5 emails, 192 brands reached

Description

No lifecycle infrastructure existed for Manifest AI. A new Shopify install got a generic welcome and nothing after, no automated touchpoint, no data on what happened next.

Built a five-email sequence triggered off the Shopify onboarding-complete event, spaced three days apart, written to read like a note, not a blast. Strict rules held across all five: lowercase subject lines under 40 characters, one sentence per line, no em dashes, plain-text-first HTML to work around a locked DMARC policy on the shared sending domain. The trigger wasn't testable through the UI, so a webhook simulation matching the platform's event schema got built just to validate the flow before it went live.

192 unique brands reached, about 30% open rate, 104 completing all five emails. A 27% leak, 52 brands triggered the journey and got zero emails, flagged as a structural pipeline issue instead of ignored. Cross-referencing HubSpot deal records against the journey cohort surfaced 9 deals tied to 5 journey brands worth $4,450+. Caught a live double-send bug on one account before it became a complaint, and a HubSpot configuration bug where a deal marked closed lost was displaying as Closed Won, the kind of thing that corrupts revenue reporting for anyone trusting the dashboard label.