The core idea is simple: write the sequence once, define the entry condition, and let the system send on time, every time, with the same accuracy whether the audience is ten contacts or ten thousand.
A drip campaign is a pre-written sequence of emails or messages sent to a contact on a schedule or in response to a trigger. The point is to deliver the right message at the right step of the relationship without a human sending each one. Marketing teams use drips to welcome new signups, nurture leads toward a demo, re-engage cold accounts, and win back churned customers, all from inside the CRM.
The six things to know before building your first drip, and the one choice that decides whether the sequence feels helpful or annoying.
A drip campaign is a series of pre-written messages (usually email, sometimes SMS or in-app) that go out in a defined order with planned gaps between them. The sequence is authored once. The system handles the pacing. Every contact who enters the drip sees the same arc, personalized to their record, delivered at their local time.
Every drip has an entry condition. A new signup, a form submission, a stage change on a deal, a tag applied, an inactive period, a product action taken or skipped. The trigger decides who the sequence talks to and when the first message lands. A thoughtful trigger is the difference between a welcome that feels timely and one that feels random.
Time-based drips send on a calendar (day one, day three, day seven). Behavior-based drips wait for the contact to act (opened the last email, visited the pricing page, booked a call) before releasing the next step. Most useful drips mix both: a baseline schedule with branches that accelerate, pause, or exit when behavior tells you to.
A drip gets smarter in three layers. Tokens swap in the contact name, company, product, or owner. Segments send different versions to different audience slices (industry, plan tier, geography). Branches fork the sequence based on behavior inside the drip itself, so a prospect who clicked the demo link sees a different next message than one who did not.
Four numbers describe a drip. Open rate measures whether the subject line and sender earn attention. Click rate measures whether the body earns a next step. Conversion rate measures whether the drip actually produces the business outcome (demo booked, trial started, deal won). Unsubscribe rate measures the cost of running it. Every revision moves one of those four.
A good drip knows when to leave. Common exits include the contact replying, booking a meeting, converting, unsubscribing, or hitting the end of the sequence. A drip without exit rules keeps sending into a conversation that already moved to a human, which is the fastest way to turn a nurture into an annoyance.
Teams rarely build drips from scratch. There is a short list of patterns that cover most of the work, and most companies run four to six of them in parallel across the lifecycle. Starting from these templates (rather than a blank sequence editor) is how a small team ships a nurture program in a week instead of a quarter.
Fires when a new contact signs up, creates an account, or subscribes. Introduces the product, the team, and the next step. Usually three to five messages across the first ten days. The job is onboarding and trust, not a hard sell. A good welcome drip is the single highest-ROI sequence most companies ever build.
Long-horizon nurture for leads who are not ready to buy. Each message delivers one useful idea (a benchmark, a template, a case study, a short guide). The goal is to be the resource the buyer keeps opening, so when the budget cycle starts, your product is the one they already trust. Typically five to twelve messages over four to eight weeks.
Fires when a contact goes inactive for a defined window (sixty days, ninety days, a quarter). Offers a fresh reason to re-open the relationship: a new feature, a relevant case study, a short survey. Shorter than other drips (two to four messages) because the honest signal is a reply or a sunset. Hitting the end without engagement is a cue to suppress the contact.
For e-commerce or self-serve SaaS. Fires when a contact starts a purchase or signup and does not finish inside a defined window. Reminds the contact what is in the cart, surfaces a review or an incentive, and keeps the context warm for the second attempt. The highest-converting drip in most online businesses, measured per contact entered.
Fires when a demo or discovery call completes. Delivers the follow-up recap, the resources referenced on the call, and the next-step options (proposal, trial, pilot). Tied to the deal record so the rep sees every open and click as the opportunity moves through the pipeline. Short, dense, and tightly scoped to the conversation that just happened.
Fires when an account cancels or lapses. Pauses respectfully, then re-opens with a new reason to return: a product improvement, a lower tier, a dedicated contact. The audience is small but valuable, since a former customer already understands the product. A measured win-back program is one of the quietest profit levers in a mature revenue motion.
The oldest drips are simple calendars. Day one, day three, day seven, day fourteen. That still works, but modern drip engines mix a baseline schedule with real-time behavior so the sequence adapts to the contact instead of just marching through them. Here is how the two approaches combine in practice.
The simplest pacing. The system sends message one on entry, waits the defined gap, sends message two, and so on. Predictable, easy to audit, and fine for shorter sequences where behavior data is thin. Works best for welcome and onboarding drips where the clock is the signal.
The system waits for an action (opened the last message, clicked the pricing link, revisited the product) before releasing the next step. Removes the awkward "second nudge" to a contact who already acted. Requires reliable behavior tracking, which is why modern drips are tied directly to the CRM activity timeline rather than a separate email tool.
The pattern most mature programs land on. A default calendar paces the sequence, and inside the sequence, behavior branches accelerate, pause, or redirect the contact. Clicked the demo link on message two? Jump to the demo-booking message. Did not open message three? Hold for two days before trying a different subject line.
A drip engine worth running sends against the contact's own time zone, not the marketer's. A seven a.m. onboarding email is seven a.m. in Austin, Berlin, and Singapore. Open rates climb and the inbox gets fewer "sent overnight" complaints. Trivial once configured, invisible to the sender, highly visible in the metrics.
A drip that fires an SMS at eleven p.m. on a Saturday burns trust faster than the content earns it. Quiet-hours rules hold messages until a defined window the next morning. For regulated channels, this is not optional. For email, it is just good manners that happens to also improve response rates.
When the contact converts, replies to a rep, unsubscribes, becomes a customer, or is already in a competing drip, the sequence stops. Suppression lists and global exit rules keep the audience from receiving three nurtures and a billing reminder in the same week. If you only build one guardrail in a drip program, build this one.
Historically, drips lived in a separate email tool, and the sync back to the CRM was always a day late. Modern programs run the drip against the same contact and deal records sales and service use every day. The payoff is attribution that actually works, segmentation that uses real data, and sequences that stop the moment a rep takes over.
The entry condition is a saved segment of CRM records, not a static list exported last week. Industry, plan tier, deal stage, product used, custom field value, any attribute on the record. When a contact's situation changes, the next evaluation adds or removes them from the drip automatically.
A contact enters the drip when they fill a form, change stages, book a meeting, use a feature, or sit untouched for a defined period. The triggers read the same activity timeline the rep reads, so the drip and the human are looking at the same truth. No "did they really open it" guessing between tools.
Opens, clicks, replies, and conversions are logged against the contact and deal, not stuck inside a separate email dashboard. The sales rep sees which drip warmed the opportunity. Marketing sees which drips produced closed revenue. The finance view sees which campaigns actually paid for themselves.
The moment a rep sends a one-to-one reply, books a meeting, or advances the deal, the drip pauses or exits. The contact never gets a canned "just checking in" the day after a real conversation. The handshake between automation and human is where most drips either feel sharp or sloppy.
Opt-in records, unsubscribe tokens, and preference-center choices live on the contact record, not inside the email tool's database. A drip only sends to contacts the record says can be contacted. Audit trails show when consent was granted and when it was revoked, which is what every modern privacy framework actually requires.
The reporting layer rolls up the sequence metrics (open, click, reply, convert) alongside the pipeline metrics (deals created, deals won, revenue closed). A single view answers the question every revenue leader eventually asks: of the pipeline we built last quarter, how much came from the nurture, and which drip did the work?
Strkr includes marketing automation and the CRM in one tool, so drips send against live contact data, exit the moment a rep takes over, and report revenue, not just opens. Pricing is published. The feature pages show exactly what ships today.
The terms overlap heavily. Drip usually describes the mechanic (a sequence of pre-written messages sent on schedule or trigger) and nurture usually describes the intent (building a relationship with a lead over time). Most nurture programs are implemented as drips, and most drips are a form of nurture. Teams use the words interchangeably in practice.
It depends on the drip's job. Welcome and onboarding drips tend to run three to five messages across a week or two. Educational nurtures run five to twelve messages across a month or two. Re-engagement and win-back drips stay short at two to four messages. The useful question is not how many messages, it is whether each message is worth sending on its own.
Common cadences land between every two days and every seven days, with the first message often arriving within an hour of the trigger. The right spacing depends on urgency: a demo follow-up moves faster than an educational nurture. Behavior-based pacing lets the sequence tighten or widen based on how the contact is actually engaging, which usually outperforms a fixed schedule.
Benchmarks vary by industry and audience, but mature B2B drips often see open rates between 30 and 50 percent on the first message, trending down across the sequence. A better signal than raw opens is the conversion rate: percent of entered contacts who took the business action the drip was built to produce. That number is what pays for the program.
A drip whose entry and pacing are driven by contact behavior rather than a fixed calendar. The sequence starts when the contact does something specific (fills a form, changes stage, visits a page, goes inactive), and each next message waits for a defined behavior signal before releasing. Trigger-based drips tend to feel more relevant because they react to the contact instead of marching through them.
In three layers. Token replacement swaps in the contact name, company, product, or owner. Segmentation sends different versions of the sequence to different audience slices (industry, plan, geography, lifecycle stage). Behavior branches fork the path inside the sequence based on what the contact does, so a prospect who clicked the pricing link sees a different next message than one who did not.
Sending too fast and too often, writing a sequence that is really six versions of the same message, forgetting to exit when the contact converts or replies, letting the drip overlap with other campaigns the same person is in, and treating the sequence as "set and forget" instead of reviewing metrics every quarter and rewriting the worst-performing message.
At minimum: a contact database, an email sender with authenticated domains, a workflow engine that can wait between steps and branch on behavior, and reporting that ties sends back to the business outcome. Modern CRMs bundle all four, which is why drips increasingly live on the same record as the deal rather than in a separate email tool.
No sales call, no migration consultant, no four-month implementation. Enter your card, get 14 days of the full Pro tier, cancel any time before day 14 with zero charge. Spin up a workspace, import your CSV, and have something useful before lunch.
