Learn / Automations

How to drip an email course

Five lessons, one a week, each at the same hour in the reader local time.

The workflow

1. 1Send email: no campaign chosen yet
2. 2Delay: 7 days, held to 09:00 their time
3. 3Send email: no campaign chosen yet
4. 4Delay: 7 days, held to 09:00 their time
5. 5Send email: no campaign chosen yet
6. 6Delay: 7 days, held to 09:00 their time
7. 7Send email: no campaign chosen yet
8. 8Delay: 7 days, held to 09:00 their time
9. 9Send email: no campaign chosen yet
10. 10Exit flow

Before you start

Five lessons, one a week, each at the same hour in the reader local time. The consistency is what makes it a course rather than a sequence of emails: people start expecting it, and the open rate on lesson four is the measure of whether lessons one to three were worth their time.

You will need: a list, five campaigns.

How to set it up

1. 1Write all five before you activate anything. A course that stops at lesson three is worse than a three-lesson course.
2. 2Choose the Drip a course template and trigger on the list your course signup feeds.
3. 3Assign each lesson to its send step, in order.
4. 4Adjust the weekly waits if the material suits a different pace. Daily works for short, practical lessons; weekly for anything that needs doing between them.
5. 5Activate.

What goes wrong

• Activating with lessons four and five unwritten. The deadline arrives whether you are ready or not, and subscribers notice.
• Making every lesson the same length. The first should be the shortest: it proves the course is manageable.