An onboarding sequence focused on the first hours doubled partner interactions on a marketplace

B2C marketplace · Growth stage

Partners joined the platform without any structured communication in their first days, and activation depended on each partner's own initiative.

Treat partner onboarding as a funnel with a single goal: the first interaction.

• We designed the sequence hand in hand with the client's team: platform, entry trigger, touchpoints and content.
• We measured engagement for each email day by day after sending, to see where attention dropped.
• We adjusted the CTAs to lead straight to the activation action.

+100% partner interactions and +200% delivered-and-opened emails, compared with the previous sequence.

• Partner attention drops fast. Opens of the first email fell by more than half from day 1 to day 2.
• The right CTA is worth more than one more email. Changing only the CTA of one email already generated new interactions.
• On a marketplace, activating the supply side is also acquisition. An active partner means demand served.

1. Build the first-48-hours sequence in a spreadsheet, one row per message: trigger (sign-up, first visit, 24 hours without action), channel, time, CTA and the activation action it should drive. Measure clicks and the final action, not opens.

2. Focus your effort on the first 48 hours, while attention is still high, and test one CTA at a time, always pointing to the activation action.

3. Ask an LLM:

   My marketplace has partners on the supply side and their activation action is [ACTIVATION ACTION]. Design an onboarding sequence for the first 48 hours with 4 to 6 messages, giving the trigger, channel, time, subject line, short copy and CTA for each one, and tell me which metric to track at each step.

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