control tower / journal
Journal
engine connected
← Journal
Proposed -- needs human approval

This tower does not push to git. To approve, a human makes this exact edit and commits it:

1. Open docs/marketing/journal/004-lifecycle-email-first-sms-deferred.md in the docs repo.
2. Change the line "- **Status:** proposed" to "- **Status:** active".
3. Commit and push. The journal's git history is the audit trail; this tower does not commit on your behalf.

004: Lifecycle flows ship email-first; marketing SMS deferred pending a compliance pass

  • Date: 2026-08-30
  • Decider: engine proposal (Claude, from the v1 build plan), pending Daud approval
  • Status: proposed
  • Review by: 2026-10-15

Decision

The six blueprint flows (welcome, abandoned checkout, pre-trip upsell, post-tour review + referral, birthday, win-back) build on the existing boat-os comms/notifications infrastructure, email channel first. No marketing SMS ships until a dedicated TCPA / quiet-hours / 10DLC / consent-language compliance review is completed and recorded as its own journal entry. Birthday is deferred entirely: no date-of-birth is collected anywhere today, and collecting it is a product decision, not an engine decision.

Evidence

  • Automated flow email earns $2.87 revenue per send, roughly 16x campaign blasts; automations were 2 percent of send volume but 30 percent of email revenue (Omnisend 2026 dataset, docs/research/marketing/longtail.md:32-42). The channel case does not depend on SMS.
  • The research corpus contains zero TCPA/quiet-hours/10DLC guidance (recon gap, longtail.md). Shipping marketing SMS without that pass is legal exposure, not speed.
  • The existing preference system already defaults marketing to opt-in-only with quiet-hours suppression and RFC 8058 unsubscribe (boat-os preference.service.ts:32-45, unsubscribe-header.service.ts), so the email path is compliant by construction.
  • Welcome flow is blocked on real newsletter capture: both site newsletter forms are stubs that send the email nowhere (newsletter-section.tsx:24-34, newsletter-form.tsx:24-34).

Predicted effect

Post-tour review + referral (the fastest flow to ship, extending the existing sendPostTourReview) is live within 3 weeks; abandoned checkout within 5. Together they attribute 5 percent+ of monthly bookings within 8 weeks of going live, measured by promo-code redemptions and flow-tagged UTM conversions in the Stripe attribution join.

Measured effect

(pending)