A working guide to building a drip campaign: choosing the trigger, mapping the sequence, writing emails people finish, setting exit conditions, and knowing which numbers mean it is working.
Most drip campaigns fail for an unglamorous reason: they were written as a set of emails rather than designed as a path from one state to another. The emails are fine in isolation and the sequence goes nowhere.
This guide is the build order. Eight steps, a worked example with real timing, the numbers worth watching, and the mistakes that quietly cost the most.
A drip campaign is a fixed series of emails delivered automatically, timed relative to each recipient's own trigger date rather than to a calendar date. Someone who signs up today and someone who signed up in March both get email one on their personal day zero.
That per-person timing is the whole advantage. It means the sequence can be genuinely relevant to a moment (just subscribed, just abandoned a cart, just finished a trial) in a way a broadcast never can, and it means you write it once and it keeps working.
It is worth separating three things people use interchangeably:
Start with a drip campaign. Add branching only when you have evidence about where people fall off.
Two sentences, written down before you draft anything:
Trigger: what has just happened to this person. Outcome: the one specific action this sequence exists to produce.
Examples that are specific enough to build:
If you cannot write the outcome as a single observable action, you are not ready to write emails. "Nurture the lead" and "stay top of mind" are not outcomes; they are how sequences end up with no measurable result and no reason to be improved.
This is the step that separates sequences that convert from sequences that just arrive. Ask: why has this person not already done the outcome?
Write the honest list. Usually it is three to five items:
Each email in your sequence handles one of these. That is the design. Not "email 3 is a case study" but "email 3 handles the belief that this does not work for a team our size, and it uses a case study to do it".
The fastest source for this list is sales calls, support tickets, and the replies you already get. Do not invent it.
One objection per email gives you your length. Four to seven emails covers most sequences.
Cadence should be front-loaded, because attention decays fastest right after the trigger:
| Day | Job | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 (within minutes) | Deliver what was promised, set expectations |
| 2 | 2 | Handle the biggest objection |
| 3 | 5 | Proof: a specific result, named |
| 4 | 9 | Handle the second objection, usually price or effort |
| 5 | 16 | Direct, clear ask |
| 6 | 30 | Useful thing with a soft ask, then exit to your regular list |
Two rules that matter more than the exact spacing:
The practical constraints:
Skip the personalisation that is not personalisation. A first name in the subject line is transparently automated now. Referencing the specific thing they downloaded is not.
Trigger: downloaded a website planning checklist. Outcome: starts building a site.
Email 1, day 0, sent immediately Subject: Your website planning checklist Delivers the file with no preamble. One line on what to do with it first. One line setting expectations: "I'll send you four short notes over the next two weeks on the parts people get stuck on. Reply any time and it reaches me."
Email 2, day 2 Subject: The part everyone skips Handles the biggest objection, which here is not price but paralysis. Makes the case that the structure decision comes before the design decision, and points at the seven types of business website so they can pick one and move.
Email 3, day 5 Subject: How Maria launched in a weekend One specific customer, named, with the actual timeline and the actual outcome. Proof that is checkable, not a testimonial adjective.
Email 4, day 9 Subject: What this costs, honestly Handles the money and effort objection directly. Real numbers, including what it costs if they do nothing. No discount.
Email 5, day 16 Subject: Want me to look at your plan? The direct ask, with a booking link and a genuinely low-commitment framing.
Email 6, day 30 Subject: Three site structures that convert Useful on its own, soft ask at the end, then the person moves to the regular list and out of the sequence.
Five of the six earn their place by being useful whether or not the reader buys. That ratio is roughly right.
This is the step most often skipped, and it is the one that causes the embarrassing failures. Someone must leave the sequence when:
Write these as rules in the tool, then test each one by pushing a real record through it.
Any mainstream email platform can do this, and the choice matters far less than the design. What you actually need:
The last one is not optional. Since the major mailbox providers tightened bulk-sender requirements, an unauthenticated domain gets filtered regardless of content quality. Set it up once, verify it, and re-verify after any DNS change.
Then test like it is going to production, because it is:
Per email, watch:
Across the sequence, watch two things:
Give it enough volume to mean something before you change anything. A few hundred people through a sequence is a signal; twenty is noise.
A drip campaign is a design problem before it is a writing problem. Name the trigger, name the one outcome, list the real objections between them, give each objection one short email, front-load the timing, and build the exit rules before you turn it on.
Then look at where people stop and fix that email. That single loop, run four times, will beat any amount of upfront polish.
The destination matters as much as the sequence: every email points at a page, and that page has to deliver on what the email promised. If yours does not, building a landing page that matches the sequence is the higher-leverage fix. For the broader picture on automating this kind of work, see seven examples of business automation.
Front-load the sequence, because attention fades fastest right after the trigger. Send the first email immediately, space the next few about 2 to 4 days apart, then widen the gap to roughly a week or more. A typical six-email sequence goes out on days 0, 2, 5, 9, 16 and 30.
A drip campaign is a pre-written series of emails sent automatically on a schedule or in response to something a person did, rather than sent manually to a list all at once. The defining feature is that it is triggered by behaviour and runs per person, so two people who sign up a month apart both receive email one on their own day one.
Four to seven for most sequences. Fewer than four rarely gives you enough room to handle objections; more than seven usually means you are padding. The exception is a long-cycle purchase, where a slower educational sequence of ten or more spread over months can work if each email is genuinely worth opening.
Start close and widen out. A common working pattern is day 0, day 2, day 5, day 9, day 16, then monthly. The logic is that interest decays fastest right after the trigger, so the early emails should arrive while the person still remembers signing up.
Triggered and behavioural emails generally outperform broadcast campaigns, and a well-targeted welcome or nurture sequence often sees open rates well above list average, with the first email highest and a decline across the sequence. Treat published benchmarks as loose context only: your own first sequence becomes your real baseline, and the number that matters is the conversion rate to the action you designed for.
A newsletter is one message sent to everyone at the same time, and it is about what is new. A drip campaign is a fixed sequence delivered relative to each person's own trigger date, and it is about moving one person from one state to another. You can run both; they do different jobs.
Immediately when they take the action the sequence exists to produce, when they enter a live sales conversation, when they buy, and after a defined number of non-opens. Failing to build exit conditions is the most common technical mistake, and it produces the experience of being asked to buy something you already bought.
How we research, test and update this page: our editorial policy. We.Inc is our own product.
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