Email drip campaigns with branching logic, no code required
This is for anyone who has sent a scheduled email blast and wants something smarter: a sequence that actually reacts to what each person does, sends a different next email to someone who clicked than to someone who ignored it, and keeps running on its own. Below: what makes a drip campaign more than a countdown of emails, how branching actually works under the hood, and a real one we built with a working screenshot.
Quick answer: An email drip campaign is a sequence of emails triggered by time or by what a recipient does, like opening an email or clicking a link, rather than a single scheduled blast. The part that makes it useful is branching: sending a different next email depending on whether someone engaged or not. In Mavibot, a drip campaign is built in the same visual flow builder used for chatbots, with each email as a block and the conditions living on the arrows between them, so a branch is just two arrows leaving the same block, one for the event and one as a time-based fallback.
What makes a drip campaign more than a countdown
A basic autoresponder sends email 1, waits, sends email 2, waits, sends email 3, regardless of what the recipient does. That works for a simple onboarding series, but it wastes the two most useful signals you have: whether someone opened the email, and whether they clicked anything inside it.
A drip campaign with branching uses those signals to change course. Someone who clicked your discount link gets a different follow-up than someone who never opened the email at all. Someone who opens but doesn't click gets a nudge instead of a repeat of the same offer. The sequence stops being a fixed schedule and starts being a set of paths that respond to real behavior.
If you just need to send a single one-off email rather than a multi-step sequence, see how to create and send an email campaign instead, this article focuses specifically on sequences with branches.
How branching actually works
The mechanism is simpler than it sounds. In Mavibot, every step in a drip campaign is a block, and each block holds one email: a subject line, a preheader, and the actual design. The conditions that decide where a recipient goes next don't sit inside the block, they sit on the arrows connecting it to whatever comes after.
A single block can have more than one arrow leaving it. To build a real branch, like "clicked the link" versus "didn't click within 3 days", you add two arrows from the same email block: one arrow with the condition "clicked a link", and a second arrow with a time-based condition like "after 3 days". Whichever one fires first is the path the recipient takes. If they click, they follow the first arrow immediately. If three days pass with no click, the time-based arrow acts as the fallback and moves them down the other path instead.
The three condition types available on an arrow are time-based ("after" a set number of minutes, hours, or days), "opened email", and "clicked a link". That's enough to build most of the branches a real campaign needs: engaged versus not engaged, opened but didn't act, or simply "enough time has passed, move on regardless."
A real drip campaign we built
To show this instead of just describing it, we built a small win-back campaign: a discount offer email, followed by two different paths depending on whether the recipient clicked.
Here's what each block does:
- Start: triggers as soon as someone enters the campaign's audience.
- "We miss you": a promo email offering 30% off an annual English course, sent about a second after entry.
- Two arrows out of "We miss you": one labeled "Clicked a link", leading to a "Comeback bonus" email for anyone who engaged. The other labeled "After 3 days", leading to "Mark sleepers", a softer reminder for anyone who never clicked in that window.
- "Comeback bonus": a follow-up email saying the discount code is about to expire, sent to whoever clicked the first email. From here, an "Opened the letter" arrow leads to one final email.
- "final push": the last email in the sequence, telling the recipient it's the last day for the discount.
- "no further email": the campaign ends a day after the final push, whether or not the recipient acted on it.
The email design itself, the "We miss you" block in the screenshot above, was generated automatically rather than built from scratch. Mavibot's email editor can produce a full, styled design (hero image, headline, discount code block, call-to-action buttons, footer with an unsubscribe link) from a short description, which is where most of the actual time in setting up a campaign like this usually goes.
What the same block can do besides send an email
Because a drip campaign in Mavibot runs on the same flow builder as chatbots, a block isn't limited to sending a message. Four other step types are available on that same canvas, and each does something a plain email tool can't.
Action moves the segmentation and CRM work into the flow itself. A branch that ends with "clicked the link" can tag that contact as interested, add them to a different list, or move their deal to the next CRM stage, at the same moment it sends the next email, without a separate integration stitching the two together.
Calculator is closer to a small coding environment than a marketing setting. It runs actual logic, so anything that needs a calculation or a piece of custom data before an email goes out (a personalized price, a loyalty points balance, a countdown value) can be computed there and dropped straight into the email content.
API request lets a step call an external service before deciding what happens next. In an email drip campaign that's useful for things like checking whether an order actually shipped before sending a "your package is on its way" email, pulling live stock availability before recommending a product, or confirming a payment went through before branching into a thank-you sequence instead of a reminder.
Analytics gives a more detailed read on how the campaign is performing than the sent, open rate, and click numbers already visible on each block. It works as a custom event: you name an event category and an event name, then set the value to track, which is useful when you want to measure a specific segment's behavior rather than just watching the campaign's overall numbers.
Common mistakes in a drip campaign
Treating every non-response the same way is a common one. Someone who opened three emails and never clicked is a different case from someone who never opened any of them, and routing both down the same path wastes the whole point of branching. A branch with only an event condition and no time-based arrow behind it is another trap: contacts who never trigger that event just get stuck in that step indefinitely instead of moving on. Sending too many emails before the first branch point is a third, a sequence that fires three emails before checking any engagement hasn't learned anything about the recipient yet, it's just annoyed them on schedule.
It's also worth remembering the one-entry rule. In most drip campaign tools, including Mavibot, each contact enters a given campaign once. Restarting it or adding new contacts to the audience won't resend the sequence to people who already went through it, so testing changes on a live campaign usually means creating a fresh one rather than editing and relaunching the original.
Frequently asked questions
What is an email drip campaign?
It's a sequence of emails sent based on time or on recipient behavior, like opening an email or clicking a link, instead of a single one-time blast. The sequence keeps running on its own once it's set up and launched.
What's the difference between a drip campaign and an email funnel?
The terms are mostly used interchangeably. Both describe an automated sequence of emails with a specific goal, whether that's onboarding, a sales offer, or winning back inactive subscribers. "Funnel" sometimes implies a narrower focus on moving someone toward a purchase, while "drip campaign" is used more broadly.
How does branching work in an email sequence?
A branch is created by adding more than one arrow out of a single email block, each with a different condition. One arrow might trigger on an action like "clicked a link", while another triggers after a set amount of time passes, acting as a fallback for contacts who never took that action.
Do I need to code to build a branching email sequence?
No. In Mavibot, drip campaigns are built in a visual flow builder, the same one used for chatbot flows, where you drag blocks onto a canvas and set conditions on the arrows connecting them.
How many emails should be in a drip campaign?
There's no fixed number. It depends on the goal and how many meaningful branch points you actually need. A short win-back sequence might only need two or three emails, while an onboarding series can run longer as long as each branch is based on a real behavior difference, not just a fixed schedule.
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