THE BUILD ORDER

Every flow in your account shipped in some order. Usually that was the order someone asked for it. Build in the order the inputs arrive instead. Each week below produces a number the next week needs, and the thirteen weeks end the day your peak season opens.

Placement, then interval, then offer

Work those three in that order, because each depends on the one before. A reorder reminder can't earn on mail that never reaches the inbox, so placement comes first. Timing needs the interval from your order file, so it waits for the pull. The offer comes last, because a discount set before the timing exists reaches customers who were about to reorder at full price.

Count back from your peak

Peak sets the deadline because of who arrives then: the largest cohort of the year, and in some files the best. If replenishment and subscription paths are live when they place their first order, their second order has somewhere to arrive. Build those paths after peak and the first thing that cohort hears is a winback. In a holiday business, many of those second orders fall due in February.

Build the February plan in October.

Starting in January? Run weeks 1–4 now and put weeks 5–13 in front of your next peak.

Month six, built out of order

Picture month six of a program built out of order:

• Forty flows, each reasonable the week it shipped.
• No per-recipient reporting, so no flow can be ranked on what it earns.
• Overlapping triggers, so one customer sits in three sequences and whichever sent last claims the order.
• Two welcome series, one email and one SMS, written by different people in different quarters.
• A loyalty widget unopened since launch.
• A repeat rate that hasn't moved a point, and a meeting about creative to explain why.

Some of those flows were good. None had a number waiting for it at launch, so none could be judged, and a flow that can't be judged never gets turned off. That's how the count keeps growing.

When there is no file (a launch, or a brand entering a new market the way Pepe Jeans was entering North America when I set up its segmentation in Klaviyo), write down your assumption for each number, with a date on it, and replace it with the file's number as soon as one exists. An assumption nobody wrote down becomes the timing of a flow for three years.

The thirteen weeks

1. Week 1 · InstrumentInput: Your order export and your audit score.
   Build: The six pulls, the Holdout Digit written to every profile, and the Monday Scorecard stood up.
   Output: Repeat rate by first product, the reorder interval, and a scorecard read aloud once.
   Exit criterion: Every number the later weeks need exists.
   Chapter: For Your Analyst
2. Week 2 · The mail arrivesInput: Seed addresses at each major provider and access to Google Postmaster Tools.
   Build: Authentication, Postmaster Tools monitoring and a seed check on one flow message.
   Output: A placement reading for every provider before any flow is rebuilt. Build flows before placement and you test them on the part of your file that isn't in spam.
   Exit criterion: Nothing in spam at any provider, and reputation High or Medium.
   Chapter: Prove the Mail Arrives
3. Weeks 2–4 · The structureInput: The reorder interval and repeat rate by first product from Week 1.
   Build: Reorder timing from the file, then Structural Share, including what customers get outside the inbox, then flows that branch on first product, then subscriptions listed first and never selected by default, then SMS on the customer's clock.
   Output: Second orders that arrive without a campaign.
   Exit criterion: Replenishment fires before any winback, and every consumable offers subscribe.
   Chapter: The Kept Interval and the four chapters after it
4. Weeks 5–8 · The file and the offersInput: A live replenishment flow, because a sale can only pause a flow that exists.
   Build: Work the back file, give your top ten percent an owner, run a capture offer, tested on 180-day margin, and set the Full-Price Window before the next sale.
   Output: Offers priced on what they do to the second order.
   Exit criterion: The next sale has its audience and its exclusions in writing before it's announced.
   Chapter: Work the Back File, then the two chapters after it
5. Weeks 9–13 · Prove it and own itInput: Eight weeks of holdout data and a scorecard with history.
   Build: The first holdout read, the Doorway Rule agreed with whoever buys paid media, the January page, and the budget ask.
   Output: A program that can say which parts of it make money.
   Exit criterion: The budget ask is on the calendar, with the date the holdout gets read.
   Chapter: Attribution Isn't Proof, then Part five

Most of it runs on tools you already pay for. Two pieces can cost money: the paid layer in the back-file program and SMS if you don't send it yet. Both are optional, and each chapter says when they pay.

Do this

• Put the thirteen weeks on a calendar that ends the day your peak season opens. Write Week 1's exit criterion at the top.