How to set up a drip campaign for a SaaS without a marketing team

The short answer

A drip campaign is a handful of emails that go out over the days after someone signs up. For a small product, five emails over two weeks is plenty. Give each email one job, and stop the whole thing for a person the moment they do what you wanted. You do not need a marketing team for this. You need to know what a new user should do first.

Five emails that cover most products

The days are a starting point. Move them to fit how quickly your product pays off.

1. Day 0, the welcome. Say hello and name the one thing to do first, with a link straight to it.
2. Day 2, help with that first step. For people who have not done it yet. Offer a short guide or ask what went wrong.
3. Day 4, one example. Show one way a customer uses the product, in two or three lines.
4. Day 7, a question from you. Ask what is getting in the way. The answers are worth more than any other email in the set.
5. Day 14, the last note. Say you are around, link your docs or a call, and stop.

The second one can look like this:

Subject: Stuck on the first step?

Hi Sam, you signed up a couple of days ago but haven't connected your first project. That step is the fiddly one, so I wrote a short guide: [link]. If something is not working, reply to this email and tell me what you see.

Make it stop when they act

A timer on its own is the usual mistake. Someone gets set up on day one, and on day two an email asks if they have started yet. A drip should follow what people do, not only the calendar. Once your product knows they did the thing, the rest of the drip should not go.

What to avoid

• More than one ask in an email.
• A newsletter voice. Write as if you are emailing one person.
• Sending the drip to people who never signed up, such as an imported list.
• Daily emails. Spread them out.
• A sixth, seventh and eighth email. After the last one, wait until you have something new to say.

How Kicklace does it

Paste your site's address. Kicklace reads it, proposes the stages your customers go through, such as signed up, activated and paying, and writes your first emails in your voice from what it read.

A drip hangs off a stage. Put it on Signed up and it starts when someone arrives, or once they have been there a number of days. Its steps run in order: an email, a wait, a note to you, or a task for you. On an email with no words yet, Write it for me writes it from where it sits and what comes before it. The first email goes within about a minute of someone arriving. The Lifecycle has the full map.

The stop-when-they-act part comes from how the map works. Nobody is moved by hand. Kicklace moves people when something happens: a sign-up from Clerk or Kinde, a payment in Stripe, or one line from your own server saying they got set up, with the kicklace package. A sequence stops for somebody the moment they move on from its stage.

A few rules hold without you setting them:

• each person gets each email once;
• nobody gets more than one tip or check-in a day;
• nothing is sent for something that happened before you switched it on, or because of an import;
• tips and check-ins carry Stop these emails, one click.

Nothing sends until you switch a sequence on. First Kicklace replays the last 30 days and shows who would have got what, and you can send yourself a test. Kicklace is free up to 1,000 contacts (pricing), and the demo shows a drip written for your own site, with no sign-up. For more on what to send after sign-up, see the onboarding email sequence and activation emails.

FAQ

How many emails should a drip campaign have?

Three to five for most products. Each one needs a job the one before it did not do. If you cannot say what an email is for in a few words, drop it.

What is the difference between a drip campaign and a newsletter?

A drip goes to each person based on when they arrived or what they did. A newsletter goes to everyone on a list at the same time. In Kicklace the drip lives on a stage of your map and a newsletter lives on a list, which only emails people who joined it.

Do I need a developer to stop the drip when people activate?

Not for payments or sign-ups: Stripe, Clerk and Kinde connect without code. For your own "activated", the first real thing in your product, your server posts one event with the kicklace package.