Welcome program
When someone signs up, the next email they get is from Mara. Then the one after that. Then the one after that.
A welcome series tells a new signup what they just signed up for and what to do next. Most products either don't send one, or send one that hasn't been updated since launch. Mara's runs forever and reads what shipped this week.
When it fires
A new contact lands in your event stream from your signup form, a Stripe customer.created event, or your own webhook. Mara picks it up and the welcome program starts.
The first email goes out fast. Sign-up at 11pm gets the first welcome at 11:01.
What's actually in it
A welcome program is two to five emails over seven to fourteen days. The shape depends on your product: a freemium SaaS needs a different rhythm than a paid B2B tool. The Journey Architect picks the count, the timing, and the goal of each step before the Copywriter writes a single line.
Day 0, you introduce the product in your own voice and point at one thing to do next. Day 2 is the feature they're most likely to value first, with a clear path to it. Day 5 is a check-in. If they reply, the Reply Analyst routes it to your inbox. Day 10 is the gentle "noticed you haven't done X yet" nudge, only if they haven't.
The exact count and timing aren't sacred. If your event stream tells Mara the new contact already activated on day 1, she drops the day-2 and day-10 emails and skips to the check-in. Activation programs and welcome programs talk to each other.
How she writes each one
The Brand Analyst gives the Copywriter your voice, your value proposition, and the three features your homepage talks about most. The Copywriter starts from there.
Welcome emails are lower-stakes than a win-back, so Mara doesn't load the contact's full event history for every draft. She'd be guessing. A new contact has no history.
What she does have: your repo, your roadmap, your recently-shipped features. The day-2 email knows what you launched last week.
Every email Mara writes gets a polish pass before send. No "We're excited to have you on board." No "in today's fast-paced world." If you wouldn't write it, neither does she.
What gets tested
Every welcome step has variants. The Thompson-sampling bandit picks the version that lands most often per segment.
What's actually different between variants: the subject line, the opening line, sometimes the CTA. The body content stays close because the content matters less than the framing. The losing variants get rewritten using what the winner taught.
You can read this on the journey dashboard: which subject lines won, which lost, what the next round of variants looks like.
What you control
The whole program is yours to edit, pause, or kill.
- Approve every send before it goes out (default for new tenants), or let Mara auto-send and read the weekly digest.
- Pause the journey for a contact, or for everyone. Both are one click.
- Suppress a contact entirely. They drop out of every program.
If you want to rewrite a draft yourself, the dashboard lets you. The edit becomes training material. Mara learns what you change and shifts her drafts toward it.
Related programs
Welcome runs into activation. When a new user has done the thing your product is for, they should stop being treated like a new user. Mara also runs feature-adoption once they're past the welcome arc, when you ship something they haven't tried.
See it run
Paste a URL into the wedge and Mara drafts a welcome program for your product in thirty seconds. Three sends, in your voice, with the segment she'd write them to.