How campaigns work

A campaign is a sequence of steps that Swimlane runs for you, from your own LinkedIn account, for every contact in an audience: send an invitation, send a message, like a post, check whether someone replied, tag them. You design the sequence once, and Swimlane works through each contact at the pace you set, inside your office hours and your daily limits.

Who enters a campaign

The source. You pick one list. If you don't pick any, every contact in your workspace is a candidate. Archived contacts never enter.
Filters. You can narrow the source to contacts that carry given tags, whose headline contains a keyword, or whose ICP match reaches a minimum level (Low, Medium or High match or better). See Choose and filter your campaign's audience.
Continuous enrollment. A campaign is not a one-off snapshot. About once a minute, Swimlane looks at the source again and enrolls the new contacts that match. Add someone to the list after launch and they join the campaign shortly afterwards, with nothing to do on your side.
Only new arrivals. Off by default. Turn it on to skip the people already in the list and enroll only the contacts added to it after the campaign was created. It only has an effect when the campaign has a list.
No duplicates. A contact is never enrolled twice in the same campaign. The same contact can, however, be in several campaigns at the same time.
Leaving the list doesn't take them out. Once enrolled, a contact stays in the campaign even if you remove them from the list. To stop all automation for one person, archive the contact: their sequence is paused, and it resumes where it stopped if you unarchive them.

How the sequence runs

Steps. You can use Connection Request, Send Message, Like last post, Poke, Add tag, Remove tag, and four conditions: If connected, Has a conversation, Replied to message and Viewed profile. See Campaign steps reference.
Delays. Every step has its own Delay before this step, in days. It starts counting when the previous step is finished (for the first step, when the contact enters the campaign). 0 means as soon as possible. There is no separate "wait" step.
Branches. A condition splits the flow into Yes and No. A connection request splits it into Accepted and Not accepted, after its own Wait for acceptance period. Each branch has its own steps and its own End of sequence. Branches never join back together.
Conditions are checked once, when the contact reaches them and their delay is over. See Campaign conditions and branches.
When actions really happen. Tag steps and conditions are handled inside Swimlane straight away. Connection requests, messages, likes and pokes go through your queue: they wait for your virtual office hours if you've set them, and invitations and messages are spaced out by a random pause and counted against your daily limits. An action that can't go out yet is deferred and retried automatically.
It doesn't end by itself. Because new contacts can join at any time, a campaign stays Active until you pause or delete it.

What happens when someone replies

Nothing stops. A reply does not pause or end the sequence: the contact keeps moving through the steps you designed. To treat people who replied differently, add a Replied to message condition and put your follow-up messages on its No branch.

There is one safety net: just before a message goes out, Swimlane re-checks the conditions on the path that led to it. If one of them now gives the other answer (for example, the contact replied after the check), the message is not sent and the contact continues on the other branch.

After launch

The steps are locked once the campaign is launched: contacts already in the sequence are positioned on them. You can still change the name, the description, Only new arrivals and the audience, and pause, resume or delete the campaign (see Pause, edit, resume or delete a campaign). If a message step uses a saved template, editing that template changes what the campaign sends next.

What a campaign does not do

It sends no emails. Everything happens on LinkedIn.
It doesn't know whether a message was opened.
It doesn't send at a time of day you choose, rotate templates or test message variants.
It doesn't raise its volume on its own. You decide your daily limits.
It isn't shared. Each teammate sees their own campaigns, and each campaign acts from the LinkedIn account of the person who created it.
It doesn't run without an active subscription.