Reach
Eligibility, consent and opt-outs
Who may enter a prospecting versus a marketing campaign, the order Reach checks things in, and how unsubscribes, bounces and complaints suppress an address.
On this page
Reach decides who may receive each campaign from why you have their address. A person can be admitted to one campaign and refused by the next, because consent is scoped to a purpose: someone who subscribed to your newsletter agreed to your newsletter, not to a sales sequence.
Campaign kind × source#
Every campaign is either prospecting (a first approach to someone who has not asked to hear from you) or marketing (a message to an audience that gave you their address for it). Every lead records its source. The pair decides:
| How the address came in | Prospecting | Marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Added by hand, imported, via the API, or entered while enrolling — supplied by a member of your workspace | Admitted | Admitted |
| From CRM — an existing relationship | Admitted | Admitted |
| From a form on your website — the person gave it to you | Refused — a form is not a basis for a first approach | Admitted |
| Found by discovery or enrichment — research only | Refused | Refused |
Research-only people can be admitted once a person clears them for outreach and records why. See Leads.
The order Reach checks things in#
For every person, before enrolment and again before every message:
- Opt-outsan address or number that has opted out is refused, whatever else is true
- Statusthe lead must be active
- Eligibilityresearch-only addresses are refused
- Campaign kindthe source must be a basis for prospecting or marketing
- Channelthe person must be reachable on a channel the campaign's journey uses
The first refusal wins, and it is the one recorded. Someone who is both opted out and research-only is refused on the opt-out, because that refusal survives any later change.
Channels come from the journey: an SMS-only campaign refuses a person with no number at enrolment rather than queueing a text that would fail. A journey with both email and SMS admits someone reachable on either.
When you enrol people, Reach shows what the gate will do first — who will be admitted and who refused, and why — then enrols. The number actually enrolled can be smaller than the number you chose, and Reach says by how much and why.
Opt-outs#
An opt-out is read before every single message Reach sends, on every campaign, permanently. People opt out, or are opted out, by:
- the unsubscribe link in any campaign email — a permanent opt-out for that address,
- texting STOP to one of your numbers — records a consent revocation and an opt-out for that number at the same moment,
- anyone on your team choosing Never contact this person again from a reply or a person's profile,
- a hard bounce or a spam complaint, which write an opt-out automatically.
A full mailbox (a soft bounce) is not an opt-out.
Opt-outs are workspace-wide: someone who unsubscribes from one campaign is not contacted by any other.
SMS consent#
Reach → Settings → Compliance also lists the SMS consents recorded — people who agreed to receive texts, with when and how. Carriers expect you to be able to show this.
Your responsibilities#
Reach enforces the rules above, but you remain responsible for complying with the law where you and your recipients are — for example, rules on unsolicited commercial email and text messages, and on how consent must be collected and recorded. When in doubt, send marketing only to people who asked for it, and keep prospecting personal and low-volume.