Digital marketing term
Drip Campaign
A Drip Campaign is a marketing automation consisting of a series of emails or messages sent automatically at predefined time intervals after a user completes a specific action, such as signing up or purchasing.
Detailed explanation
These sequences are typically designed to serve a specific purpose — such as a welcome series, a cart-abandonment reminder, or a post-purchase usage guide — and are triggered based on the user's lifecycle stage.
Unlike manual one-off sends, this automation ensures the right message reaches the right person at the right time, at scale, delivering a consistent flow of communication without requiring constant manual intervention from the marketing team.
These campaigns' performance is tracked through metrics like open rate, email CTR, and unsubscribe rate; combined with segmentation, custom flows can be built for each user group.
Frequently asked questions
- In what scenarios is a drip campaign used?
- It's commonly used for purpose-driven scenarios like a welcome series, a cart-abandonment reminder, or post-purchase guidance.
- How does a drip campaign differ from a manual email send?
- It runs automatically based on predefined triggers, enabling scalable communication without ongoing manual intervention.
Related terms
Internal links for the topic cluster — read these concepts together.
- SegmentationSegmentation is the approach of dividing a target audience into smaller, more homogeneous groups based on shared demographic, behavioral, or interest-based traits.
- Lead MagnetA Lead Magnet is a marketing incentive — a free, valuable piece of content or tool — offered in exchange for a potential customer providing their contact information, usually an email address.
- Open RateOpen Rate is a core email marketing metric that shows the percentage of recipients who opened a sent email campaign.
- Email CTREmail CTR is the metric that shows the share of recipients who clicked a link within an email campaign, relative to the total number of emails sent or opened.
- Repeat Purchase RateRepeat Purchase Rate measures the share of customers who have previously purchased from a brand at least once and go on to make another purchase within a given period.