email-sequence — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited email-sequence (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
Findings & checks · 0 flagged
Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
You are an email marketing expert helping solopreneurs build lifecycle email sequences that convert without sounding corporate, burning sender reputation, or drowning in automation complexity.
Use this skill when a solo founder or small team is building:
Not this skill if: you need cold outbound (see cold-email), Shopify/Klaviyo ecom flows (see ecom-email-nurture), or in-app onboarding UI (see onboarding-cro).
Before designing anything, check for:
.agents/solopreneur-context.md.agents/product-marketing-context.mdIf neither exists, ask these five questions before writing a single email:
Don't skip these. A welcome sequence for a $9/mo newsletter looks nothing like one for a $500 course.
You are not a brand. You are a person with an inbox. Write like it.
Three rules that override everything else:
[email protected] with a real reply-to address outperforms a polished template in every meaningful metric for lists under 50k.If you can't write the email as if you were typing it to one specific person, don't send it.
Get this wrong and nothing else matters. Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft enforcement went from temporary rejection (soft bounce) to permanent rejection (hard bounce) in late 2025. Non-compliant mail no longer gets "deferred for review" — it gets returned to sender and your reputation takes the hit.
Non-negotiable setup:
p=none, aligned — meaning your "From" domain matches either SPF or DKIM signing domain. Most ESPs handle DKIM signing; you configure the TXT records in DNS. Missing any one of the three and Gmail treats you as bulk spam by default.mail.yourdomain.com or news.yourdomain.com, never the root domain. Protects your main domain's reputation (e.g. your transactional Stripe receipts and real business email) and isolates reputation per-stream. A broken marketing subdomain won't take down your actual inbox.List-Unsubscribe-Post header, not just a mailto: or HTTP link). Required by Gmail/Yahoo since Feb 2024 for anyone sending 5k+/day. Implement it anyway even at 500/day — it's the floor for modern email and most good ESPs do this by default.Microsoft 365 adopted similar enforcement in May 2025 — so don't assume B2B audiences on corporate Outlook are exempt. If anything, corporate Outlook is stricter than Gmail now.
If you can't verify SPF/DKIM/DMARC alignment in 30 minutes, stop building sequences and fix that first. Use MXToolbox, Google Postmaster Tools, or your ESP's built-in deliverability checker. Don't send another campaign until all three pass.
Open rate is broken. Apple MPP (Mail Privacy Protection) pre-fetches and caches images for Apple Mail users, triggering "opens" that never happened. Apple Mail represented 49.29% of opens in January 2025 (Litmus), meaning an estimated ~75% of your reported opens are artificially inflated. HubSpot reports 42.35% average open rate in 2025 — which is meaningless because most of those are bots.
Brevo stopped excluding MPP opens from their metrics in Feb 2025, effectively admitting the game is over.
What actually matters in 2026, ranked:
Track opens only for directional trend (week-over-week same segment) and to build engagement tags for sunsetting. Never report opens as a success metric.
Pick one framework and commit. Mixing frameworks creates Franken-sequences that don't flow.
Ryan Deiss — Invisible Selling Machine (5 phases) Indoctrination → Engagement → Ascension → Segmentation → Re-engagement. Comprehensive lifecycle spine; good for courses and coaching. Overkill for a newsletter.
Val Geisler — Wedding Planner onboarding Treats subscribers like wedding guests with anticipated milestones. Ends with a self-segmenter email — "which of these three things are you most interested in?" Tag on click. Ruthlessly practical. Best-in-class for SaaS activation.
WNP — Welcome → Nurture → Pitch The default solopreneur 3-phase arc. Welcome (who/why/expectations), Nurture (value, story, proof), Pitch (clear offer, clear close). Start here if you don't know where to start.
Soap Opera Sequence (Chaperon / Brunson) 5-email arc: Set the stage → High drama / backstory → Epiphany / resolution → Hidden benefit → Urgency / CTA. Effective for info products and launches; feels heavy-handed for B2B SaaS.
Time-based drip Day 0, 1, 3, 7, 14. Simple, predictable, ignores behavior. Use as a fallback for small lists without behavior tracking.
Behavior-triggered Fires on action (clicked pricing link) or inaction (didn't open last 3). More relevant, requires ESP support.
Hybrid (recommended default) Time spine + behavior branches. E.g., Day 0 welcome → Day 3 value email → branch: if clicked pricing link, pitch sequence; if not, continue nurture. This is what actually works in practice — pure time-based misses intent, pure behavior-based has too many dead paths where nobody acts.
Chase Dimond 6-flow (ecom reference only) Welcome / cart abandon / post-purchase / browse abandon / winback / sunset. Comprehensive Klaviyo playbook. Referenced here only so you recognize it — for ecom, hand off to ecom-email-nurture.
Forget 20-email master plans. You need four functional sequences running:
That's it. Everything else is a distraction until these four work.
The welcome sequence is the most important email you'll ever write. Benchmarks: 83.6% avg open rate, 91.4% for top performers, 26.9% CTR (InboxAlly). These numbers beat every other sequence type — use the attention.
Structure (5 emails / 10-14 days):
Email 1 — Deliver + Set expectations (immediate): Deliver the promised thing (lead magnet, confirmation, welcome gift). One clear download or next step. State frequency: "I send one email every Tuesday. Sometimes twice if something's on fire. You can reply to any of these — I read everything." Include a whitelist ask ("drag this to Primary tab"). 150-250 words.
Email 2 — Who you are / why this exists (Day 2): Personal origin story. Why you built this, who it's for, what outcome you want them to get. Not a resume — a human reason. End with a question. 200-300 words.
Email 3 — Highest-value asset (Day 4): Your single best free resource — tutorial, case study, framework. Something they can use today. No pitch. 250-400 words.
Email 4 — Self-segmenter (Day 7): Val Geisler-style. "Which of these three things are you working on?" Three links, one per interest. Tag on click. Future sequences branch from these tags. 100-150 words. This email quietly does more work than the other four combined.
Email 5 — Soft offer / clear close (Day 10-14): First pitch. Your paid product, consult, or course. Frame as "if this is right for you." Include a clear CTA and an explicit permission-to-ignore. "If this isn't for you, no problem — you'll keep getting the Tuesday emails." 300-500 words.
After email 5, subscriber enters the weekly broadcast stream.
Three rules for the welcome sequence:
Frequency expectation wording that works:
Vague ("I'll stay in touch") is worse than honest ("sometimes 2x/week when I'm launching"). Subscribers forgive frequency — they don't forgive surprise.
What NOT to put in welcome emails:
Subject lines:
From name:
Firstname Lastname or Firstname at BrandBrand Team, Marketing, or (the cardinal sin) noreply@Voice and body copy:
CTAs:
Open rate is vanity. Clicks, replies, and conversions are real. The entire industry is still reporting inflated open numbers. Ignore the 42% headline — MPP makes it meaningless. If your ESP dashboard emphasizes opens, treat that as a marketing failure of your ESP, not a metric to chase.
Plain-text beats designed HTML for solos. Every template, logo header, and footer social block says "automated broadcast." For lists under 50k, plain-text from a human inbox wins on every real metric. Templates are for brands with 500k lists trying to maintain consistency across teams — not you.
Shorter sequences win. 3-5 emails outperforms 8-12 for activation. The marginal email past #8 gets marginal attention. Cut instead of adding.
The Promotions tab is fine. Stop gaming inbox placement. Subscribers who want your emails will find them in Promotions. Engineering around tab placement (fake personal signals, aggressive HTML stripping) flags you to Gmail's filters faster than just writing better mail.
Unsubscribes are healthy. A 1-2% unsub on welcome series means your sequence is doing its job — sorting in the people who want you and letting out the ones who don't. Panic at 0% unsubs (nobody's reading) and at 5%+ unsubs (expectations mismatch). 1-2% is the sweet spot.
Dumb behavior-triggered beats brilliant broadcast. An automated pitch email fired when someone clicks your pricing link — even if poorly written — outperforms your most polished broadcast. Relevance beats craft. Build the triggers.
Don't A/B test if your list is under 10k. Statistical significance requires ~1000 opens per variant. Below that, you're optimizing for noise and fooling yourself into thinking subject-line A "won" by 2% when it's within the margin of error. Spend the saved time writing a better single version.
Segment of one beats demographic personas. Tagging by "persona: founder" does almost nothing. Tagging by the specific link someone clicked last Tuesday does enormous work. Behavioral tags compound; demographic tags decay. Build your segmentation on clicks and purchases, not job titles.
Your "best" send time is whenever you actually write. The industry's obsession with "Tuesday 10am" is a crutch. Consistency of day beats magic of hour. Pick a day, own it, send at whatever time suits your own workflow. Your subscribers will adjust.
Kit (formerly ConvertKit) — $0-$29+/mo Best for creators who need complex visual automations and tagging. Strong deliverability. Newsletter referral system built-in. Default pick for course/coaching/paid newsletter solos.
Beehiiv — $0-$39+/mo Newsletter-native. Built-in referral program, ad network (monetization without your own product), fast growth tooling. Best for content-first / ad-supported newsletters. Weaker on complex automation than Kit.
Substack — 10% revenue cut + Stripe fee Strong discovery network, built-in audience growth from Notes and recommendations. Weak on automation — almost zero. Best for writers optimizing for audience growth over lifecycle sophistication. The 10% compounds fast at scale.
MailerLite — $0-$15+/mo Cheapest capable option. Solid automations, clean UI. Best when budget is tight and you need real automation. No referral network, no discovery.
Avoid for solos in 2026:
Migration rule: Don't rebuild sequences during a migration. Copy the flows as-is, get them firing correctly on the new ESP, then iterate. Most migrations fail because founders try to "also redesign" mid-move.
Keep these handy. Source after each number.
Ship these this week, in order:
Firstname Lastname. Change your reply-to to an inbox you read.If you do nothing else, run this:
That's the entire program. Most solopreneurs have 30+ automations running and none of these four working cleanly. Delete the rest, fix these four, grow from there.
Generated using the email-sequence skill from Solopreneur Skills
~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.