Drip campaign
A pre-scheduled sequence of emails sent over time, triggered by an event like signup or purchase.
A drip campaign is a sequence of pre-written emails sent on a defined schedule (or triggered by user actions) over a period of days, weeks, or months. The standard examples: welcome sequences (sent on signup), nurture sequences (sent to mid-funnel leads), and re-engagement sequences (sent to dormant users).
Drip campaigns differ from broadcast emails in that they're triggered per-user rather than sent on a single send date. Each subscriber moves through the sequence on their own timeline, starting from the trigger event. This makes drip campaigns easier to test (every subscriber gets the same treatment) and harder to scale poorly (slow drips trickle out instead of slamming the list).
The most common drip-campaign mistake is overlength. A 12-email welcome series almost always underperforms a tight 3–4 email series. Each email in a drip should have a clear job; if you can't articulate the job of email 7, it shouldn't be in the sequence.