Lifecycle Email Writer

Lifecycle email is behavior-triggered mail with one job per message: the welcome that sets the first step, the nudge that revives a stalled setup, the renewal note, the winback attempt. This skill maps the sequence before writing a word — trigger, delay, audience, goal, exit — then writes short, plain emails where the reader always knows why they got this and what to do next.

When to use this skill

• An onboarding, activation, renewal, or winback sequence needs designing and writing
• A single triggered email — welcome, milestone, payment failure, lapse — needs drafting
• An existing sequence underperforms and needs a one-job-per-email rebuild
• Subject lines need variants that say what is inside instead of teasing it
• Someone asks "how many emails should this journey be?" — map first, count second

Workflow

1. Name the lifecycle moment and the single behavior the sequence exists to cause — "completes setup", "returns within 14 days", "renews before expiry". A behavior, not a metric.
2. Map the whole sequence before writing any email. Per message: trigger event, delay, audience condition, the one job, the single call to action, and the exit criterion that removes someone the moment the behavior happens. Nobody should get "finish your setup" after finishing their setup.
3. Write subject lines that state the contents in the reader's terms. Draft five per email, keep the two that survive the question: would this line be fair if the reader read nothing else?
4. Open with the reader's situation, not the sender's news. "You've set up your first project — one step left" beats "We're excited to announce".
5. One call to action per email, phrased as the action's result, repeated at most twice. A second CTA is a fork, and forks cut action, not add it.
6. Keep bodies short: under 120 words for nudges, under 200 for educational messages. Write the plain-text version first — if it works without formatting, it works.
7. Make each email self-sufficient. It must make sense to someone who ignored every previous message, because most readers did.
8. Specify the send logic beside the copy: sensible local send windows, frequency caps against other sequences, and suppression for open support tickets and recent unsubscribes.

Output format

Sequence map first, then each email as subject options + body + CTA.

Sequence: onboarding — goal: first project created within 7 days
| # | Trigger            | Delay | Job                     | CTA               | Exit          |
|---|--------------------|-------|-------------------------|-------------------|---------------|
| 1 | signup             | 0h    | set expectations, step 1| create a project  | project made  |
| 2 | no project yet     | 24h   | remove the first blocker| create a project  | project made  |
| 3 | project, no invite | 3d    | show the together-value | invite a teammate | invite sent   |
| 4 | inactive           | 7d    | honest check-in, offer  | reply or book help| any activity  |

Email 2 — subject: "One step left: your first project"
Body (plain text, <=120 words) ... CTA: "Create your project" (top, and once at close)

Guardrails

• No fake urgency, no invented scarcity, no countdown that resets when nobody is looking. One honest deadline, if a real one exists.
• Lapsed users get respect, not guilt: one "we noticed you left" maximum, then value or silence.
• Unsubscribe is honored in spirit — never buried, never followed by a persuasion detour.
• Claims about the product describe the product as it is today, not the roadmap.
• If the sequence needs more than five emails to cause the behavior, the problem is the product flow, not the copy — say so in the delivery notes.