Why the list leaves PULSE
People who have never heard from you are the riskiest mail there is: no relationship, high bounce and complaint rates, and every one of those counts against the domain that sent it. PULSE keeps that off your domains entirely. A cold campaign is handed to a dedicated cold-email tool — Instantly, Smartlead, or any tool that accepts leads — which sends from its own domains and mailboxes. PULSE still owns the audience, mints each person’s unsubscribe link and, for a questionnaire, their survey link; the tool contributes delivery and nothing else.
Who is handed over
An external tool is for your cold list, so by default a file or push carries only the contacts not known to be engaged — people who have replied, clicked, filled in a form or otherwise engaged stay on PULSE and your own domain. When a campaign’s audience includes engaged contacts, a checkbox under the count lets you include them too, for that campaign. The count on the campaign is exactly who will be handed over.
Two ways to hand over
Export downloads a merge file you upload to the tool yourself: one row per person with their fields and links. It works with any tool and needs no plan tier. Push posts the same people straight into the tool over its API, one lead each, from a campaign or a survey — no file, no re-mapping. Push needs a tool connected under Settings → Integrations → Sending tools, a credential, and the unsubscribe attestation ticked. Both use the same audience rules and mint the same links, so a downloaded row and a pushed lead can never disagree about somebody’s URL.
Connect a tool
- In the tool, create an API key. For Instantly it needs the leads:create and leads:update scopes — scopes cannot be changed after a key is made, so a key with only create fails the first time a push meets someone already in the campaign.
- Create or pick the campaign the leads land in and pause it: a running campaign mails every lead it is given. Copy its id.
- Settings → Integrations → Sending tools → Add the tool: paste the key, set that campaign as the default target, Save. Test the connection — for Instantly the expected answer is a 400 saying an email is required, which means the credential was accepted and the empty test created nothing.
- Send one test lead to your own address, then look in the tool: the lead should carry unsubscribe_url as a custom variable. That is the merge variable your template must render; a template that does not is the failure this test exists to catch.
- Tick "my template merges the unsubscribe link" and turn the tool on. Push refuses to run until you have.
What the tool must do
The message is the tool’s: its sequence, schedule, and sending mailboxes. Your template has to merge {{unsubscribe_url}} into every message, and {{survey_url}} for a questionnaire. Nothing sends until at least one sending mailbox is attached to the tool’s campaign — that is the tool’s setup, not PULSE’s.
Reading the result
A push reports added and updated separately. Someone already in the tool’s campaign is not added twice; their variables are refreshed in place — so a survey pushed to people you pushed earlier for a campaign reads "already in the tool, given their link", which is the correct outcome. A person the tool refused is counted with its reason; the usual one is a key that can create leads but not update them. The audience count on a campaign also says how many contacts were held back because their address was judged unreachable, so a small list never reads as an empty one without a reason.
What comes back, and how
Survey answers, unsubscribes, and clicks on PULSE links need nothing from the tool: the recipient lands on PULSE and is recognised by their own link, even if they forward it or answer from another mailbox. Replies and bounces come back through a webhook (Settings → Integrations → Inbound webhooks — pick the tool’s preset, copy the URL and the x-webhook-secret header into the tool, turn the endpoint on; Instantly needs one webhook per event type) or through a synced mailbox. A reply moves the contact to the engaged tier, the same as a reply to mail PULSE sent. Opens are not collected for cold mail, and spam complaints accrue to the tool’s domains — read those in the tool. That last point is the isolation working.