How does a drip campaign work?
A subscriber enters the campaign through a single trigger — usually a signup, a purchase, or a list import. From there, timers do all the work: email 1 goes out immediately, email 2 after three days, email 3 after a week. The schedule is the entire logic. There is no branching, no reaction to events, and no per-recipient variation beyond merge fields. Most tools call the same thing a sequence or an autoresponder.
When is a drip campaign enough?
When the message does not depend on what the reader does. A welcome series, a five-part onboarding email sequence, an email course, a post-purchase check-in — all of these work as day-0/3/7 sends. A drip is also the fastest automation to ship: write the emails once, set the delays, turn it on. For a first automation, that simplicity is the point.
Why it matters for a two-person team
A drip is growth work you do once. Build one in an afternoon in Mailchimp, Brevo, or any tool with a sequence builder, and it keeps a touchpoint running for months without anyone watching it. For a team that cannot staff a lifecycle marketer, that trade — an hour of setup for months of unattended sends — is usually the first automation worth making.
What are the limits of a drip campaign?
A drip cannot see behavior. Left alone, it will pitch an upgrade to someone who upgraded yesterday and keep onboarding a user who churned last week. The fix is branching: send different emails to activated and stalled users, wait for events, exit people who convert. That is a customer journey, and coordinating several of them across channels is journey orchestration. Drips are the on-ramp, not the destination.