Drip Campaign vs Broadcast: Send the Right Message on the Right Clock

A drip campaign

A drip campaign is a series of messages timed relative to each person. Day one, day three, day seven, counted from the moment that individual entered the campaign. Two people who enquire a fortnight apart receive the same sequence at the same point in their own journey.

A broadcast

A broadcast is one message sent to a segment at one moment in calendar time. Everyone receives it together, regardless of how long they have been a contact. Price changes, event invitations, festival offers and product announcements are broadcasts by nature.

Both are called campaigns, both are automated, and both are configured in the same screen in most tools. The distinction that matters is invisible in the interface: a broadcast is anchored to the calendar and a drip is anchored to the contact.

The practical consequence appears in the numbers. A broadcast produces one spike you can read the next morning. A drip produces a rolling cohort where results accumulate over weeks, so judging it on a weekly total tells you almost nothing.

Exit conditions

A drip must stop when a person replies, books or buys. A broadcast has no exit because it is a single send. Sequences without a reply-stops rule are the most common cause of a customer receiving a nurture message the day after signing.

Relevance and personalisation

Drips know where someone is in their journey, so the content can assume context. A broadcast has to be written for the least-informed reader in the segment, which is why broadcast copy tends to be shorter and more general.

Volume, deliverability and consent

Broadcasts create sudden volume, which is exactly what spam filtering and messaging platforms scrutinise. Drips spread the same volume across days. On WhatsApp in particular, promotional broadcasts depend on approved templates and opt-in status, and opt-out handling has to be immediate on both.

Use a broadcast when the message is genuinely tied to a date: a sale window, a webinar, a new branch opening, a policy change. Use a drip when the trigger is the contact's own action: a form submission, a quote sent, a demo attended, a renewal approaching. Nearly every business needs both, and the healthy pattern is a small number of well-targeted broadcasts sitting on top of drips that run continuously in the background and generate most of the pipeline.

Sequences combine email, SMS and WhatsApp steps with a delay on each, enrol contacts automatically from a form, a stage change or a routing rule, and stop the moment the person replies so the conversation hands over to the owner. Because enrolment is driven by CRM events, follow-up starts without anyone remembering to start it.

Broadcasts are sent to a saved segment built from the same fields and tags you use everywhere else, with opt-outs honoured across channels and results attributed back to the contact record rather than living in a separate marketing report. Sequences, broadcast sending and campaign reporting are available on paid plans.

More on this: sales automation, WhatsApp CRM, CRM with WhatsApp, lead management software, features, and use cases.