Set up your Welcome sequence in Shopify Flow

A new paid patron joins at 9:47 PM on a Sunday. They get your Patreon welcome note on the way in, click around the page for ninety seconds, and close the tab. That is usually the last message they hear from you for two or three weeks — until your next post drops.

Ten days is plenty of time to disappear from a new patron's mental model. A short welcome sequence over those first ten days is the difference between "the creator I support" and "the creator I forgot I support."

This post walks the exact Shopify Flow that fires three welcome emails on Day 0, Day 5, and Day 10 — every new paid patron, every time. Copy the chart, paste the values, ship the sequence.

Before you start

You need three things, and only three:

1. A Shopify store with the free Shopify Flow app installed (Settings → Apps → search "Shopify Flow").
2. Shopify Email (or any marketing tool that exposes a "marketing activity" Shopify Flow can call). Three activities — one per email — saved as drafts before you start. Name them clearly: Welcome · 01, Welcome · 02, Welcome · 03.
3. FanConvert connected to your Patreon and your Shopify store. That is the small piece of software that listens to every Patreon membership moment and marks the matching Shopify customer with the sequence label fanconvert:onboarding the second a new paid patron joins.

If you have all three, this is a 15-minute job — five for the trigger, ten for the two follow-up checkpoints.

The chart, in one picture

Here is the Shopify Flow you are about to build. One trigger up top, the sequence-label check repeated at every stage so a patron who cancels or churns mid-sequence falls out cleanly, and three sends spaced over 10 days.

Here is the cadence as a table, since most of the actual setup work is pasting these values into the Shopify Flow UI:

Build it in five steps

1. Create the workflow

Shopify admin → Apps → Flow → Create workflow. Name it Welcome · Patreon so a future-you, scrolling a list of 12 workflows, knows what it does without opening it.

2. Pick the trigger

Click Select a trigger and pick Customer tags added (under the Shopify Admin category). This is the trigger Shopify fires the second FanConvert marks a customer with the fanconvert:onboarding label.

There is nothing to configure on the trigger itself.

3. Add the first condition + first send

Click + → Condition. In the condition builder:

• Field: customer.tags
• Operator: any item
• Inner field: tags_item
• Inner operator: is equal to
• Inner value: fanconvert:onboarding

In plain English: "fire the next step only if the customer has the fanconvert:onboarding label on them right now." This is the gate. Every checkpoint in this workflow uses the same condition — that is why a patron who cancels mid-sequence silently drops out the moment FanConvert lifts the label.

On the condition's true branch, click + → Action → Send marketing activity. Pick Welcome · 01 from the dropdown of saved activities. Leave customer_id at its default (customer.id). That is the first email.

4. Add a 5-day wait, then the second condition + second send

Click + → Wait under the action you just added. Set duration to 5 days.

After the wait, add another condition (same tags_item == "fanconvert:onboarding" check) and on its true branch, add the second Send marketing activity with Welcome · 02.

5. Add a second 5-day wait, the third condition, and the last send

Click + → Wait under the second send. Set duration to 5 days.

After the wait, add the final condition (same check again) and on its true branch, add the third Send marketing activity with Welcome · 03. There is no wait after the last send — the sequence ends there.

Save the workflow. Toggle Active at the top.

You are done.

What "done" looks like

Open your Shopify customers list, pick a test customer (yourself, on a second email account), and apply the label fanconvert:onboarding manually — just type it into their tags field and save.

Within ~30 seconds the first email should land in your inbox. In the Shopify Flow run log (Apps → Flow → your workflow → Runs) you should see the trigger fire, the first condition return true, and the first send queue up.

Now remove the label from that test customer. Wait a few minutes, then check the run log again: the next stage's condition should return false and the run should end. That is the safety check working — a patron who cancels mid-onboarding gets no further welcome emails.

Three things that bite people

The label is case-sensitive and exact. Shopify Flow's is equal to does a strict string match. fanconvert:Onboarding, fanconvert: onboarding (notice the space), and fanconvert:on-boarding (notice the hyphen) all silently fail. FanConvert always writes the exact form fanconvert:onboarding — all lowercase, one word, no spaces. Match that in your condition or nothing fires.

Re-check the label at every stage, not just the first one. A common shortcut is to put a single condition at the top of the workflow and then chain three sends and two waits below it. That looks tidy on the canvas and is wrong. A patron who joins on Sunday and cancels on Tuesday will otherwise receive Emails 2 and 3 over the following two weeks — two welcome-quality sends to a customer who has already left. The two mid-sequence condition checks are not redundant; they are the difference between a warm welcome and an awkward one.

Don't compete with the Patreon welcome note. Patreon already sends a custom welcome note on join — the one you wrote in Membership → Tiers → Welcome message. Email 1 in this Shopify sequence lands seconds after that note. If both say "welcome, here is what you just unlocked," the second feels redundant. Better: the Patreon note is the receipt; Email 1 is the first piece of value (a behind-the-scenes link, an unlisted track, a guide). Email 2 on Day 5 checks in with something new. Email 3 on Day 10 closes the welcome loop and points at what's next on your calendar.

What about the other three sequences

The shape is identical. Build three more workflows, one per sequence, each watching for its own label:

Same trigger, same condition shape, same one-tweak-per-cycle build. Once you have the first one in muscle memory, the other three take about ten minutes each.