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A drip sequence sends a planned series of emails to each contact on their own schedule, starting from when they enroll. This guide walks through a five-step welcome series — the most common starting sequence and a good template for everything else. For one-off broadcasts, see Send Your First Email Campaign. For 1-on-1 cold outreach to prospects, see Cold Email.

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The example: a five-step welcome series

StepDelaySubject
10 daysWelcome to Acme
22 daysThree things to try first
35 daysLet me show you the dashboard
49 daysWhat our customers say
514 daysA small offer to get you started
This roughly maps to: introduce, activate, educate, build trust, convert. You can adapt the same skeleton to a course drip, a product onboarding flow, or a long re-engagement nurture.

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The flow

1

Create the sequence

Go to /dashboard/marketing/email/sequences and click New sequence.Give it an internal name (Welcome — newsletter subscribers) and pick a kind: nurture, onboarding, re-engagement, etc. The kind is just metadata for filtering later.
2

Pick the trigger

The trigger decides who gets enrolled and when:
  • Manual — you enroll contacts explicitly. Useful while you’re testing.
  • Tag added — fires when a tag like newsletter-subscriber is added.
  • Form submit — fires when a contact submits a Hiveku form.
  • Workflow — wired into a Workflow so any node can enroll.
For a welcome series, Tag added is usually the right pick — every signup path your site has should add the same tag, and the sequence triggers from there.
3

Add the steps

Click Add step five times. For each step:
  • Delay — days from the previous step. Step 1 delay is from enrollment.
  • Email — pick a template or write inline.
  • Send window — optional. Constrain to weekdays + business hours so a 2-day delay doesn’t fire at 3am Sunday.
For our welcome series:
  • Step 1: delay 0, template Welcome.
  • Step 2: delay 2, template First things to try.
  • Step 3: delay 3, template Dashboard tour.
  • Step 4: delay 4, template Customer stories.
  • Step 5: delay 5, template Welcome offer.
(Note delays are between steps, so total elapsed time from enrollment is 0/2/5/9/14 days.)
4

Set stop conditions

Click Stop conditions to define when a contact should drop out early:
  • On unsubscribe — always on. Can’t be disabled.
  • On reply — optional. Useful if the sequence is conversational.
  • On tag added — e.g. customer for a lead nurture, so converting customers don’t keep getting nurture mail.
  • On tag removed — rarer, but useful for specific lifecycle flows.
For our welcome series, set “stop on tag = customer” — once they buy, they exit.
5

Test with a single enrollment

Add yourself as a manual enrollment first. Watch the sequence fire step 1 (instant), then artificially advance to verify steps 2-5 land in your inbox correctly.The sequence detail page has a Fast-forward (test mode only) button that walks you through every step in 30 seconds without waiting for real delays.
6

Activate

Click Activate. The sequence starts honoring its trigger immediately — anyone tagged newsletter-subscriber from now on gets enrolled.For backfilling existing contacts who already have the tag, click Enroll matching contacts now from the sequence detail page. Hiveku enrolls every eligible contact (skipping suppressions and existing enrollments).

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Enrollment patterns

Three ways to get contacts into a sequence:
From a contact’s CRM record, click Enroll in sequence and pick the sequence. Useful for VIP onboarding or one-off enrollments.

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Reviewing metrics

The sequence detail page rolls up:
  • Active — currently enrolled, awaiting a future step.
  • Completed — finished every step.
  • Stopped — dropped out early, with a reason.
  • Per-step delivery, open, click rates — see exactly where engagement falls off.
  • Median time-to-conversion — if the sequence has a goal tag, how long enrollment to that tag takes.
A common diagnostic: if step 3 has half the open rate of step 2, the subject is the suspect — try drafting two new variants and A/B test.

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Pausing and editing

You can pause a sequence at any time. Active enrollments stop advancing until you resume; new triggers don’t enroll anyone while paused. Editing rules:
  • Adding or changing a future step is fine — enrollments not yet at that step pick up the change.
  • Editing a step in the past doesn’t retroactively send. Anyone who already received an old version keeps that version in their report.

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Best practices

  • Don’t enroll the same contact twice unless you mean to. Re-enrollment is opt-in per sequence.
  • Respect unsubscribes — Hiveku does this automatically; the email-respect-unsubscribes rule blocks any attempt to bypass.
  • End with a clear next step — a CTA, a meeting link, a real offer. Vague closes waste the trust the sequence built.
  • Keep cadence light — more than two emails per week is usually too much. The coach warns when overlapping sequences would deliver three or more emails in a 7-day window.
  • Verify your domain before activating — the email-verified-domain-required rule blocks the first send if DKIM/SPF/DMARC aren’t passing.

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Troubleshooting

Delay is in days from the previous step. If you set step 1 delay to 0 and step 2 delay to 0, both go out the same day. Bump step 2 to 1 or more days.
Check the Activity tab on the sequence — every trigger event is logged with whether it produced an enrollment. Common skips:
  • Contact already had an active enrollment (re-enrollment off).
  • Contact is on the suppression list.
  • Tag spelling mismatch.
Hiveku auto-pauses a sequence if your account hits a deliverability threshold. Resolve the issue on the Deliverability dashboard and resume.
Check whether they have multiple enrollments — if you backfilled by audience and the trigger also fired, you can end up with two. Pull both and re-enroll once if needed.

Sequences reference

Full reference for steps, triggers, and metrics.

Build a dynamic audience

The kind of audience you’d usually back a sequence with.

A/B test subject lines

Build engagement intuition for sequence steps.