders into it from an inbound message.
  • Goal. What the conversation is for, such as a call is booked. It steers the agent throughout and is what the numbers measure afterwards.

  • Class. Marketing or service. Every channel asks this question: WhatsApp categorizes every template this way, and 10DLC registration asks the same. The class decides one thing: whether the frequency cap applies. Marketing Outreaches are capped; service Outreaches are exempt.

    Classify honestly. A promotional message sent as service skips the frequency cap, which is the behavior carriers treat as a violation, and the responsibility is yours rather than the platform's. When a message would read as marketing to the person receiving it, it is marketing.

"New lead: product information, offer a call" is a complete Outreach.

A multi-step conversation does not need a multi-step Outreach. "Introduce the product, answer questions, offer a call, book it" is one Outreach, and the back-and-forth is the agent doing its job over however many turns it takes. There is no flowchart to draw, because the agent can ask a question where a diagram would have to branch.

An Outreach can also carry one follow-up, sent after a number of days if the person has not replied and cancelled the moment they do. One nudge, not a sequence.

Guide: Write an Outreach.

Automated Outreach

Automated Outreach watches a linked Google Sheet and sends an Outreach to every new row that qualifies. New and edited rows are picked up within about ten minutes of your edits settling. Your team keeps working in the sheet, and nobody copies rows into the console.

An agent holds as many of these as it has lead sources. Each is a named rule over one sheet tab, with its own filter, consent column, Outreach and send budget, so paid social and the website form stay separate rather than being merged into one sheet that has to share everything.

It never ends, so its numbers always carry a period, and the useful question is whether it is keeping up: how many rows fired, how quickly after they appeared, and which ones failed.

A rule never sends the same Outreach to a person it has already reached with it, whatever the sheet says on a later pass. A start date keeps an older backlog out entirely, consent is checked per row, and an hourly cap bounds how much a single pasted block can send. Each rule keeps its own cap and its own run history, which Monitor · Sends shows when filtered to that rule.

Guide: Automate outreach from a sheet.

Campaigns

A Campaign is one Outreach sent to a list of People you pick, staged and started as a unit. It carries nothing authored of its own: the opener, Playbook, Goal, and class all come from the Outreach it references.

A Campaign has an end, so it has a final result and a total: sent, delivered, replied, goal reached. Its report is Monitor · Sends filtered to the Campaign.

Guide: Run a campaign.

Sends

Every audience produces sends, one row per person. The row records:

  • What it was: the Outreach, the person, and the opener as rendered.
  • What happened to the attempt: sent, or failed or suppressed with a reason.
  • What happened to the message: delivered, read, or failed at the carrier, where the channel reports it.
  • What came of it: replied, goal reached, opted out.

A send shows as queued until it goes out, and you can cancel it while it is queued. A send you make by hand is queued for about a minute, until the send worker picks it up. A send that can't go out for a temporary reason is queued again and retried automatically. A send is the only thing an operator cancels.

Once the person replies, everything is ordinary. The conversation appears in Monitor · Conversations, the agent follows the Outreach's Playbook, and the Goal is what review and the dashboard measure.

Sending guardrails

The rule behind every guardrail is this: whoever names the recipient owns consent and send time.

When you name the person, the send is yours. A send you make by hand or through the API, and a follow-up you send now from a person's record, goes out when you make it. You are responsible for having the person's consent. Anychat refuses it only on an explicit no: your own request saying the person did not opt in, a STOP from the person, or consent recorded on the Person as denied. Consent you assert with the send is recorded on the send as its evidence and never changes the Person's consent.

When Anychat picks the people and the time, Anychat enforces the rules. Automated Outreach, Campaigns and scheduled follow-ups are the sends Anychat makes on your behalf, and for them:

  • Consent is required. Automated Outreach and Campaigns reach only people whose consent is recorded as granted. Consent is recorded by you, arrives with an import or a linked sheet, or is given by the person in conversation. A scheduled follow-up continues an Outreach already sent, and stops if the person's consent is now denied.
  • Safe hours. Safe hours are the hours in which these sends are allowed, read in the time zone you configure. Outside them, sends wait and go out at the start of the window. An Automated Outreach or Campaign send window narrows this further: both must be open. An Automated Outreach can be set to send outside safe hours, for a lead source you answer the moment someone leaves their details; consent still applies. Appointment reminders go when they are due by default, because a reminder just before a call is only useful then; you can make them wait for safe hours instead. A reply in a conversation is never held: safe hours govern starting one.
  • Frequency. A person receives at most one marketing message every N hours, 48 by default. Automated Outreach skips a person inside that gap and a Campaign excludes them. Service Outreaches and scheduled follow-ups are exempt. A send you make by hand inside the gap goes out with a warning.
  • Never mid-conversation. Automated Outreach and Campaigns don't interrupt someone who is talking to your agent: if the person wrote in the last 30 minutes, their send waits until 30 minutes after their last message. A send you make by hand and an appointment reminder go when they are due.

STOP always wins. On every RCS and SMS channel, a person who replies STOP is opted out of that agent on that channel until they reply START, whatever any other system believes, and no kind of send reaches them there: not a send you name, not Automated Outreach, a Campaign, a follow-up or a reminder. Opt-out is held per channel identity, so it covers every provider and binding of the channel and never another channel. Compliance messages, on by default, tell the person: the confirmation replies, the HELP answer and the first-message notice.

No Outreach owns a person. Being a candidate for one never disqualifies someone from another. Repetition is limited by the frequency cap and by Automated Outreach never reaching the same person twice with the same Outreach.

These settings live per agent, at Settings · Sending, and the only per-Outreach control is the class. An org running two agents holds two sets, because consent and the frequency cap are measured against the Person record, opt-out against a channel identity, and both belong to one agent.

Channel support

Outreach sends over RCS today. WhatsApp requires Meta-approved templates for business-initiated messages. See Channels for per-channel status.

What's next