Set up your first flow in Mailprompt

The first week, in order

This guide is part of the Mailprompt help centre. It walks through the shortest path from a new account to a first approved flow, in the order the product expects: brand, domain, draft, approval, results. Skipping a step is possible, but the later steps get harder without the earlier ones.

Fill in the brand kit first

The brand kit holds the store name, logo, colours, fonts and a short note about your voice. Every draft uses it: the header, the footer address, the button colour and the way the copy sounds. Doing this once saves editing every email afterwards.

Open Settings, then Brand kit. If you do not have a logo to hand, leave it empty rather than uploading a placeholder; the email renderer falls back to a text header, which looks intentional. Keep the voice note short and concrete. "Warm, plain, no exclamation marks" is more useful than a paragraph about brand values.

The footer of every marketing email is built from the account's legal name and postal address. Those come from the account, never from the assistant, so check them in Settings before the first send. A missing postal address blocks a send because commercial email in the United States must include one.

Add a sending domain

Open Settings, then Domains, and add the domain you send from. Mailprompt shows four groups of DNS records: DKIM, SPF, DMARC and the return path. The exact hostnames and values are generated for your account and shown in the app; do not copy them from another account or from an old guide.

The sending domain guide explains what each record does and how to read the verification states. Verification is not immediate. Mailprompt checks DNS on a schedule and marks each record verified, missing, mismatched or in conflict. A green domain in the list means all required records passed. Sending is blocked while DKIM or SPF fails, because a store that skips authentication damages its own reputation and the shared infrastructure.

If your DNS provider is Cloudflare, you can connect it with a scoped token and let Mailprompt add the records. Otherwise, copy each record into your provider's DNS screen. The app keeps the values available until the record verifies, so you can return to the page over several sittings.

Pick a template or describe a flow

The Studio shows a template gallery and a chat box. A template is a complete starting point: the trigger, the waits, the emails and a suggested audience. Describing a flow in plain language is the other route: "win back customers who have not ordered in 90 days, friendly tone, free shipping" gives the assistant enough to build the sequence.

Both routes produce a draft, not a live flow. Review the audience before the copy: a welcome email sent to the whole list is a different decision from a welcome email sent to people who joined in the last seven days. The flow review shows the step order, the wait between steps and the segment or list each send targets.

Check the products the email uses. A product grid built from "best sellers" changes as your catalog changes, which is usually what you want. A grid built from explicit product ids stays fixed. Neither is wrong, but the choice should be deliberate.

Review and approve

Open the flow and read the rendered email, not just the text. Check the subject line, the preview text, the links, the images and the footer. The pre-send checklist runs on every approval request and reports prices, unsupported claims, missing alt text, email size and unsubscribe link problems.

When the version is right, ask an owner or admin to approve it. Approvers see the audience, the rendered email and the send schedule, and the approval stores a snapshot of exactly what was approved. A later edit invalidates that snapshot and returns the flow to review. This is the core rule of the product, and the approval guide covers the edge cases.

Watch the results

The results screen counts clicks and attributes orders placed within five days of a click to the message that produced it. Give the first flow a week before judging it. Check three numbers: how many people received it, how many clicked, and what the attributed revenue was. A flow with a modest click rate and a clear revenue line is doing its job.

If revenue stays at zero while clicks are recorded, check that the store's tracking snippet is installed and that orders are reaching Mailprompt. Attribution depends on the click identifier surviving from the email to the store, so a missing snippet breaks the chain without breaking the send.

When something is blocked

Most blocks are one of four things: an unverified domain, a missing postal address, an unapproved version, or a recipient who is suppressed. The app names the reason on the screen where the action failed, and the fix is usually in Settings or in the approval record.

Do not work around a block by exporting the list and sending from another tool. The block exists to protect the account's sending reputation and the recipients. The help centre has a guide for each of these cases, and support can look at the request id from the error message.