Most people misunderstand drip campaigns. They think drip email is just about writing a sequence of five emails and queuing them up in an autoresponder. That is the lazy way. And it is why your open rates are plummeting.
A real drip campaign is behavior-driven. It is a sequence of automated emails, in-app messages, or push notifications that trigger based on a user’s actions. If you treat every user the same, even well-planned drip marketing campaigns will fail.
A user who signs up and immediately activates a core feature needs a different message than one who signs up and disappears for three days. The goal is not to “touch base.” The goal is to move the user to the next stage of the customer onboarding lifecycle.
In this guide, I will break down the best drip campaign examples you can copy, but more importantly, I will explain the best practices so you can apply them to your own product.
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What is an email drip campaign?
An email drip campaign is a sequence of automated emails sent based on timing or user behavior, designed to guide people toward a specific outcome.
Instead of sending one-off emails, we prewrite a drip sequence that unfolds over time. Messages trigger based on what a user does, doesn’t do, or when an action happens.
For example, a new signup might receive a welcome email immediately, a setup reminder two days later, and a feature-focused email after completing onboarding.
The “drip” part matters because the value compounds over time, helping us educate, nudge, and convert without overwhelming people all at once.
Most effective drip campaigns are tied to a clear job-to-be-done, like activating new customers, qualifying leads, re-engaging inactive accounts, or supporting trial conversion.
Why is building drip email campaigns important?
Drip campaigns are important because most users don’t convert immediately; they need multiple touchpoints over time to build trust and take action.
Nevertheless, the industry standard for email automation is lazy.
Most companies establish a linear queue: Email 1 on Day 1, Email 2 on Day 3, Email 3 on Day 7. Critics argue this method is “good enough” or easier to implement.
While simpler to build, it treats every user identically, regardless of their activity level, technical proficiency, or intent. This ignores the reality that triggered emails achieve a 5.02% click-through rate compared to 3.84% for standard newsletters, proving that behavior-based logic outperforms linear drip marketing campaigns.
The friction is easy to spot. Sending a “How to use Feature X” message to a user who hasn’t finished account setup doesn’t help. It creates active friction and signals that your drip campaign strategy doesn’t reflect where the user is in their journey.
Conversely, sending a “Pro Tip for Feature X” to a power user who just used Feature X for the 100th time is equally wasteful.
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Real-world drip campaign examples to learn from
I’ve reviewed dozens of drip campaigns, and the ones that work all have one thing in common: they’re built around real user behavior.
The email drip campaign examples below show how effective drip email campaigns respond to intent, timing, and context.
In each case, we’ll break down what triggered the message, why it made sense for the user, and how it moved them forward across stages like activation, retention, and re-engagement.
Welcome drip campaign emails
Welcome drip campaign emails are your first chance to show users how to get value from your product without overwhelming them. The best email drip campaigns don’t explain everything. They focus on how users should start, based on what drives activation in that product.
Take this welcome email from Mural. It’s built around one clear action: Start collaborating. There are no side links, no feature lists, no setup guides competing for attention.
From my perspective, this is one of the cleanest welcome patterns you can use in drip email campaigns when activation depends on doing one obvious thing early.
Now compare that to AirOps. Instead of pushing you toward one action, the email gives you options. You can book a strategy call, join a cohort, or connect with the community. The tone is casual and founder-led, which lowers the pressure to “get it right” immediately.
I tend to like this approach more for complex products, where you might want help, inspiration, or reassurance before diving in.
Then there’s Dropbox, which plays a longer game. Dropbox doesn’t try to explain everything in one welcome email. Instead, it runs a short drip email series over roughly two weeks. Each message introduces one small capability, like uploading files, sharing folders, saving space, or editing documents.
If you ask me, this works because it matches how you adopt horizontal products. Value compounds through repeated use, not a single “Aha!” moment. It’s a smart use of drip marketing to onboard new subscribers without overwhelming them.
Deliver hyper-personalized welcome emails with Userpilot!
The welcome emails I showed you above work well because they’re focused and intentional.
But you can take this even further by personalizing based on what each user does.
Userpilot lets you trigger different welcome emails using:
- In-app activity during trials: If a user explores your analytics dashboard, send them advanced reporting tips. If they haven’t logged in after two days, send setup reminders instead.
- Welcome survey responses: Segment by role or goal. A Product Manager looking to “improve onboarding” gets case studies and templates, not generic tours.
- Synced data from HubSpot or Salesforce: See which ABM ads users interacted with before signing up. If they engaged with “team collaboration” content, lead with collaboration use cases.
This helps you focus each welcome email on one core action that’s most likely to activate that specific user.
Plus, Userpilot includes email templates to get you started.
Drip marketing campaigns for abandoned carts
Abandoned cart email campaigns are usually framed as an e-commerce tactic, but in SaaS, the idea maps almost perfectly to following up when you don’t convert.
First, I have Supademo. It explicitly references that you looked at the product before and asks a simple question: Is this still on your radar, or is it a “not right now” situation?
From my experience, this works because it reduces the mental load of replying. The user doesn’t have to explain themselves. As far as email drip campaigns go, this is a smart way to re-engage without pressure.
A similar pattern shows up in Zendesk’s demo follow-up. Instead of reselling the product, the email consolidates everything you might need to continue evaluating.
This includes a webinar, a free trial, and a direct link to book time. If you dropped off after the demo, this removes friction by putting all the next steps in one place. I like this approach when you know interest existed, but momentum stalled due to timing or internal priorities.
Then there’s Intercom, which uses a classic abandoned cart trigger called extending access. The email reopens a 14-day trial and focuses the message on a specific outcome. They show you what other customers are achieving and invite you to pick up where you left off.
In SaaS terms, this is the equivalent of putting the item back in your cart and saying, It’s still here if you want it. It’s a strong example of drip marketing that balances social proof with relevance, rather than pushing generic promotional emails.
Recommendation drip campaign examples
Recommendation drip campaigns solve a common post-activation problem: there’s more value in the product, but users don’t always discover it on their own.
When Netflix sends a recommendation email, they already know that browsing creates friction and that too much choice kills engagement. So instead of waiting for you to open the app and decide, they push one highly relevant option straight to your inbox.
From a product perspective, this helps Netflix control engagement loops. The team uses existing signals, like viewing history and genre affinity, to guide behavior outside the app.
You see a similar strategy with Dropbox, but applied to feature adoption instead of content consumption.
After signing up, many new subscribers only use basic functionality or stop engaging altogether. Rather than pushing the full feature set, Dropbox sends drip marketing emails when usage slows, each highlighting one feature tied to a specific pain point.
Re-engagement campaigns
Re-engagement drip campaigns exist to answer one uncomfortable question product teams face all the time: Did the customer lose interest, or did life just get in the way?
It targets a very specific moment in the lifecycle. That’s why timing and framing matter here.
When Dropbox sends a 30-day trial offer, it deliberately waits until you have enough context to make a better decision the second time.
By this point, you already understand file storage and syncing. Dropbox doesn’t waste the email on basics. Instead, it reframes the product around a new use case, working with a team, and gives you a fresh window to properly test that value.
You see a more direct version of re-engagement in the Appcues follow-up. These targeted messages land right after the trial expires, when intent still exists, but the action didn’t happen.
It calls out the reality that little progress happened and offers two simple paths forward, which are either extend the trial or close the loop.
As part of a broader email marketing automation setup, re-engagement flows like these help teams recover stalled momentum without restarting the entire drip campaign.
Confirmation emails
Confirmation emails mark progress. They exist to acknowledge that you did something meaningful and to make sure momentum doesn’t die right after that moment.
In e-commerce, this usually follows an immediate purchase, a shipping update, or a payment confirmation. In SaaS email drip flows, the trigger differs, but the role remains the same. A user completes a key action, and the product responds instantly with relevant information about what comes next in their customer journey.
This is where confirmation emails quietly support broader marketing efforts.
This email from Collaborator clearly shows the pattern. You created your first project, which is a real activation moment for the product.
The team explicitly names what you accomplished, which reinforces progress, and then guides you toward the next action that matters. That is to choose channels from the catalog.
I like this approach because it does two things for the team behind the product. First, it reduces hesitation right after activation, which is when many users stall or drop off.
Second, it standardizes guidance without forcing in-app prompts or manual follow-ups. The email becomes a lightweight extension of onboarding that keeps users moving forward on their own.
Best practices to build successful drip campaigns
After reviewing real email drip campaign examples, one thing is clear: most drip campaigns fail not because of the copy, but because the email arrives at the wrong moment.
Below, I’ll walk through the best practices that set reactive drip marketing apart from the noise.
Segment and personalize by lifecycle stage
If you want your drip campaigns to stop feeling generic, you need to anchor them to where users are in their customer journey. Lifecycle-based segmentation does exactly that by tying each email sequence to progress toward value.
From my experience, this is where product data has to lead email, not the other way around. When you segment by real behavior, your email drip can deliver personalized messages that align with intent rather than guessing.
For that, a tool like Userpilot can help you do exactly that.
Instead of guessing who’s “new,” “active,” or “at risk,” you define lifecycle stages using product behavior. That might mean completing a checklist, triggering a key event, adopting a core feature, or going inactive for a set period.
Userpilot updates these lifecycle segments automatically as behavior changes.
From there, you can act on the same logic everywhere. You can trigger in-app guidance for users who haven’t activated yet and send lifecycle-aligned drip emails by syncing those segments to your CRM or email marketing software. What I like about this is how Userpilot helps you do this entire workflow from one place.
Keep content concise and value-focused
If you want your drip campaigns to get results, you have to respect how much time people spend reading emails.
Recent cognitive research shows that heavy exposure to rapid, fragmented digital content makes it harder for people to sustain focus on longer tasks or messages.
Another research also points out that the average attention span for digital content consumption has dropped to only 10 seconds.
This forces marketers to rethink how they capture interest almost immediately.
I’ve seen this clearly in key metrics like click-through rate. If your first drip email reads like a small essay, most people won’t reach the CTA before they disengage.
That’s why the first email in a SaaS email sequence should focus on one clear action that delivers value fast. Not feature depth or education. Just the next step that helps the user experience value right away.
Align emails with in-app and multi-channel touchpoints
If you want your drip campaigns to feel connected to everything someone does in your product, you can’t treat email as a separate silo. The smarter approach is to make email part of your product ecosystem.
I’m biased, but our product, Userpilot, was built for exactly this kind of alignment.
With our email feature, you can send behavior-based messages when users hit certain triggers, like missing a key action or going inactive.
At the same time, you can orchestrate in-app guidance that complements those emails.
For example, if you email a user to encourage them to try a feature, you can link that CTA to an in-app walkthrough, tooltips, or an interactive checklist that activates when they log in.
What I like about this approach is that you don’t have to recreate logic across multiple email marketing tools or patch together workflows using separate marketing tools.
Segmentation, triggers, and engagement live in one place, which makes it easier to manage the entire campaign and keep messages consistent across the customer journey.
That’s also what our customers love about Userpilot:
Test, measure, and optimize continuously
If you want your drip campaigns to keep getting better, you have to treat them like experiments.
With Userpilot, you can test parts of your drip marketing setup in a controlled way. It gives you a staging environment where you can safely trial email sends before they hit real users, so you can validate delivery, content, and triggers ahead of time.
That matters because small changes compound. A tweak to a follow-up email, a different trigger after a failed action, or a tighter timing window can significantly change how many users stay active or move forward. This is especially true when your goal is to nurture leads across a longer sales cycle, rather than push for an immediate decision.
This makes it easier to test your email logic end-to-end. You can check whether the right follow-up email fires after specific user actions.
You also need to think about the format when you test. By iterating subject lines, body length, tone (e.g., casual vs. direct), and timing, you learn what drives opens and clicks instead of what you think should.
Start sending smarter drip email campaigns!
Great drip campaigns don’t rely on guesswork. They respond to what users actually do and meet them with the right message at the right moment.
When your emails reflect real product behavior, drip campaigns feel helpful instead of repetitive. And that’s hard to pull off if email, segmentation, and in-app guidance live across disconnected marketing automation software and product tools.
Userpilot helps you connect those dots in one place, so your drip emails stay aligned with how users move through the product.
If you want to see how this works in practice, you can get started with a Userpilot demo and explore it on your own product data.
Boost Product Engagement with Actionable Drip Campaign Examples and Userpilot
FAQ
What is a drip campaign example?
A simple drip campaign example is a welcome series sent after someone fills a lead capture form on your website. For instance, an e-commerce business might send an email right away thanking the user for signing up.
Two days later, they could send a product guide. A few days after that, a customer story or use case follows. Some brands also run limited sales drip campaigns tied to seasonal offers or product launches.
Each message is pre-written and sent based on timing. The goal is to stay in touch without overwhelming the reader while guiding them toward a clear next step that aligns with their level of interest.
How to do a drip campaign?
To run a drip campaign, start by defining your target audience and the action that triggers the emails. That action could be signing up, downloading a resource, or making a first purchase.
Next, map out the message flow. Decide what the first email says, what follows, and why each step exists. Write emails that build on each other and avoid repeating the same point.
Set up tracking with tools like Google Analytics to see opens, clicks, and drop-offs. Share performance insights with your sales team so they know when leads are warming up and ready for outreach.
How long should a drip campaign be?
The length of a drip campaign depends on intent and context. A short campaign for limited sales drip campaigns might last one to two weeks, with three to five emails spaced closely.
An onboarding or education series can run longer, sometimes four to six weeks, with more breathing room between messages.
What matters is pacing. Each email should arrive when it still feels relevant to the reader’s action. If messages drag on without adding value, people stop opening them. Review engagement data regularly and adjust timing based on how your audience responds, not on a fixed calendar rule.
What makes a drip campaign successful?
A drip campaign works well when it speaks clearly to the reader and stays focused on one purpose. Success starts with knowing who the emails are for and why they signed up. Content should hit all the right notes by answering real questions instead of pushing constant offers.
Timing also plays a big role. Emails that arrive too fast feel intrusive, while long gaps break momentum. Finally, success comes from reviewing results and making small improvements over time, based on actual user behavior.
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