The Marketing Agent Preset

This is one of the shipped preset types, a worked example of what the agent mechanism can carry, and the one to reach for when the job is email and SMS outreach. Add an agent with type marketing, configure your providers, and it runs the whole motion: prospecting, sequences, replies, and list hygiene, on whatever schedule and model you give it.

The Order of Work

Each tick follows a deliberate priority order. Responses come first: people who wrote back are the warmest thing in the pipeline, and the agent reads and answers them before anything else. Scheduled follow-ups come second: contacts whose sequence step is due get their next touch. New contacts come last: only after the existing relationships are served does the agent start new ones. A tick handles roughly 20 to 30 messages, which keeps each run reviewable in the activity feed and keeps sending patterns natural. The supporting tool layer adds sequences, sending windows so messages land at sensible local times, and engagement tracking across the list.

Templates and A/B Tracking

Outgoing messages are composed from your templates in memory/documents/marketing/, written in your brand voice and personalized per contact. The agent tracks performance per template variant, A/B data accumulates with every send and reply, so which subject lines and which framings actually earn responses stops being a matter of opinion. Template work is a natural conversation with the master agent: ask what is winning and why, and have it draft the next variant from the data.

The Contact Lifecycle

Every contact carries a lifecycle stage, lead, engaged, interested, customer, past_customer, and the agent moves people through it from their behavior: a reply advances a lead to engaged, buying signals advance to interested, and the stages drive what kind of message each person receives next. The same machinery handles the exits: opt-outs and bounces are suppressed immediately and permanently, suppression is checked before every send, and a past customer is approached as someone with history rather than a cold name.

Compliance Is Structural

Unsubscribe compliance is enforced on every email as a property of the system, not a habit of the agent: every message carries the unsubscribe mechanism, every opt-out lands in the suppression list, and suppressed contacts are filtered before composition ever starts. Replies that need a human get flagged rather than handled, the preset specifically watches for legal-sounding replies and for high-intent responses, a person ready to buy, where a human touch closes better. Those arrive as flags in the sidebar with the full context attached.

Setting It Up

Two requirements gate the agent, and it costs nothing until they are met. First, at least one product in memory/system/marketing.md, the agent sells what you describe, so this file is where its pitch comes from. Second, an email or SMS provider in config/marketing.json, the Config tab's Marketing panel edits this with validation. The gate check means an enabled-but-unconfigured marketing agent skips its AI call entirely, so it is safe to create early and configure when ready. The master agent's onboarding walks both steps with you.

Running It

All the standard controls apply: its own tick and model in the Models panel, its own pause button, Kill Now for the current task, and the global pause. One extra layer is specific to outward-facing work: a tool-level pause, php tools/marketing.php pause, stops sends without stopping the agent, useful when you want list work and reply reading to continue while nothing leaves the building. The marketing tool's CLI also exposes contacts, queues, suppression, and metrics directly, so you can inspect the pipeline state whenever you like.

The pattern that works: start with the agent enabled on a modest tick and watch a week of activity. The A/B data and lifecycle metrics will tell you where to invest, better templates, a different sequence rhythm, or a stronger model for composition, and every dial adjusts live.