Personalization variables in outreach messages

Follow-up sequences are the messages a campaign sends after a connection accepts your invitation. Each step fires automatically at its configured delay.

Building a sequence

In manage_outreach (action setup), steps placed after the invite are your follow-ups. Each step has a type: message for a text DM (note it's 'message', not 'text'), or voice_note, image, video for media steps, plus webhook to notify your own systems. Every follow-up step requires a delay_hours value, so a typical shape is: first touch shortly after acceptance, next message a few days later.

Prefer starting from a proven cadence? list_sequence_templates shows the built-in templates and apply_sequence_template copies one into your campaign in a single call.

Personalization variables

Message text supports variables in single braces: {first_name}, {last_name}, {name} (full name), and {company}. Columns from your CSV import and custom fields also resolve as variables.

The safety behavior matters: if a variable has no value for a contact, Crispy drops the entire sentence containing it rather than sending 'Hi , '. So structure templates as short sentences, each carrying at most one variable. 'Hi {first_name}. Loved what {company} is doing.' degrades gracefully, a missing company drops one sentence and the greeting survives.

Variables are forgiving about formatting: {first name} and {first-name} normalize to {first_name}. Double braces are wrong, use single.

Before launch, run preview_campaign_launch. It renders real sample messages for your actual contacts, the fastest way to catch a broken token or a template that collapses to nothing for sparse contacts.

Common mistake: cramming two variables into one sentence. One missing value then deletes both.

Pro tip: write the first follow-up as pure value, no pitch. The variable that matters most isn't {first_name}, it's whether the message reads like you wrote it for them.