Need to send subscribers back to a Drip Workflow repeatedly? Use this simple Rule

Have you ever needed to send subscribers back to a Workflow after they exit it? This is a common requirement when you use a Drip workflow to send emails rather than campaigns. With campaigns, subscribers automatically get a new email that is added to the end of the campaign (assuming you don’t have any automated rules to remove them from the campaign). But with workflows, subscribers will exit the workflow as soon as they have made it all the way through. So if you add another email to the workflow, any subscribers who have already finished the workflow and exited it will not be sent the newly added email.

Solution: Simple Rule

The solution is to send them back to the workflow after they exit. And when they exit the next time, send them right back again, repeatedly. This will mean that they will be looped through the workflow over and over again. That way, if you’d added any new emails to the workflow, they will be sent it.

You can achieve this with a simple rule. Here is how:

The steps in the rule

In the workflow:

• Tag users when they enter the workflow
• Remove tag when workflow ends
  

In a rule:

• Send the subscriber back to workflow when the tag is removed
  

Because the tag is added when subscribers join the workflow, it will automatically get added again when subscribers get sent back to the workflow.

With this rule in place, you can simply add new content to the Workflow and keep sending people through it, over and over again.

Skip content already sent

Because you’ll be sending subscribers back to the workflow as soon as they exit, you need to make sure they don’t get sent the same email again. You can do that by tagging subscribers when you send the email in the workflow, and checking for the existence of that tag in a workflow decision (thanks to Brennan Dunn for this technique ¹).

In the above example, the workflow is tagging subscribers after the email is sent. It then checks for that tag before sending the email. If they have been tagged, it skips that particular email. Otherwise, it sends the email and tags them. This guarantees that subscribers are only sent the email the first time and will skip it any subsequent time.

Wrapping up

Workflows are a lot more powerful than simple campaigns. But they do come with their limitations. Fortunately, there is always a way around limitations in Drip!

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^{1. I first learnt about this technique in Brennan Dunn’s excellent Drip Mastery course. ↩}