One always-on sequence
Every new contact starts the same welcome sequence. First email on day two, then one every ten days. Twenty-four emails is about eight months, so nobody falls off the end.
Case study · Lifecycle email
An email programme that keeps running without anyone loading it
A 24-email welcome sequence that gives a new contact eight months of useful mail, six lifecycle tracks that branch on what people actually do, and the rules that stop the two from talking over each other.
24emails in the always-on welcome sequence
8 monthsof runway before a contact runs out
6topics on rotation, so no two in a row repeat
6lifecycle tracks branching on behaviour
Problem
Most nurture stops after four emails.
A new contact downloads a report, gets a thank you, gets three follow-ups, then hears nothing for a year. When sales finally calls, the contact has forgotten who you are.
The other failure is the opposite. Marketing runs a campaign, the nurture is still running, and the contact gets three emails in a week from a company they spoke to once.
How it is built
Six topics on rotation
The sequence cycles through six subject areas rather than telling one story front to back. A contact who joins at email nine still gets a spread of topics, not the tail of an argument.
Tracks that branch on behaviour
Six lifecycle tracks sit on top, joined by what someone does: which page, which report, which product. They are shorter and more specific than the welcome sequence.
Sales wins the tie
If sales is in a live conversation, marketing email stops. The suppression rule is written once and applied to every track, not decided per campaign.
The part I would bring anywhere
The copy lives in a text file, not in the tool.
All 24 emails are written in one Markdown file. Each one has a heading, a subject line, and a body. A script reads the file, turns each email into HTML, and pushes it to HubSpot over the API.
That sounds like a small thing. It changes how the programme is run:
- You can read the whole sequence in one pass and see where it repeats itself.
- Edits are diffs. You can see what changed, and roll back.
- A rewrite of twelve emails takes one edit and one script run, not twelve trips through the editor.
- The same source file feeds other channels, because it is structured text rather than a saved email asset.
Deciding to send every ten days rather than every three is a decision about how much attention you are owed. Deciding that a sales conversation mutes marketing email is a decision about who owns the relationship. Both are written down once and enforced by the system rather than argued about per campaign.
Email copy, subject lines, campaign names, workflow and list IDs are withheld. The structure is the transferable part.