“Should I put these people in a sequence or just send a campaign?” is one of the most common questions new growth teams ask — and the answer matters, because reaching for the wrong one wastes effort and, worse, annoys people. Both send email; that's where the similarity ends. Here's how to tell them apart and decide which to use.
What a sequence is
A sequence — also called a sales cadence — is a planned series of touches aimed at one person, spaced over days or weeks. Its whole point is persistent, personal follow-up: an email on day 0, a bump on day 3, a call task on day 5. The defining trait is that it's tied to an individual and reacts to them — a good sequence stops the moment that person replies or books a meeting, because the goal was a conversation and you got one.
What a campaign is
A campaign is one message sent to a whole audience at once — a product announcement, an offer, a newsletter. There's nothing per-person about it: everyone in the segment gets the same email at roughly the same time, and you measure it in aggregate — opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes. A campaign is about reach, not back-and-forth.
Side by side
| Sequence | Campaign | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | A series of touches to one person over time | One message to a whole audience at once |
| Sends from | The rep's own connected mailbox (one-to-one) | SendGrid, Gmail, or SMTP (one-to-many) |
| When it stops | Auto-stops the moment the person replies or books | It's a single send — there's nothing to stop |
| Best for | Outbound and active follow-up on specific prospects | Announcements, offers, and newsletters to a segment |
| What you measure | Per-person progress through the steps | Aggregate opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes |
How to choose
The deciding question is simple: am I working specific people, or reaching a group? If you're pursuing named prospects and want personal follow-up that threads in their inbox and stops when they engage, that's a sequence. If you have one message for a whole segment and care about aggregate reach, that's a campaign. When in doubt, ask whether a reply should change what happens next — if yes, you want a sequence.
The combo move: run a campaign to a broad audience for awareness, then enroll the people who click into a one-to-one sequence for personal follow-up. Reach with the campaign; convert with the cadence.
How KudosCRM handles both
In KudosCRM, a sequence sends its email steps from your own connected mailbox and auto-stops on a reply or booked meeting; call, LinkedIn, and video steps are manual tasks the cadence waits on, and there's no SMS channel. A campaign sends through SendGrid, Gmail, or SMTP to a live lead audience, with real, privacy-aware open tracking (Apple Mail Privacy opens are excluded so the rate isn't inflated), click and bounce tracking, and RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe. Same records, two different jobs — pick the one that matches the work.