Email Drip Campaign Examples for eCommerce: Triggers, Timing, and Exits

An email drip campaign is a set of automated emails that starts when a shopper does something, like joining your list or leaving a cart, and keeps sending on a delay until they buy or the sequence ends. Hayes Media, an email and SMS retention agency for Shopify and DTC brands, gives every drip a trigger and an exit rule, so a shopper stops getting it the moment they buy.

This guide answers what a drip campaign is and what each type looks like for a store, with a short made-up example for each. For the checklist of automations every store should have and each one's job, see our guide to the Klaviyo flows every store needs.

What's an email drip campaign?

It's a series of emails that one event starts and time delays space out. Klaviyo uses the word flow, and its Help Center describes flows as "also known as automations or drip campaigns". It defines one as "a sequence of automated actions (e.g., sending messages) triggered by a behavior or event."

Every drip campaign has four parts.

Trigger. The event that puts someone into the sequence. Klaviyo lists the trigger types as "list, segment, metric, date property, price drop, or low inventory." For a store, the useful ones are joining a list, an action like viewing a product or placing an order, and entering a segment.

Delay. The wait between one email and the next. Klaviyo says "Flows can include time delays between actions and multiple paths that split based on different criteria for further customization."

Content. What each email says. Give each email one idea.

Exit rule. The condition that takes someone out early. Usually that's buying. A drip without an exit keeps pitching a product to the person who just bought it.

Is a drip campaign the same as a nurture campaign or an email funnel?

Mostly, yes. A drip campaign is the mechanism: a trigger, then emails on a delay. A nurture campaign is a drip whose job is to move someone who isn't ready to buy yet. An email funnel is the whole path from signup to first order to repeat order, and it's usually made of several drips.

The word to watch is campaign. In most email tools, a campaign means a one-off send you schedule, like a launch or a sale. A drip is a flow. If you ask your team for a drip campaign, make sure you mean the automated kind.

How do you set the timing between drip emails?

From your product's purchase cycle and your own order data, not a template's default. A shopper deciding on a candle and a shopper deciding on a mattress don't need the same gap between emails.

The platform mechanics are simple. Klaviyo says "Each time delay creates a waiting period between one component and the next." Delays add up, so emails are scheduled relative to each other. It also warns that "If components are back-to-back, with no time delays, they will all occur simultaneously." For a welcome series, Klaviyo's own example is that "adding a 24 hour (or longer) delay between your first email and your second email in a welcome series flow will give someone enough time to receive and read the first email before receiving another." Treat that as Klaviyo's suggestion for one flow, not a rule for every drip.

For the rest, your data holds the answer. For browse and cart drips, look at the time between a first product view and an order among people who did buy. For replenishment and winback, look at the gap between first and second orders. Set each delay inside the window your buyers actually use.

What do the main eCommerce drip campaigns look like?

Six drips cover most of what a store sends automatically: welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, replenishment, and winback. Klaviyo's Help Center names four of them as the ones to set live first, in this order: "Welcome series", "Abandoned cart", "Post-purchase", and "Winback". Each example below is made up to show the mechanism. None of them is a client or a benchmark.

Welcome series

Trigger and exit. Someone joins your list. Klaviyo gives the welcome series as its example of a list-triggered flow. The exit is a first order. Klaviyo also notes that "each welcome series flow can only be entered once", which is why it recommends separate welcome flows for email and SMS.

Made-up example. A skincare brand's popup promises a code. Email one delivers the code in the first line and gives the main reason to buy. Email two shows customer proof. Email three answers the biggest objection, which for this brand is whether the product suits sensitive skin. Anyone who orders leaves the series. Our welcome series guide covers each send in detail.

Abandoned cart

Trigger and exit. Someone adds to cart and doesn't buy. Abandoned checkout is a related flow: it fires when someone starts checkout and stops. Both start from an action the shopper takes, which Klaviyo calls a metric-triggered flow, and both exit on a placed order.

Made-up example. An apparel brand's first email shows the item left in the cart and one button back to it. The second answers the question that stops buyers in its category, which is fit and returns. The third is a plain last reminder, with an offer only if the margin allows one. See our abandoned cart email sequences for what each send says.

Browse abandonment

Trigger and exit. Someone you can already identify views a product page and doesn't add to cart. It exits on an add to cart, a started checkout, or an order, because the cart flow owns that person once they add something.

Made-up example. A furniture brand sends one email showing the sofa the shopper viewed, with its price and a link back. A second email answers delivery and returns, then the drip ends. No discount, no urgency. Our guide to browse abandonment emails covers who to exclude and how to measure it.

Post-purchase

Trigger and exit. Someone places an order. This drip helps the customer get the result they paid for, asks for a review after they've used the product, and times the next offer to when they'll be ready. It hands off to replenishment or winback, and a second order moves them into your repeat-customer sends. Loyalty starts before the first order, in the whole buying experience. The second order is where it shows.

Made-up example. A cookware brand sends a care guide around delivery, a review ask once the customer has cooked with the pan, and later a cross-sell into the lid that fits it. The order confirmation itself is a transactional email, so it stays about the order. Our post-purchase email flow examples go through the six jobs this drip does.

Replenishment

Trigger and exit. A customer buys a product that runs out. The delay comes from how long the product lasts and your typical reorder gap for it, so the email lands just before they need more. It exits on a reorder. Active subscribe-and-save customers stay out, because they're already on auto-ship.

Made-up example. A supplement brand sells a tub that lasts a month at the suggested dose. Its order data shows most repeat buyers reorder close to that point, so the replenishment email goes out shortly before it with a one-click reorder link and the option to subscribe.

Winback

Trigger and exit. A customer goes clearly past your normal reorder gap without buying. In Klaviyo, you can build it as a segment-triggered flow, where a segment is "a dynamic grouping of profiles that meet certain criteria." It exits on an order, and people who've stopped opening anything go to a sunset flow instead.

Made-up example. A coffee brand finds the point by which most of its second orders have already happened, and starts winback after it. It sends one email with the customer's last order, a reorder link, and its strongest proof, then stops. Our guide to winback email flows shows how to find that point in your own orders.

How do you stop a drip campaign at the right time?

Put the exit rule in a filter that's checked before every email, not only at the start. In Klaviyo, that's a profile filter. Its Help Center says "Before each component (email, SMS, split, etc.), profile filters will be re-checked to ensure that recipients still meet the criteria of the flow." It gives the example "has Placed Order zero times since starting this flow".

The detail that catches people out is this line: "Note that trigger filters are not checked again at send time." If your only exit rule sits on the trigger, a shopper who buys after email one still gets emails two and three.

Then decide which drip owns a person when two could fire at once. Cart beats browse. Post-purchase beats welcome once someone has ordered. Winback never runs while someone is still on schedule for replenishment. One more thing to know before you edit a live drip: Klaviyo says "updating a time delay before a message will not impact any already scheduled messages." People already waiting keep the old timing.

What does one shopper's path through these drips look like?

Here's a worked example. The store, the shopper, and the timing are all made up to show how the drips hand off.

A shopper joins a candle brand's list from a popup and enters the welcome series. Before email two, she views a candle and leaves. The brand has decided welcome owns new subscribers, so she's kept out of browse abandonment. She comes back, adds the candle to her cart, and stops again. Cart beats welcome, so she gets the cart email next.

She orders. The profile filters in welcome and cart now remove her before their next emails, and the post-purchase drip starts. She gets a care guide around delivery and a review ask once she's burned the candle a few times. Near the point where the brand's data shows most buyers reorder, replenishment sends her a reorder link. If she goes well past that point without buying, she moves into winback, gets one email, and leaves it.

How do you know if a drip campaign is working?

Judge each drip by orders and gross profit, not opens. For welcome, cart, and browse drips, read placed order rate per recipient and revenue per recipient for each email, not only for the whole flow. For post-purchase, replenishment, and winback, read repeat purchase rate and time to second order, cohort by cohort.

Attributed revenue isn't the same as revenue the drip caused. Some people would have bought anyway. A holdout group that gets nothing tells you the real difference. Across the whole set, the number that matters is lifetime gross profit to CAC, where CAC is what you pay to acquire one new customer and lifetime gross profit is the margin one customer returns across their whole life with you.

When doesn't this apply?

Thin data. If your store has too few orders to read reorder gaps, start each drip with one email and add more only when the first one earns its place.

Products people buy once. Replenishment doesn't fit a product that doesn't run out. Post-purchase still matters, but the next offer is a different product, not a refill.

Subscribers on auto-ship. Subscribe-and-save customers belong in their own sends. Replenishment and winback should exclude them.

Order and shipping emails. These are transactional, not drip marketing. They stay about the order and follow different rules.

Text messages. Klaviyo notes that subscribers "can opt in to email and SMS separately", so SMS needs its own opt-in. Add texts to a drip only for people who opted in to SMS.

Working with Hayes Media

Hayes Media builds and runs retention for eCommerce brands: email, SMS, loyalty programs, and subscribe-and-save. We work in Klaviyo for most accounts and have experience in most other email and SMS platforms. Email on its own is a full engagement, and you can see how our email and SMS service works.

Hayes Media's retention site lists "8 yrs Retention expertise", "$500M+ Client revenue driven", and "15x Average ROI", and one account shows "0% to 59% of Revenue from Retention". Those figures and our case studies are published by Hayes on its own sites. Hayes has no third-party review profile and no Klaviyo partner listing.

Hayes Media works with brands doing at least $100K per month in revenue. It's a guideline, not a gate: a smaller brand with a clear budget set aside to scale and real order volume already qualifies. One-time email projects start from $2,000 USD, and retainers for ongoing full management start from $4,000 USD per month, scoped on the discovery call.

If you want to know which of your drips are missing an exit rule or running on a template's timing, we'll audit your flows on the call and show you what to fix first. Book a discovery call. No onboarding fees. No lock-in contracts. No junior marketers.

Sources

Klaviyo Help Center: Getting started with flows. Source for the flow definition, trigger types, time delays, profile and trigger filters, and the suggested first flows.