Understanding Drip Campaigns

 Overview

A drip campaign is an automated outreach sequence — a series of messages sent to a defined group of students over time, with configurable delays between each message. Once a student is enrolled in a campaign, the system works through each step in order, sending emails, SMS messages, in-app notifications, or any combination of these, until the last step is sent, a stop condition is met, or the student is manually removed.

Drip campaigns are built in the Drip Campaign Center, which is accessed through CRM & Cohort Center → Messaging Center → Drip Campaign Center.

This article explains how drip campaigns work, how students enter and exit them, and how the different pieces of the system fit together. For step-by-step instructions on building a campaign, see How to Create a Drip Campaign.

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At a Glance

• Where it lives: CRM & Cohort Center → Messaging Center → Drip Campaign Center
• What a step can send: rich-text email, plain-text email, SMS, in-app notification, pop-up — any combination
• 4 ways in: manual enrollment, audience segment launch, automated triggers, advanced AND/OR start conditions
• 5 ways out: campaign completion, stop condition, manual removal, Stop for All Recipients, campaign deleted/archived
• Enrollment is exclusive: a student can only be in a given campaign once at a time

Campaigns are organized into tabs by current state:

Each tab shows a badge with the count of campaigns in that state. Each running and scheduled campaign also shows a Created By field and the next scheduled run time for its active steps.

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How It Works

The Step Sequence

Each step contains one or more messages, and each step has a configurable delay that controls how long the system waits before sending the next one.

When a student is enrolled, the system:

1. Waits for the campaign's initial delay (if configured)
2. Sends Step 1
3. Waits for Step 1's configured delay
4. Sends Step 2
5. Continues until the last step is sent, a stop condition removes the student, or the student is manually removed

Delays can be set in minutes, hours, days, or weeks, or scheduled to send at a specific future date and time — useful for coordinating with enrollment deadlines, orientation dates, or semester start dates.

What You Can Send in Each Step

The step configuration determines the modality of message that is sent. Any combination is valid within a single step:

You can combine modalities in a single step — for example, send both an SMS and a rich-text email simultaneously. Rich-text and plain-text email are separate toggles and can both be active on the same step, though sending two emails at once from a single step is not best practice.

How Students Enter a Campaign

There are four ways a student can be enrolled in a drip campaign. Understanding the differences is important — they represent fundamentally different outreach models.

1. Manual Enrollment. Happens immediately. Users locate students by way of filters in cohorts, the recruitment pipeline, Audience Segments, or the Student LookUp, then add them individually or in bulk to audience segments, or cohorts with actions containing drip campaigns.

2. Audience Segment (Immediate or Scheduled). An Audience Segment is a persistent membership list of students. When you launch a campaign for a segment, all current segment members are enrolled at once. You can launch immediately or schedule it for a future date and time. This is the "run it once against a list" model — useful when you have a defined group of students you want to move through a campaign together.

3. Automated Triggers. Campaigns can be configured with start triggers that automatically enroll students when specific events occur:

• Completes a Meeting Milestone
• Submits a CRM Registration Form
• Completes a Milestone
• Recruitment Status Updates

Triggers are evaluated in real time as events occur. Multiple triggers of the same or different types can be configured on a single campaign.

4. Advanced Start Conditions. For more precise control, start conditions can be combined using AND/OR logic — for example, "student submits Form A AND is added to Group B." Students are only enrolled when the full condition set is satisfied. Advanced start conditions are configured in the campaign's Settings tab in the Workflow Builder. See Advanced Drip Campaign Start & Stop Conditions for full details.

Live Enrollment via Segment Sync

An Audience Segment can be linked to exactly one drip campaign. When that sync is active, enrollment becomes continuous and automatic — any student who enters the segment, by any method, is immediately enrolled in the linked campaign. The segment stays open; the campaign stays open; new students flow in as they qualify.

This is fundamentally different from a one-time launch. A synced segment-campaign pair is a live outreach pipeline that operates as long as both the segment and the campaign are active.

Students can enter a synced segment four ways — all of them trigger enrollment automatically:

• Manual add — an advisor adds the student directly
• Bulk upload — a CSV file import adds the student
• Cohort automation — the student is added automatically when they join a matching cohort
• Attribute auto-sync — the student receives a student attribute label that matches the segment's auto-add trigger

The attribute auto-sync path is especially powerful. A segment can be configured to add students automatically when they receive a specific attribute (student label), and remove them when that attribute is removed. Combined with a linked campaign, this creates a behavioral trigger sequence: student receives an attribute → added to segment → enrolled in campaign → receives automated outreach → attribute removed → removed from segment.

This is ConexED's way of automatically reaching out to students the moment something about them changes — no single "if this, then that" switch to flip, but three simple building blocks working together: a student attribute label, an Audience Segment, and a Drip Campaign, each handling its own piece of the job.

How Students Exit a Campaign

Students leave a drip campaign in one of five ways:

1. Campaign completes — the student reaches and receives the final step
2. Stop condition fires — a configured trigger removes the student automatically
3. Manual removal — an advisor removes an individual student from the running campaign
4. Stop for All Recipients — an administrator clears all currently enrolled students at once. The campaign itself remains running and open to new enrollments — only the current audience is cleared.
5. Campaign is deleted or archived — all active sends are canceled

Stop Conditions mirror start triggers — the same event types that can start a campaign can also stop it:

• Has a Meeting (Milestone) — student completes a meeting milestone with a moderator in the linked group
• Intake form submission — student submits a specified form
• Milestone achievement — student achieves a specified milestone
• Recruitment pipeline stage — student's recruitment status changes to a configured stage

When a stop condition fires, all pending steps for that student in that campaign are immediately canceled. The student is not restarted — they are simply removed from the active queue. Stop conditions can also be combined with AND/OR logic for precise removal rules. See Advanced Drip Campaign Start & Stop Conditions for details.

Quiet Hours

Quiet Hours are set for 9 PM – 8 AM in the recipient's timezone. If a student is within the quiet hours window, when a step is scheduled to fire, the message is not sent. Instead, the system reschedules the send for the next available time after the quiet hours window closes, then delivers it automatically — no manual intervention needed.

This applies to email, rich-text email, and SMS steps. Quiet hours do not affect in-app notifications or pop-ups. Quiet hours are configured at the institution level. See SMS Quiet Hours for details.

Pause, Archive, and Delete

Campaigns have several states beyond simply running or stopped:

Per-Step Audience Filtering

Each step can be configured to only fire for students who have specific student attribute labels. Steps support two match modes: Any (the student has at least one of the configured attribute labels) or All (the student must have every configured attribute label). Match mode is set per step.

When a step fires for a student who doesn't satisfy the configured attribute filter, that step is skipped for that student — and the campaign does not advance them to the next step. The student is effectively removed from the campaign at that point.

Use per-step label filters when you have a mixed audience in a campaign and want to stop outreach for students who have already taken an action (indicated by an attribute ) before reaching a given step.

Campaign Analytics

Each campaign has an Analytics view that reports on performance across email and SMS steps combined:

• High-level metrics: total sends, open rate, and click rate
• Engagement funnel: a visual progression from sent → opened → clicked
• Send history: volume and delivery status broken out by date
• Device breakdown: how recipients engaged (desktop, mobile, etc.)
• Clicked contacts list: a detailed list of contacts who clicked, with timestamps and the links they clicked
• Summary totals: original sends, resends, and combined performance
• SMS counts: included alongside email metrics when a campaign has SMS steps, with clear indicators when delivery data isn't available

Click tracking only applies to ConexED in-app links. External website links included in a step's message are not tracked by the click-rate metric or the clicked-contacts list. When adding an external link to a message, use the full https:// URL format.

See Drip Campaign Analytics Reference for the full metric definitions.

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Things to Know

• One enrollment in the same campaign. A student can only be enrolled in the same campaign once at a time. If something triggers re-enrollment while they're already in progress, the system ignores it — their existing position is preserved and they are not restarted.
• SMS requires opt-in. SMS messages are only delivered to students who have opted in to receive text messages. Verify SMS opt-in status in the membership table, the prospective student record, or the Student LookUp to determine if SMS steps for your audience are best suited to meet your outreach goals.
• Segment sync is not the same as launching a campaign for a segment. A one-time launch enrolls current members once. A synced segment-campaign pair is a live, continuous pipeline.
• Re-adding a student already enrolled has no effect — their existing progress is preserved.
• If the segment is archived, enrollment is blocked — students added to an archived segment will not be enrolled even if the campaign is active.
• The campaign's initial delay still applies during segment sync — enrollment is recorded immediately, but the first step fires after the configured wait.
• Removing a student from the segment does not automatically remove them from the campaign — that's controlled separately by Stop Conditions.
• Pause ≠ Archive ≠ Delete. Pausing is the only option that preserves enrolled students and their progress for later resumption — it temporarily suspends the campaign without clearing anyone's place in line. Both Archive and Delete immediately cancel all active sends; the difference is that Archive preserves the campaign record while Delete removes it permanently. There is no need to pause before archiving.
• Per-step label filters are a filter, not a fork. Students either match and receive the step, or they don't match and exit the campaign at that step — there's no branching to an alternate path.
• Use step names. Each step supports an internal step name (not visible to students) that appears in the Workflow Builder. Descriptive names — "Day 3 — Incomplete Application Reminder" — are more useful six months later than "Step 3."
• Start and stop can't share the same Recruitment Status stage. If a campaign uses Recruitment Status as both a start trigger and a stop condition, the same pipeline stage can't be selected for both. This is enforced automatically when the campaign is configured, to prevent a status change from simultaneously starting and stopping the same campaign.
• Campaign activity is also visible on Prospect Details. Assigned faculty/staff can view a prospect's drip campaign messages directly from the Prospect Details page, matching the visibility already available on the Student Details page.

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Use Cases

Time-boxed outreach for a specific term. A one-time manual enrollment or a single Audience Segment launch works well when you have a defined group and a defined window — for example, a registration push ahead of a fall term deadline.

Always-on, attribute-driven outreach. Segment sync with attribute auto-sync is the right fit when you want to reach students the moment something changes about them — they receive a new attribute, their recruitment status updates, they complete a step — without manually managing an enrollment list. Example chain: student receives a "Needs Outreach" attribute → added to segment → enrolled in campaign → receives outreach → attribute removed once they act → removed from segment.

Mixed-audience campaigns with partial relevance. When a single campaign's audience includes students who've already taken an action that makes later steps irrelevant, per-step label filtering lets you keep them out of the later steps rather than running a separate campaign for them.

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Decision Guide

Which enrollment model fits your goal?

Before you launch, ask:

• What does "done" look like for this audience? Build the matching stop condition before launch — the most common mistake is a campaign with no stop condition, which keeps messaging students long after the outreach is no longer relevant.
• Is this a one-time send or should it stay open indefinitely? That answer determines whether you want a segment launch or a segment sync.
• Does the audience mix students at different points in a process? If so, plan per-step label filters up front rather than after students start receiving irrelevant steps.

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Configuration Overview

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Next Steps

• How to Create a Drip Campaign