All About Email Campaigns

The short answer

Email campaigns send from senders you set up once on the Manage Sender Emails page: your own Gmail, Outlook, or SMTP mailbox — or, the recommended option, addresses you create on a verified custom domain (no mailbox or password needed). If a campaign pauses with Permission Issue / Reauthenticate, the fix is almost always: Manage Sender Emails → Refresh on that address (custom-domain senders never need reauthentication). Sending is deliberately paced (default 60/day per address) to protect deliverability, so you won't see a big burst.

Add a sender

Dashboard → Outreach → Email Campaigns → Manage Sender Emails (opens its own page) → Add Email, then pick:

• Custom Domain (recommended) — create addresses like outreach@yourbrandcreators.com on a domain you've verified. No inbox, password, or reauthentication needed — see the next section.
• Gmail — OAuth sign-in with Google.
• Outlook — OAuth sign-in with Microsoft.
• Custom (SMTP) — enter host, port (587 STARTTLS or 465 SSL/TLS), username (usually your full email), and password. If your provider has 2FA (Gmail/Yahoo/iCloud/Fastmail, etc.) use an app password from that provider's security settings, not your login password.

Then create a campaign: New Campaign on the Email Campaigns page → choose which connected sender(s) to send from → pick your audience → set the per-campaign daily message limit → write your subject and body → start it. (Note: email campaigns don't have follow-up sequences or send scheduling — those live on Automations.)

Custom sending domains (recommended)

Rather than connecting mailboxes one by one, verify a domain once and create sender addresses on it freely:

1. Manage Sender Emails → Manage Domains → Add Domain. Enter a domain you control. Use a separate domain (e.g. mybrandcreators.com) or a subdomain (e.g. creators.mybrand.com) rather than your main domain — if a sending address ever takes a reputation hit, your business domain is untouched.
2. Publish the DNS records shown. Cruva gives you the exact records: three CNAMEs that enable DKIM signing (required) plus a recommended DMARC record (Gmail and Yahoo require DMARC for bulk senders). Add them wherever your DNS lives — GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Namecheap, etc.
3. Wait for verification — automatic, usually minutes, up to 72 hours for slow DNS propagation. The refresh icon next to the Pending badge re-checks on demand.
4. Create addresses: Add Email → Custom Domain → pick the verified domain, choose the name before the @, and optionally a sender name — the From name recipients see in their inbox (e.g. "Sam from MyBrand"). Edit it any time from the sender table.

Why we recommend it: nothing expires (no Permission Issue pauses, ever), DKIM/DMARC authentication is correct from day one, and you can create several addresses on one verified domain to spread volume.

One caveat — replies. A custom-domain address has no inbox behind it. Replies go to wherever that domain's mail is hosted; if the domain has no mail hosting, replies won't reach you. If reply-handling matters for a campaign, add mail hosting for that domain or send from a connected Gmail/Outlook mailbox.

Campaign types: pure email vs. TC + Email

There are two kinds of email campaign:

Pure email. You write a fully custom message with text, images, or product cards — a clickable, nicely formatted link to your product that recipients can tap straight through to. If you'd rather not compose the message in the editor, you can upload an HTML file instead and Cruva will send that as the email body.

TC + Email. The campaign first sends a target collab invite through TikTok, then follows up with an email. The cadence works like this: a batch of 50 invites goes out (or whatever your shop's limit is), then each of those creators is emailed one at a time afterward. If you include [invite_link] in your email body, the email carries a direct link to that creator's TC invite.

Do email campaigns avoid TikTok messaging limits?

A big reason people reach for email campaigns is to get around TikTok's messaging limits — and pure email campaigns do exactly that, since nothing touches TikTok. But note that TC + Email does not avoid those limits: it still has to send the target collab invite through TikTok before the email goes out, so your shop's TikTok invite limits apply as usual.

Audience options

You can target an email campaign three ways:

• Outreach — set filters just like a normal automation (GMV, followers, etc.) and target the entire creator database.
• List — use a saved list from Outreach → Lists. There's no separate "email list" any more: every list holds handles and emails together, so any list can be picked here. What matters is its Emails count — the members with an address on file, which is who the campaign will actually reach. If all you have is handles, upload them anyway: Cruva attaches each creator's email where one is on file, and the list picker shows the resulting emailable count next to each list. You can select up to 10 lists per campaign.
• Creators — pick specific creators directly.

For outreach and group-based sources, only creators with a known email are contacted — for broader reach, upload your own addresses as a list, or build one from an AI Search with Only show creators with emails enabled.

Final step: CC, subject, and reusing past campaigns

On the last step of campaign setup you can add CC recipients, customize the subject line, or populate the whole thing from a past email campaign to get set up quickly.

Sending from multiple mailboxes

A single email campaign can have up to 10 mailboxes linked to it, and every linked mailbox is used to send, so the campaign moves that much faster. At the account level you can connect up to 100 mailboxes. In theory that's 150 sends × 100 mailboxes = 15,000 emails per day. If you're concerned about outreach speed, the answer is simple: link more emails.

"Manage Sender Emails" is not the same as the Cruva app email

The sender you set up here is the address you want to send campaigns from. It has nothing to do with the address Cruva generated when you installed the app. Manage Sender Emails is the button at the top of the Email Campaigns page — it opens its own page.

Fix "Permission Issue" / "Reauthenticate"

This only affects Gmail/Outlook senders — custom-domain and SMTP senders have no OAuth grant to expire. It means the email provider is blocking Cruva's attempts to send messages — the mailbox's send permission expired or was revoked. The message you'll see on the site reads:

Our email provider needs you to reauthenticate this address before we can keep sending.

A few things to check when you hit this:

Reauthenticate first. Go to Manage Sender Emails (top of Outreach → Email Campaigns), find the address, click the Refresh (reauthenticate) icon, and complete the sign-in. This alone fixes it most of the time — sometimes it's all that's required, even if everything else looks fine. Then resume your campaigns/automations.

Brand-new addresses. If it's a new email that has never sent mail, log into that mailbox directly and send one real email to anyone first — Cruva being the very first email sent from a fresh address usually gets blocked. Then reauthenticate in Cruva.

Admin restrictions. Make sure there are no admin restrictions on the email. For workspace/business domains (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365), your admin may need to allow third-party app access before reauthentication will succeed.

You do not need to add any Cruva-specific SPF/DNS record just to connect a Gmail address — connecting the account is enough.

"No email found" / "where is Manage Sender Emails?"

If a campaign says no sender email is available, you haven't added a sender yet (or it was removed). Go to Email Campaigns → Manage Sender Emails → Add Email. The table shows "No emails associated with this shop found" until you add one.

The daily email limit (default 60, max 150)

Each sender address — mailbox or custom-domain — has a daily send limit, default 60, editable to any value between 1 and 150 in Manage Sender Emails (pencil icon on the address). The cap exists to protect your email reputation and keep you out of spam.

Why the caution? It comes down to warm-up. Email providers score every sending address on its history: a mailbox that has been sending steady, legitimate mail for months has a strong reputation, while a fresh or rarely used address has none. Providers treat sudden volume from an unproven address as a spam signal. In practice, we find that non-warmed-up mailboxes sending even more than 20 emails a day get their reputation harmed — and once that happens, effectively all of your messages start landing in spam.

So even though the limit goes up to 150, we generally don't recommend exceeding 60 per day, and for a fresh mailbox you should start well below that and raise it gradually as the address builds a good sending history.

For the same reason, we also recommend sending from secondary domains — e.g. email@mywebsite-affiliates.com rather than your main @mywebsite.com — so that if a sending address does take a reputation hit, it doesn't harm your business domain's reputation entirely. The Custom Domain sender type is built exactly for this: verify mybrandcreators.com once and create your outreach addresses on it (see the custom sending domains section above).

Domain authentication & staying out of spam

How you authenticate depends on the sender type:

• Custom Domain senders: authentication is part of setup — the DNS records Cruva shows when you add the domain handle DKIM signing, and the recommended DMARC record covers Gmail/Yahoo's bulk-sender requirements. Publish them once and you're done.
• Gmail / Outlook / SMTP mailboxes: set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in your provider's admin (e.g. Google Workspace) and DNS host (e.g. GoDaddy). These records live with your provider, not Cruva — Cruva doesn't supply values to paste in for connected mailboxes. Once your domain is properly linked to Gmail/Outlook, sending works normally.

How does Cruva find creator emails?

Through a mix of proprietary methods — for example, if a creator makes their email public, Cruva pulls it. Only creators with a located email can be contacted by email campaigns.

"It says sent 4 but I don't see them in my inbox"

Two things:

You won't see them in your Inbox — check your Sent folder. Outgoing campaign mail sits in Sent, not Inbox.

Sends are paced. The campaign trickles emails out over time to avoid spam flags, so the count climbs gradually rather than all at once. If Sent looks momentarily behind, it's usually just provider lag.

Replies from creators land in your normal inbox as usual, since the mail is sent from your real address. (Custom-domain senders are the exception: there's no mailbox behind them, so there's no Sent folder to check, and replies only arrive if that domain has mail hosting — see the custom sending domains section above.)

Common problems

"Why does my email campaign keep stopping?" Most often: the mailbox lost permission (reauthenticate), the daily limit was hit (resets next day), or it ran out of recipients with valid emails. For groups/new_affiliates sources, only creators with a known email are contacted — for broader reach, upload your own addresses as a list, or build one from an AI Search with Only show creators with emails enabled.

"Campaign shows Completed with people remaining." The remaining recipients were already emailed (by this or another campaign) or resolved to 0 eligible. Turn on the Auto Resolve Conflicts toggle (it migrates creators from prior conflicting invites) and check the recipient list has active addresses. See the statuses article.