A drip campaign is a pre-built sequence of messages sent over time to a contact, rather than one-off broadcast emails. The core design decision is what paces the sequence forward: time or behavior.

Time-based drips advance strictly on a clock — email 1 on day 0, email 2 on day 3, email 3 on day 7 — regardless of whether the recipient has opened, clicked, or engaged with anything in between. Behavior-based drips advance (or branch, or pause) based on what the recipient actually does — only sending email 2 if they opened email 1, or skipping ahead to a high-intent message if they visited the pricing page mid-sequence.

Time-based vs. behavior-based drips

Dimension	Time-based drip	Behavior-based drip
Pacing	Fixed schedule regardless of engagement	Advances/branches based on opens, clicks, page visits
Build complexity	Low — simple linear sequence	Higher — requires branch logic and trigger conditions
Relevance to recipient	Can feel generic or mistimed if they've already acted	Adapts to where the recipient actually is
Best for	Simple onboarding/educational sequences with predictable pacing	Sales-adjacent nurture where response should shape next steps

Exit criteria: the most frequently skipped design element

Every drip needs an explicit answer to "what happens that stops this sequence before it runs to the end?" Without defined exit criteria, a drip keeps firing at a contact who has already converted, already unsubscribed from that specific topic, or already been disqualified — the exact failure mode covered in workflow goal criteria, but drip-specific because drips are often built as simple linear sequences without goal logic at all.

Standard exit conditions to build into every drip: the target conversion already happened (demo booked, purchase made, trial started), the contact unsubscribed or was suppressed, the contact was manually disqualified by sales, or the contact has gone fully unresponsive past a defined inactivity threshold (at which point continuing the same drip is wasted effort — route to a different, longer-cycle nurture instead).

drip_exit_criteria.txt

text

DRIP: "Trial Activation - 14 Day"
  Entry: Contact starts free trial

  Exit conditions (checked continuously, any match removes contact):
    - Contact completes activation milestone (defined in onboarding automation)
    - Contact converts to paid plan
    - Contact unsubscribes from product emails
    - Contact's trial expires without conversion (route to different drip:
      "Trial Expired - Win Back")

  Without these, a converted customer keeps getting "upgrade now!"
  emails for the remaining days of a 14-day sequence they already
  completed early.

Re-entry logic

Re-entry logic governs whether and when a contact who previously went through a drip (and exited, converted, or lapsed) can enter it again. This matters more than it first appears — a contact who abandoned a cart drip, later came back and purchased through a different channel, then abandons a new cart six months later, should generally re-enter the same abandoned-cart drip, because the underlying behavior (cart abandonment) recurred independent of the earlier history.

The common mistake is binary: either allowing unlimited re-entry with no cooldown (annoying contacts who recently exited for an unrelated reason), or blocking re-entry permanently after a single pass (missing legitimate repeat triggers). The practical middle ground is a cooldown window — re-entry allowed, but not within some minimum period (e.g. 30 days) of the contact's last exit from that same drip, which prevents rapid re-triggering while still allowing genuine repeat behavior to re-engage the sequence.

Re-entry policy options

Policy	Behavior	Risk
No re-entry ever	Contact can only go through the drip once, permanently	Misses legitimate repeat triggers (e.g. second cart abandonment months later)
Unlimited re-entry, no cooldown	Contact re-enters every time the trigger condition is met again	Can spam a contact who re-triggers the condition in rapid succession
Cooldown-gated re-entry	Re-entry allowed, but not within a minimum window since last exit	Requires defining the right cooldown length per drip type; best default for most cases

Designing against annoyance means respecting signal, not just frequency

The instinct to prevent an annoying drip is often reduced to "send fewer emails," but frequency alone isn't the real problem — irrelevance is. A drip that sends three emails a week but each one reflects where the recipient actually is (did they open the last one, did they visit a key page) reads as responsive rather than spammy. A drip that sends one email every two weeks but keeps repeating a message the recipient already acted on reads as tone-deaf regardless of how infrequent it is.

Sequencing principles that hold across drip types

A few patterns generalize across time-based and behavior-based drips: front-load the highest-value content (the first 1-2 messages get the best open rates; don't save the most compelling message for message 5), vary the call-to-action across the sequence rather than repeating an identical CTA every email (the person who didn't click a "Book a Demo" CTA three times in a row is unlikely to click it a fourth time — a softer or differently-framed ask has a better chance), and always give an easy, specific unsubscribe path from that sequence rather than only a global unsubscribe, since global-only unsubscribe pushes contacts to opt out of everything rather than just the drip they're tired of.

Topic-level unsubscribe prevents losing the whole relationship

When the only unsubscribe option is global, a contact annoyed by one specific drip (say, an overly aggressive trial-conversion sequence) often unsubscribes from all marketing communication rather than hunting for a way to opt out of just that one thing — permanently losing a channel to a contact who might have stayed engaged with your newsletter or product updates. Topic-level subscription preferences, where supported by the platform, meaningfully reduce this all-or-nothing loss.

What's next

One of the highest-value applications of behavior-based drip design is the first days of a customer relationship, where getting a new user to activation quickly determines whether they stay at all.

Next: Customer Onboarding Automation →

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