4 · Approving the first sends
What you will have done: read the letters waiting on you, understood the three checks on every row, approved a batch with the keyboard, and worked out why a letter is held.
The walkthrough
1. Open Approvals
Revenue › Approvals. It is one queue across every campaign, not one per campaign.
The heading counts what is waiting. Rows are grouped by what the decision actually is — first sends are letters nobody has ever sent to that person.
2. Read a row
Each row tells you five things: who it is going to, at what address, which campaign, which of your addresses it will be sent from, and why it is waiting.
Under that sit three checks.
| Check | What it means when it passes |
|---|---|
| name | The person’s name is a real name, and the letter uses it correctly. |
| claims | Every claim the letter makes is on the campaign’s approved list. |
| source | The engine can say where this company came from and why it qualified. |
A tick is a pass. A cross is not a blocked send — it is the engine telling you which part it could not vouch for, so you know what to look at before you agree.
source is the common one. It means nobody recorded where the company came from — usually a hand-imported list rather than one the research agents built. The letter is fine; the audit trail is thin.3. Approve
Click Approve, or use the keyboard. The hints sit at the top right of the page:
jandkmove down and up the queueaapproves the row you are ondrefuses it
The keyboard is the point of the screen. Twenty letters read and approved takes a couple of minutes with j and a, and a long time with a mouse.
4. Understand “held by a check”
A held letter is one the engine minted and then refused to offer you, because something it needs is not true yet. It is not waiting on your judgement; it is waiting on a fact.
| Held because | What lifts it |
|---|---|
| suppressed | Nothing. That address asked never to be written to. |
| not schedulable | The person needs a verified address. |
| no domain | Every domain is warming or paused. Wait, or bring one back. |
| no content | The sequence step has no text for this language. |
| outside the window | The campaign’s sending hours. It goes when they open. |
Held letters appear in the campaign’s counts — the rail row reading 6 held is telling you six letters exist and cannot go.
5. Refuse one
Refuse is not “delete”. It records that a person read this letter and said no, which is what stops the same letter being minted again tomorrow.
A worked example
Meridian Supply open Approvals the morning after importing. Six first sends wait.
Every row reads name ✓ · claims ✓ · source ✗ — the list was imported by hand, so nothing recorded why each company qualified. The letters themselves are fine.
They read the first one in full, press a, then j, a, j, a down the queue. Six letters approved in under a minute. The cockpit’s Approvals tile drops to zero.
What to do if
Approvals is empty and you expected letters. Three usual causes, in order: the campaign is not active; every letter is held rather than waiting; or the people are not verified yet. The campaign row in the rail tells you which — it counts sent, replied and held.
Every row is held and none can be approved. Look at the reason. If it is no domain, you are in warm-up and there is nothing to do but wait. See journey 1.
A letter is going to the wrong person. Refuse it. Then fix the person on the Leads screen — refusing one letter does not correct the record it came from.
You approved something by mistake. If it has not been picked up yet you can still refuse it; once sent, it is sent. There is no recall. This is why the review policy exists.
A refused send reappears. It should not. If the same letter to the same person is offered twice, that is worth reporting — note the person and the campaign.
Confirm it worked: the Approvals count drops, and the campaign row in the rail moves letters from held or waiting into sent.