email-lifecycle

Email Lifecycle

End-to-end lifecycle email — pick the right provider for the job, build the audience, draft the sequence, launch, and measure. Cross-provider patterns at the top; provider-specific tool calls below.

Out of scope — defer to other skills

Requirements

• Hyper MCP installed and connected. https://app.hyperfx.ai/mcp
• At least one of these providers connected at https://app.hyperfx.ai/apps:
  • Klaviyo — ecommerce, Shopify-heavy lists, behavioral triggers off purchase / browse data
  • Resend — product-led / SaaS / dev tools, transactional + lifecycle on the same domain
  • Beehiiv — newsletters, paid-tier subscriptions, content-driven lists
  • Gmail — small / personal lists, founder-mode broadcasts, ops emails

If none of those tool prefixes (klaviyo_*, resend_*, beehiiv_*, gmail_*) appear in the agent's tool list, stop and tell the user to enable the Hyper MCP and connect the provider they intend to use.

Provider selection

The wrong provider is the most common reason a lifecycle program fails. Pick first.

You can run more than one. The pattern is: Klaviyo for marketing, Resend for transactional + product onboarding (when the brand also runs ecom). Or Beehiiv for the newsletter and Resend for the product. Decide once per program, not per email.

Tool surface

Full per-provider mechanics, gotchas, and concrete tool-call examples in references/provider-mechanics.md.

Critical rules

1. Pick the provider before writing copy. The mechanics of how a flow gets triggered, how a segment gets defined, and what data you can personalize against differ enough that "we'll figure out the provider later" wastes a day.
2. Always start with the audience, not the email. A welcome flow with no opt-in source is unsendable. A win-back with no inactivity definition is unsendable. Define the audience first; the copy is downstream.
3. One purpose per sequence. A "welcome + onboarding + product education + first purchase nudge" mega-flow is brittle and impossible to measure. Split into separate flows wired together.
4. Honor unsubscribes globally, not per-list. When a profile unsubscribes, suppress them across every flow in the workspace — not just the one they unsubscribed from. All four providers expose this; it's not optional.
5. Test sends with a real seed inbox before going live. Every provider supports a test send. Do not launch a 10-email sequence to a 50,000-person list without seeing every email render in Gmail / Outlook / Apple Mail / mobile.
6. Stay under provider rate limits. Especially for resend_send_broadcast (large blast → throttled), gmail_messages_send (~500/day soft cap), and klaviyo_send_campaign (account-tier dependent).
7. Track conversion metric, not opens. Apple Mail Privacy Protection makes open rates ~useless on iOS. Configure conversion events at the provider level (Klaviyo metrics, Resend automation completion, Beehiiv segment transitions) and report on those.

Workflow

Phase 1 — Define the lifecycle program

Get the user to commit to:

1. Trigger — The event that puts a profile into this flow. Examples: "signed up for the newsletter", "made first purchase", "abandoned cart with > $50 value", "no order in 90 days".
2. Audience filter — Beyond the trigger, who qualifies. ("Newsletter signup, but only US-based". "Abandoned cart, but only first-time visitors.")
3. Goal — One concrete outcome the flow drives toward. Not "engage them more". Concrete: "first purchase within 14 days", "activate the integration within 7 days", "upgrade to paid within 30 days".
4. Success metric — Conversion rate to goal. Open and click are diagnostic, not goal metrics.
5. Suppression rules — Who should never get this flow even if they hit the trigger. (Existing customers shouldn't get the new-customer welcome. Recent purchasers shouldn't get the win-back.)

If the user can't answer the trigger or the goal, the flow isn't ready to build.

Phase 2 — Pick the sequence pattern

Five patterns cover ~95% of lifecycle work. See references/sequence-patterns.md for full templates with copy, timing, and provider-specific notes.

Phase 3 — Build the audience

Audience setup is provider-specific. Examples for the most common case (welcome flow):

Klaviyo — create the list, then a flow trigger on "Subscribed to List":

klaviyo_create_list(list_name="newsletter-2026")
# triggers + flows are configured in Klaviyo UI; the API surface here is
# for adding profiles, building segments, and sending one-off campaigns.

Resend — create an audience, then an automation triggered by contact.created:

resend_create_audience(name="newsletter-2026")
resend_create_automation(
  name="welcome-2026",
  trigger="contact.created",
  audience_id="aud_...",
  ...
)

Beehiiv — subscriptions trigger automations directly when added to a segment / publication:

beehiiv_create_subscription(
  publication_id="pub_...",
  email="[email protected]",
  utm_source="signup-form",
)
beehiiv_add_to_automation(
  automation_id="aut_...",
  subscription_id="sub_...",
)

Gmail — labels are the segment. Start with a label per program:

gmail_labels_create(name="lifecycle/welcome-2026")
# manual contact list maintained outside Gmail (Sheets, CSV) — Gmail
# is best for ≤500 contacts, founder-led sends.

Provider-specific gotchas (e.g., Klaviyo's profile-merging behavior, Resend's audience-vs-segment distinction) are in references/provider-mechanics.md.

Phase 4 — Draft the sequence

For each email in the sequence:

1. Subject + preview text — Lifecycle subject lines should look like 1:1 mail when possible (lowercase, short). Different rules than cold email — a welcome from a brand the user just opted into can be slightly more branded.
2. Body — One job per email. Welcome touch 1 = "thanks, here's what to expect"; touch 2 = "here's the one thing to do first"; touch 3 = "here's the proof / case study".
3. CTA — One per email. Same rules as cold email — interest-based or single-action.
4. Personalization tokens — Use whatever the provider exposes ({{first_name}}, {{event.product_name}}, {{custom_field.plan_tier}}). Never use a token without a fallback ({{first_name|"there"}}).

Drafts-first by default — for any new sequence, build the first email and test send it to yourself before moving on. Provider previews look correct in the editor and broken in production more often than not.

Phase 5 — Launch

1. Test send to a seed inbox. Every provider supports it. Use it for every email before activation.
2. Activate the flow. Klaviyo: set status to Live. Resend: enable the automation. Beehiiv: publish the post / set automation to active. Gmail: just send.
3. Set a 7-day check-in. Most lifecycle issues (broken token, wrong audience filter, send-time-pacing surprise) show up in the first week. Pull metrics on day 7 and again on day 30.

Phase 6 — Measure & iterate

Pull the conversion to goal metric, not opens or clicks. Open rate post-MPP is noise.

Iteration rule: don't tune copy until the audience is right. If the welcome flow has a 1.2% conversion and the same product organic conversion is 4%, the audience is misaligned (too broad, wrong source, suppression rules missing) — fix that first. Copy comes second.

Quality check (before launch)

Read the whole sequence end-to-end as if you're a single person receiving it over the planned timing. Reject any sequence that fails:

• The 5-email arc tells one coherent story.
• Each email could stand alone if the previous ones bounced.
• Every CTA leads somewhere that still works (no broken links, no canceled offers).
• The unsubscribe link is visible (provider auto-adds, but verify in test send).
• Tokens have fallbacks. No Hi , after a missing first-name.
• Subject lines are different across the sequence — same subject 5x reads as a system glitch.
• The send time isn't 3am in the recipient's time zone.

Reference workflows