Add contacts to a paused campaign

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Add contacts to a paused campaign

You no longer have to resume a campaign just to add a few more people to it. You can now build up the contact list while the campaign stays paused.

What changed

Previously, adding contacts to a campaign that was paused meant either resuming the campaign first (which could start drafting and sending to everyone already in it) or waiting until you were ready to go live before adding anyone. Neither option was great if you wanted to prep a list over a few days, or add a handful of contacts to an existing paused campaign without touching what was already running.

Now you can select individual contacts, up to 500 at a time, and add them directly to a campaign that is paused. Drafting and sending stay off for the whole campaign, including the contacts you just added, until you resume it. This gives you a real staging step: build the list, review it, add more people if needed, and only flip the campaign live when you are actually ready.

The 500-contact limit per add keeps each batch manageable to review before you commit. If you have a larger list to bring in, you can add it in multiple batches, checking each batch as you go rather than adding thousands of contacts in one pass and hoping the list is clean.

This is distinct from creating a brand new campaign for the additional contacts, which was always an option but meant fragmenting your outreach across multiple campaigns with separate sequences, separate reporting, and separate sender warmup. Adding directly to an existing paused campaign keeps everything under one roof: one sequence, one set of settings, one place to track replies once the campaign goes live.

How to use it

Open the paused campaign you want to add contacts to and go to its contacts view. You will find an option to add contacts directly from there, the same way you would for an active campaign, except now it works while the campaign is paused.

Select the contacts you want from your lead lists or upload a new list, then confirm. FirstSales adds them to the campaign's audience immediately, but because the campaign is paused, nothing happens to them yet. No drafts get written, no emails go out. You can add contacts, walk away, come back the next day, and add more, all without triggering any outreach.

This makes it practical to build a campaign's audience over several sessions. You might add a first batch from a lead list you already had, review the fit, then come back a day later with a second batch sourced from AI Leads or a fresh Maps Scraper run, and add those too, all before the campaign has sent a single message.

When you are ready to start (or resume) the campaign, go to the campaign's status control and switch it to active. At that point, drafting and sending begin for the full audience, including anyone added while the campaign was paused, following the campaign's normal sequence and timing rules. Every contact, whether they were in the original list or added later, is treated the same way once the campaign goes live: same sequence steps, same timing, same sender rotation if you have one configured.

If you change your mind about a contact you added, you can remove them from the campaign the same way you would remove any other contact, as long as the campaign is still paused or the contact has not yet been drafted to. This gives you a clean way to correct a batch that turned out to have the wrong contacts in it, without having to pause and restart the whole campaign.

This also works well if you are coordinating with someone else on your team who is sourcing contacts separately. One person can keep the campaign paused while contacts come in from multiple directions, whether that is a colleague exporting a list from a CRM, a fresh AI Leads batch, or contacts sourced manually from a specific event or referral. Everyone can add to the same paused campaign without anyone needing to worry that their addition will accidentally trigger a send.

Why it matters

Campaign setup rarely happens all at once. You might get a new lead list from sales the day after you built a campaign, or want to add a handful of contacts you sourced manually while the rest of the list is still under review. Before this, that meant either resuming a campaign before it was fully ready, or holding contacts back until everything else was in place, which slowed down how quickly you could get a campaign fully staffed with contacts.

Now the paused state actually means paused, for the whole audience, at any point in the process. You can build a campaign's contact list incrementally, review it as a whole, and only trigger drafting and sending once, when you decide the campaign is ready to go. That matters most when you are combining contacts from multiple sources: an existing list, a fresh scrape, a set of manually sourced leads. You can assemble the full picture before anything goes out, rather than committing to a partial list because the alternative was resuming the campaign prematurely.

It also reduces the risk of accidental early sends. If you needed contacts added quickly in the past, resuming the campaign to do it was the only path, which meant a genuine risk of the campaign starting to draft and send before you had finished setting it up the way you wanted. Separating "add contacts" from "start sending" removes that risk entirely.

This also gives you more room to be deliberate about list quality before a campaign goes out. A paused campaign with a growing, reviewable audience is a much better place to catch a bad import, a duplicate contact, or a contact who does not actually fit your target profile than an active campaign that is already partway through drafting and sending. Catching those problems before the campaign is live means fewer wasted sends and fewer awkward corrections after the fact.

Availability

Adding contacts to paused campaigns is available on any campaign in your workspace, with a limit of 500 contacts per add.