Announcing Nutshell Drip Sequences: Deliver a Perfectly Timed Email Series Without a Single Click

Chris Cain VP of Product Development, Nutshell Last updated on: October 2, 2024

Nurturing your email subscribers takes a lot of work. So…what if we did it for you?

Several months ago, we introduced our customers to our email marketing platform Nutshell Campaigns. Since then, we’ve been working closely with our customers to better understand their email marketing needs and help unite their sales and marketing efforts.

In our ongoing quest to provide Nutshell customers with a powerful, one-stop-shop tool for sales and marketing, we’re proud to announce the much-anticipated release of drip sequences within Nutshell Campaigns!

What are drip sequences?

A drip sequence, also known as a drip campaign, is an automated series of messages designed to send to contacts over a specific period of time, at predetermined intervals.

Drip sequences are customizable and enable you to get information to your audiences at the right moment, without having to send any emails manually.

As outlined in this article from our blog, creating an effective drip sequence with clear objectives can help you achieve your marketing and revenue goals, nurture more relationships with your contacts and subscribers, and minimize the amount of time spent manually sending outreach.

Drip sequences can be used to educate new sales leads on the value of your products or service, or win back lost leads, or offer additional resources to folks who downloaded content from your website or attended a webinar. All of these things can be accomplished without your teams having to personally contact each individual.

Shortly after releasing Nutshell Campaigns, we heard feedback from our customers asking for more automation and outreach customization, additional engagement metrics, and a more efficient way to connect with larger audiences in one shot within their CRM.

Your wish, our command.

Using Nutshell Campaigns to send a drip sequence to your Nutshell CRM contacts

Ready to create a drip sequence campaign in Nutshell Campaigns right now? Visit the Outreach section of your Nutshell account. You can locate it by clicking the megaphone icon on the navigation bar inside of your Nutshell account.

On the Outreach summary tab, select Drip sequences. You’ll then need to select Create drip sequence button on the welcome message or the Create new drip sequence button in the upper, right corner of the drip sequence page, to get started.

You’ll be prompted to create a name for your drip sequence and will be brought to the drip sequence details page. Here you’ll see all components of your sequence and determine your sequence’s start trigger and goal and create your drip message(s).

Start triggers

Start trigger automation is used to initiate the sending of your drip sequences.

For example, if a new lead is being created in Nutshell for every new sign-up from a web form on your homepage, then choosing Lead is created as your start trigger would automatically initiate your drip sequence for each new lead with an associated email address.

Or maybe you utilize Nutshell tags to sort your contacts (people) into different campaign categories. Selecting Tag is added to a person as a start trigger (and then selecting the specific tag) would be ideal for ensuring that the right contacts are receiving the right drip sequence.

Nutshell’s drip sequences can be triggered to automatically begin with one of the following actions:

• When a lead is created
• When a lead enters a particular stage
• When a person is added to an outreach audience
• When a tag is added to a contact
• When a lead is closed

Sidenote: A start trigger is required to activate your drip sequence.

Goals

Other email marketing automation tools will tell you how much each drip sequence was opened and clicked, and that’s about it. Nutshell helps you see how your sequences are driving sales outcomes. (Finally, we marketers can get a little respect around here!)

Adding a goal to your drip sequence allows you to measure how much your messages are actually accomplishing.

Goal selections for Nutshell’s drip sequences are:

• Lead is won
• Tag is added to a person
• Lead is created
• Link is clicked

Maybe you’re giving a webinar in a couple of weeks and are hoping to gain more interest (and registrants) with a mini drip campaign that includes a link to a webinar trailer video. You could set a goal for Link is clicked and select the link to your webinar trailer on Youtube.

When a contact clicks on the link, your drip sequence goal will be met. This would allow you to gauge how much traffic your drip campaign is pushing to your video.

Next steps

With a goal set, including a next step in your drip sequence once the goal is met takes your next task out of your hands.

Next step selection options include:

• Add a tag to the recipient
• Add recipient to an audience
• Remove recipient from an audience

Here’s a super pro tip: continuing from our webinar scenario mentioned in the previous section–now that your email recipient has met your drip sequence goal and shown interest by clicking on your video link, your next task could be to add them to a follow-up campaign that provides more resources on the topic of your webinar and, again, offers a registration link.

This could be automated with the next step Add a tag to the recipient and utilizing the tag as the start trigger for the follow-up campaign. Any recipient meeting your goal would automatically be tagged and triggered to receive the new campaign as a next step.

Another pro tip: if Lead is won is the goal for your marketing outreach then create a next step to add recipient to an audience for your organization’s newsletter to keep your customer informed, to continue to nurture the relationship and attract their repeat business!

Messages

When you’re ready to create the first message of your drip campaign, you’ll click on the +Add a message button. If you’ve created broadcasts and newsletters in Nutshell Campaigns already, then creating a drip sequence message with our editor will look familiar to you!

You will have the option to create your new drip message from a previous piece of outreach, one of our pre-made suggested templates, or from scratch. Once you’ve chosen and provided a name for your new message, you’ll be able to create and edit your message(s) inside the editor.

Our drag-and-drop design tool allows you to easily add and edit formatting options, text blocks, visual assets and media, and more! The Send a test email button and preview section under the Details tab provides an opportunity for you and your colleagues to check out how your message looks on desktop or a mobile device before sending your drip sequence into the wild.

For more details on creating drip sequences in Nutshell Campaigns, check out the How to create drip sequences article in our Help Center.

Delays

Obviously, you wouldn’t want your drip sequence recipient to be bombarded with every message in your series at once. Delays keep things nice and spaced out. You can set up a sending delay for the first message of your drip sequence, as well as set one for each following message.

Delays can be set in:

• Minutes
• Hours
• Days
• Business days
• Weeks
• Months

Delays can be set up from the drip sequence’s detail page or on the left-hand sidebar of a message when open in the editor.

Drip sequence details

Sharing space with your messages and delays on the drip sequence details page are:

• a From field (Remember, you can only select your outreach to be sent from email addresses that have been verified under your sender address settings.)
• an option to only send drip sequence messages during your set business hours
• an option to add UTM parameters to all links within your messages (This is an option if your organization utilizes Google Analytics UTM parameters. You can find this tracking data in your Google Analytics account. It is not housed inside of Nutshell.)

These selections must be made before activating your drip sequence.

Activating your drip sequence

Now that your I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed, it’s time to get your marketing emails into inboxes! When your drip sequence is ready, select Activate sequence at the top of the details page.

 

From here, you will be walked through a review of your messages and a checklist of requirements needed to activate and send your drip sequence.

 

 

If all requirements for your drip sequence to be activated are met, Nutshell will inform you of the number of emails within your sequence, as well as the number of days it will take to complete the sequence. You will be reminded of your selected start trigger, goal, and next step.

 

If all looks good, go ahead and activate that sequence!

 

Pausing your drip sequence

Need to put one of your campaigns on hiatus? We’ve got you covered!

 

After a drip sequence has been activated, you can pause the sequence at any time by clicking Pause sequence. When paused, current recipients of the drip sequence will remain queued, and you can resume sending to them when you’re ready.

Track your contacts’ engagement with your drip sequence

 

Similar to the engagement tab available for broadcasts and newsletters, the drip sequence engagement tab provides metrics for the sequence’s open, click, unsubscribe, and bounce rates.

Each message within the sequence will also have the same engagement metrics, including a metric for sequence goals met.

Our engagement metrics take the guesswork out of determining which messages are the most effective with your contacts, which campaigns are meeting your goals and closing deals, and what ways are your contacts engaging with your outreach.

For a complete rundown of drip sequences, broadcasts, newsletters, and all things Nutshell Campaigns, visit the Nutshell Campaigns section of our Help Center.

Wait…so what’s the difference between a drip sequence and a personal email sequence?

Great question. Drip sequences and personal email sequences are both used to deliver a series of emails automatically. However, marketing drips and personal email sequences are different in two very important ways.

One is the way they look. Drip sequences are collections of marketing emails, which means they can look like anything you want them to. You can break up the text into columns, you can add animations and header images, you can choose a quirky name for the sender field, etc. Since you’re speaking as the voice of the brand, drip emails don’t need to look like an email you’d send to a friend or colleague.

 

On the other hand, personal email sequences are automated sales emails that are meant to look like any other email that you’d write to a sales prospect. They’re sent from your own name and email address, and they’re delivered in plain text—maybe there’s an embedded bear gif involved if you really want to get fancy with it. It’s still one-to-one communication, so personalization is important.

 

The other major differentiator is how these emails behave. A personal email sequence automatically stops when you get a reply because the point of a sales sequence is to start a conversation. With a marketing drip, you often want your recipients to see the entire series whether they reply or not because each message in the drip serves a purpose in educating or persuading the recipient.

Get ready to become a Drip God!

 

Haven’t checked out Nutshell Campaigns yet? If you’re already a Nutshell customer, just head to the Outreach tab and start designing your first broadcast, newsletter, or drip sequence. Seriously, there are 150 free marketing messages per month waiting for you! You’re welcome. 😉

Visit our pricing page (or your Nutshell billing page) and use the interactive slider for a cost estimate for your organization.

If you’re not yet a Nutshell customer, please start a 14-day free trial of Nutshell and explore all of the incredible advantages of using Nutshell for your sales and marketing efforts.

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