A platform helping adults navigate major life moments like housing, taxes, jobs, insurance, and financial setup.

The original scope was straightforward:

• build 5 lifecycle campaigns in Customer.io

• migrate and structure a 70K+ subscriber audience inside Beehiiv

• complete the engagement quickly

But before building anything, I audited the underlying infrastructure.

42% of Customer.io contacts had no valid email address.

Nearly half the database consisted of unusable contacts, damaging engagement quality and distorting performance metrics.

At the same time:

• Gmail and Outlook were flagging emails as spam

• lifecycle campaigns lacked clear segmentation logic

• sending infrastructure wasn’t designed for long-term deliverability

Building campaigns on top of that foundation would have produced misleading results and poor inbox placement.

So instead of immediately executing the brief, I paused the build and rebuilt the foundation first.

Diagnosed spam placement issues across Gmail and Outlook and rebuilt campaign standards around deliverability best practices:

• clean HTML structure

• plain-text compatibility

• lightweight formatting

• proper unsubscribe handling

• single-CTA email architecture

List Cleaning & Segmentation

Cleaned and restructured a 78,708-contact database:

• 8,204 unsubscribed contacts excluded

• 1,203 anonymous/fake IDs removed

• 1,625 no-email contacts suppressed

The remaining audience was segmented into:

• Founding Cohort

• Inactive

• Pre-Trial

• Blank Status

This segmentation became the foundation for a phased Beehiiv warmup strategy.

Before writing a single campaign, I created a complete lifecycle strategy document covering:

• campaign objectives

• trigger logic

• audience definitions

• behavioral conditions

• exit criteria

• deliverability rules

Reviewed and approved before implementation began.

Built 6 lifecycle campaigns

The audit revealed an additional onboarding sequence was required to improve new member activation and lifecycle continuity.

• onboarding

• activation

• re-engagement

• win-back

• nurture systems

All behavior-driven inside Customer.io.

Instead of blasting 70K dormant contacts immediately, I designed a phased warmup strategy prioritizing the most engaged cohorts first.

One key operational rule governed the architecture:

Customer.io and Beehiiv should never email the same user simultaneously.

Customer.io handled active product users.

Beehiiv handled dormant reactivation.

Once a Beehiiv subscriber converted, they permanently exited Beehiiv and entered Customer.io lifecycle flows.

⭐ 5.0 across all categories

— Genevieve Bellaire, Founder, Realworld

The original request was campaign execution.

But the real issue was lifecycle infrastructure.

Had the campaigns simply been built as requested, they would have been sent to invalid contacts, damaged deliverability further, and underperformed for reasons unrelated to copy or strategy.

Sometimes the highest-value work isn’t execution.

It’s identifying the problem underneath the brief.

Customer.io · Beehiiv · Deliverability · Lifecycle Strategy · Segmentation

Realworld (backed by Bezos Expeditions)

Review:

5.0 / 5.0