Drip Campaign

For a long time there was one way to email customers: send the same message to the whole list on the same day. That picture was what email marketing meant to most teams — write something on Thursday morning and push it to thirty thousand addresses at once.

The problem is that the people on a list are standing in different places. Someone who signed up yesterday and someone who has been paying for a year are both on it, and the two need opposite things said to them. The new person needs to know what to do first. Telling that to the year-old customer is worse than saying nothing, because it signals that nobody on the sending side knows who they are.

Ravi hit this wall at Pagedeck. He sent "invite your team and work together" to the full list, and the people who had signed up that morning hadn't created a single document yet. There was nothing to invite anyone to. At the other end of the list, customers already running ten-person teams got the same message asking them to do what they had done months earlier.

A drip campaign moves the reference point from the calendar to the person. Instead of one send date for everyone, each person's signup day becomes day zero, and the messages arrive three days and seven days after that. Someone who joined in January and someone who joined in June each get the same sequence in their own January and June. The name comes from water falling one drop at a time.

Building one is less about writing and more about settling conditions. Six of them, in order.

1. Pick the starting point. Signup day, trial start, or first payment — one of the three. Every send time is counted from this date, so it has to be a single choice; mixing two puts the same person into two sequences at once.
2. Set the entry condition, which decides who joins the sequence at all. Whether it covers only individual free signups or also people arriving on a company account changes what there is to say.
3. Decide the count and the spacing. Four messages at day 0, 3, 7 and 14 is a common shape. Tight at the front and looser at the back reads more naturally, because the first three days are when someone decides whether the product is worth returning to.
4. Assign one thing to each message. Two or three asks in one email produce none of them. First message: create a document. Second: invite a teammate. One action per send, paired up in advance.
5. Set the exit condition. Anyone who has already invited a teammate has to leave the sequence before the second message goes out. Skip this and you send mail nagging people to do something they finished last week, and that one message spends trust the earlier ones earned.
6. Read the numbers per message after it ships. Open rate is the share of recipients who opened, and unsubscribe rate is the share who cancelled after receiving. Split both by message and the weak one identifies itself — unsubscribes running three times normal on the third send is a problem with that send, not with the sequence.

It fits best where the order is already settled. What a first-time user should learn first doesn't vary much from person to person, so a team can decide it once. A free trial fits for the same reason: a fourteen-day trial makes day 1, 5, 10 and 13 the obvious send points, and the last one has to land before the trial closes rather than after.

The limit comes from timing being tied to dates alone. What the recipient did in the meantime doesn't reach the send. A day-3 message saying "try creating a document" goes out on schedule even to someone who has already created ten. Exit conditions and personalization, which fills different content in for different people inside one campaign, cover some of that gap. Once the branching passes three or four forks, though, a date-based structure stops holding, and the work belongs in a customer journey where the path splits on behavior instead.

Trying to buy performance by adding messages runs into a wall too. Going from four sends to eight lifts the number of opens a little and lifts cancellations faster, which is a bad trade on a list you intend to keep using.

"Let's do the trial drip as four messages — day 0, 3, 7 and 12."

Fixing how many sends there are and how they space out across the trial.

"Pull anyone who already invited a teammate out of the drip. They're getting the invite email again."

The exit condition is missing, so mismatched mail is going out.

"Unsubscribes are piling up on the third message only. Let me rewrite that one."

The diagnosis points at one send rather than the whole sequence.

Pagedeck's post-signup onboarding runs this way. Ravi wrote four messages, and anyone who signs up walks the same sequence counted from their own signup date. Mia asked for one addition: write down the action each message is aiming at, and drop people out of the sequence as soon as they take it, before the next message is due.

That made the maintenance rule simple. Each message is measured by the share of recipients who took its action, and any message that hasn't moved in two months gets rewritten or removed. Once a quarter Ravi rereads all four to check that none of them points at a menu that has since been renamed or a button that no longer exists.

The most common belief is that a drip runs itself once built. The sending is automatic, so the impression is easy to form. But what's automated is delivery, not content. The product keeps changing, and an email written six months ago starts describing a renamed menu or a button that no longer exists. When the first message a new signup ever receives explains a screen that isn't there, that one email sets the impression of the whole product. Hence the quarterly reread.

The second one is that more messages produce more results. More sends feel like more chances. What actually happens is that the list gets spent. A sequence stretched from four messages to eight typically gains a few opens while unsubscribes double or triple, and someone who has opted out can't be reached with next quarter's product news either. It borrows from next quarter's list to pay for this month's numbers.