> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.hiveku.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Set Up a Drip Email Sequence

> Build a multi-step nurture flow with trigger-based enrollment

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](/how-tos/send-first-email-campaign). For 1-on-1 cold outreach to prospects, see [Cold Email](/how-tos/cold-email).

## The example: a five-step welcome series

| Step | Delay   | Subject                          |
| ---- | ------- | -------------------------------- |
| 1    | 0 days  | Welcome to Acme                  |
| 2    | 2 days  | Three things to try first        |
| 3    | 5 days  | Let me show you the dashboard    |
| 4    | 9 days  | What our customers say           |
| 5    | 14 days | A 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.

## The flow

<Steps>
  <Step title="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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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](/automations/workflows) 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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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](/email-marketing/templates) 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.)
  </Step>

  <Step title="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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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).
  </Step>
</Steps>

## Enrollment patterns

Three ways to get contacts into a sequence:

<Tabs>
  <Tab title="Single">
    From a contact's CRM record, click **Enroll in sequence** and pick the sequence. Useful for VIP onboarding or one-off enrollments.
  </Tab>

  <Tab title="Bulk">
    From an [audience](/email-marketing/audiences), click **Enroll all in sequence**. Hiveku enrolls every sendable contact (skipping suppressions and existing enrollments). Useful for migration from another tool.
  </Tab>

  <Tab title="Automatic">
    Configure the sequence's trigger and let enrollments happen on their own. The standard production pattern.
  </Tab>
</Tabs>

## 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.

## 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.

## 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.

## Troubleshooting

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Step 2 fired the same day as step 1">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Trigger isn't enrolling anyone">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Sequence shows as paused but I didn't pause it">
    Hiveku auto-pauses a sequence if your account hits a deliverability threshold. Resolve the issue on the [Deliverability dashboard](/email-marketing/deliverability) and resume.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="A contact got two welcome emails">
    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.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Related

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Sequences reference" icon="list-ol" href="/email-marketing/sequences">
    Full reference for steps, triggers, and metrics.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Build a dynamic audience" icon="filter" href="/how-tos/build-dynamic-audience">
    The kind of audience you'd usually back a sequence with.
  </Card>

  <Card title="A/B test subject lines" icon="flask" href="/how-tos/ab-test-subject-lines">
    Build engagement intuition for sequence steps.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>