A follow-up sequence is a list of stages that go out after your original email. In a campaign you create today, the number you type on a stage is the wait from the step before it. Stage 1 waits from the original email, stage 2 waits from stage 1, stage 3 waits from stage 2. So waits of 3, 3, and 4 days land the three follow-ups on day 3, day 6, and day 10 after the original send.

This is the model most sending tools use, and it is the one that matches how people think about a sequence: “wait three days, then nudge again.” Insert a stage in the middle and every stage after it shifts along with it, instead of your having to re-do the arithmetic on each one.

1. Open your campaign and go to the Sequence step.
2. Turn on Automated Follow-ups. The first stage is created for you with a wait of 3 days.
3. On stage 1, set Days after the original email. On later stages the same field reads Days after follow-up #1, #2, and so on, naming the step the wait is measured from.
4. Select Add Follow-up Stage for the next stage. Each new stage also starts at 3 days.
5. Use the up and down arrows on a stage card to reorder stages. The field label and the waits renumber to match the new order.

A sequence holds up to five stages. At the cap the add button reads Maximum 5 stages reached, and the line under the list counts what you have built: 3 of 5 follow-up stages configured.

A wait is a whole number from 1 to 365. Leaving the box empty is fine while you are typing: the stage shows Enter how many days to wait rather than inventing a number for you. Out-of-range values report Wait must be a whole number of days, at least 1 or Wait must be at most 365 days. A collapsed stage card carries the same fact in its summary line, which reads Waits 3 days or Wait not set. Review will not let you send until every stage has one, and lists the reason as Set how many days each follow-up stage waits.

Above the stages, the Email sequence timeline shows where each stage lands relative to the original send: Original, then Day 3, Day 6, and so on. A stage with no wait yet reads Day not set. Under the stages, one line reports the total, and it changes as the sequence gets longer:

• Set a wait on every stage to see the total sequence length. One or more stages still has no wait.
• Total: 10 days after the first email. The normal state.
• Total: 310 days after the first email. A sequence may not exceed 365 days. From 300 days on, the line names the limit.
• Total: 400 days after the first email, over the 365-day limit. Shorten the waits between stages. Past the cap.

The whole sequence may not run longer than 365 days from the original send, and no single wait may be longer than that either. Going over blocks the send, and Review repeats the reason: Total sequence length may not exceed 365 days. Shorten the waits between stages.

No open and No click are only offered when the campaign actually measures that signal. No open needs an HTML body and Track opens left on, so a plain-text campaign or one with open tracking switched off cannot use it. No click needs Track clicks left on. When one is unavailable the option is greyed out and a line under the dropdown says which: Not available: this campaign does not measure opens. or Not available: this campaign does not measure clicks. No reply and Everyone are always available, because a reply is measured by the inbox rather than by tracking.

Only the days you select are counted when a wait is calculated, so on a weekdays-only sequence a 3-day wait after a Thursday send lands on the following Tuesday, not on Sunday. The stage list states this under the day picker: Only selected days are counted when calculating delays. These settings apply to all follow-up stages, and each stage is timed in its own send timezone. At least one day must stay selected.

Each expanded stage ends with a plain-language summary of everything above, for example: This follow-up will be sent 3 days after follow-up #1, at 09:00 (America/New York), only to recipients who haven’t replied.

Campaigns built before this changed keep their original behavior: every stage counts from the original send, not from the stage before it. Their timing field reads Days after original email on every stage, the collapsed summary reads 5 days after original or Timing not set, and Review phrases the send blocker as Set the day count on every follow-up stage. Nothing about those campaigns was rescheduled or reinterpreted.

There is no setting to switch a campaign between the two models, and no picker in the composer. The model is stamped once, when the campaign is created, because the two ways of counting mean different things and swapping them would leave the existing stage numbers pointing at the wrong reference. If something asks to change it, the answer is an error saying to create a new campaign instead.

• A campaign you create from scratch counts each wait from the previous step.
• A campaign created from a template counts from the original send and carries the template’s day counts exactly as they were authored.
• Duplicating a campaign keeps both the timing model and the per-stage waits. The copy is scheduled the same way the original was.

On a campaign that counts from the previous step, each stage is scheduled once the stage before it finishes, so the chain has to decide what “finished” means:

• The stage sent. The next wait counts from the moment it actually went out, not from when it was scheduled.
• The stage was skipped for that recipient. If the recipient replied, opened, or clicked, or someone at their company replied, that stage does not go out, and the next wait counts from the time the skipped stage was due. The sequence carries on so a later stage with a different condition can still reach them.
• The stage failed to send. The wait for the next stage counts from the time it was due, the same way a skip does. One failed stage does not silently end the rest of the sequence.
• The recipient is out of the sequence. If the campaign was paused or cancelled, follow-ups were stopped for that recipient, or they unsubscribed or were suppressed, no further stages are scheduled for them.
• A stage is no longer part of the sequence. The chain moves on to the next remaining stage rather than ending there.

On a campaign that counts from the original send, all of the stages are scheduled up front against that one send, so a skipped or failed stage never moves the ones after it.

The Follow-ups card on the campaign page reports what happened per stage. On a campaign that counts from the previous step, a stage reads Waits 3 days · day 6 overall: the wait you set first, then where it lands relative to the original send. On a campaign that counts from the original send it reads 6 days after the first send. Each stage also shows Sent, Pending, Skipped, and Failed counts, and lists the reasons under Skipped because: so a stage that reached nobody explains itself. A stage you have paused reads Paused instead of a day figure, and its wait is left out of the running total, because a paused stage never runs and its wait never elapses. You can Pause follow-ups from the same card and resume them later.

While follow-ups are paused their send dates keep moving into the past, so on resume there is usually a backlog. Those overdue messages do not go out immediately at whatever hour you happened to click Resume. Each one waits for the next time its own stage is allowed to send, using the send time, timezone, and days you set on that stage. A Friday-only stage resumed on a Wednesday evening goes out on Friday morning, not on Wednesday night.

The Follow-ups card gives you both choices. Resume follow-ups keeps the schedule you authored and tells you how many messages are waiting and when the next one goes out. Resume and send overdue now releases the messages that are already overdue at that moment, however long they take to drain; anything scheduled after that keeps its normal window.