Playbook · Mail

Convert cold email signups by landing in Gmail Primary.

Someone signed up. They went quiet. A 3-email welcome sequence written to land in Gmail's main inbox — not Promotions — is the cheapest re-engagement tool you have. Setup takes about ten minutes; every new signup gets the sequence automatically after that.

What it does for you

Most cold signups go quiet before you ever have a real conversation with them. This play fixes that: a 3-email sequence that arrives in Gmail's main inbox (not the Promotions tab, where people don't read), written in your voice, warming each signup toward a real decision. By the end you'll have:

• A 3-email welcome sequence drafted, previewed, and live. Iris writes all three emails, sends a test copy to your own inbox so you can confirm the tab before any subscriber sees it, then schedules the sequence automatically.
• Each email pointing at a different section of your landing page. Email 1 introduces the problem. Email 2 gives proof. Email 3 makes the soft ask. Every email ends with one call to action back to wherever that conversation belongs.
• A signup form snippet ready to paste into your site. Anyone who fills it out goes straight into the sequence — no list management, no Zapier.
• Primary inbox placement from the first send. Gmail classifies every message on its own. Iris follows the copy rules that keep messages out of Promotions — first-person voice, concrete proof, one ask — and re-previews if anything slips.

How it works, start to finish

Two steps, one of which is one-time setup. Here's the whole thing, nothing hidden.

1. Create a Loopi account

The prerequisite is a Loopi account — 60 seconds at loopi.social (email + password). Inside the app, the Mail tab is where your lists, sequences, and content templates live. You don't need to configure anything before running the prompt — Iris sets up the list and sequence in the same conversation.

2. Open your Agents tab and run the prompt

Paste this to Iris. Swap in your real landing page URL. She handles everything else — drafts all three emails, sends previews to your inbox, fixes anything that slips into Promotions, then schedules the sequence and returns the signup form snippet.

I have a landing page at https://your-product.com.

Build me a 3-email welcome sequence that lands in Gmail's main inbox, not
Promotions. Each email should be written in my voice — personal, first-person,
one concrete proof anchor per email — and route back to a specific section of
the landing page.

Steps:
1. Draft all three emails (subject + body each) with a first-person speaker
   voice, no marketing-copy fingerprints (no FOMO, no "now live", no slogan
   closes, no brand-team voice), and one clear call to action per email.
2. Send me a preview of each one so I can open Gmail and confirm which tab
   it lands in before any subscriber sees it.
3. If a preview tips Promotions, diagnose the body against the rules above,
   revise it, and re-preview.
4. Once all three previews land in the main inbox, schedule them as a
   sequence with a 3-day delay between steps, bound to my welcome list.
5. Set up the signup form so I get an embed snippet to paste into my
   landing page.

Report back with: the three subjects, a one-line summary of each email's angle,
and the embed snippet.

Open your Agents tab and run this play →

What Iris does under the hood

You hand her three things. She returns three.

What Loopi handles for you

Net effect: the only knobs you touch are landing page URL, voice, and tone. The plumbing happens behind the scenes.

• Compliance, automatically. Loopi auto-injects a compliant unsubscribe footer on every send — you never write one manually. This also matters for inbox placement: a bordered "Sent via X" branding block tips Promotions by itself, so Loopi keeps the footer minimal and inline.
• Preview before any subscriber sees it. Iris sends a real copy of the email to your inbox. You open Gmail, check the tab, confirm Primary before she schedules anything. If it slips, she diagnoses the body and re-previews.
• Click tracking on every link. All links are rewritten through Loopi's click tracker — so when you check analytics, you can see which email drove the most landing page visits.
• Drip scheduling and sequencing. Iris wires the three emails into a timed sequence. New subscribers who fill out the form enter the sequence automatically — no manual scheduling, no re-running the prompt.
• The signup form, one ask. Iris returns a paste-ready embed snippet — a single tag you drop into any site (plain HTML, WordPress, React, Astro). Submissions go straight into the list.

The evidence: what actually tips Primary

We sent roughly 100 controlled variants to the same Gmail inbox over a few weeks. Held everything constant except one variable per send — body tone, footer style, subject framing, threading headers, HTML chrome, sending infrastructure. Watched which tab each landed in.

Two findings dominated everything else:

• Body phrasing is the single biggest factor. Conversational, first-person, addressing one reader lands Primary. Declarative product-pitch tone — "Only in 2026 can a single person ship…" — tips Promotions every time, even with stripped HTML and no footer.
• A bordered "Sent via X" footer tips Promotions by itself, even on an otherwise-Primary body. Loopi's auto-injected footer is minimal and inline — it doesn't trigger the classifier.

Things that didn't matter the way we expected: styled call-to-action buttons (safe), threading headers (UX-only, no classifier effect), sending platform (the right body lands Primary regardless of which provider sends it).

Side-by-side: same product, opposite outcomes

Both bodies pitch the same course. Same conversational shape, same opener, same speaker. The left tipped Promo; the right landed Primary. The difference is one paragraph sliding from "telling my story" into "describing the product."

The diagnostic line: talk about what you built or noticed (an app, an experience, a year of engineering), not what the product offers (missions, features, pacing). The moment a sentence starts pitching the product's structure, the classifier flags it.

Body anti-patterns that tip Promo

• "Now live", "is here", "is now available", "limited time", "X% off" — launch keywords.
• "Real product, real users, real money" — slogan cadence.
• "The window is open, most people won't take it" — FOMO.
• "Bring your own idea. Follow the missions. Ship your MVP in 7 days" — imperative slogan close.
• "From the team at X", "your friends at X" — brand-team voice.
• "X has Y built in" — feature-pitch statement. Rephrase as a verb of doing: "I baked Y into X".
• "When you use X, do Y" — second-person tutorial cadence. Rephrase first-person: "When I use X, what happens is Y".

Pricing is fine. Sale-framing is not.

• ✓ "The first batch gets it at $97 — I priced it lower so I can stay close to everyone going through it. After that, it's $297."
• ✗ "Inside the cap: $97. After: $297. No second window." — fragment-sentence cadence + FOMO close.