💧 Drip Delivery For Warming Up A New Account

Drip delivery lets a destination receive contacts at a steady pace instead of all at once. It is built for warming up a fresh email account, where feeding in contacts too quickly can harm a new sender's reputation. Set a drip and WP Sync keeps to the pace for you, day and night.

How a drip differs from a delay:

A delay holds each contact for a fixed time after it arrives, so 200 contacts delayed by an hour are still 200 at once, an hour later. A drip gives each contact the next free slot, so the same 200 arrive one after another, evenly spaced. With a five minute drip, 200 contacts arrive over about 17 hours.

Setting a drip:

1. In the builder, open the destination step and click Delay / drip.
2. On the Drip line, type how many contacts at most, then how often, and pick minutes, hours or days. For example 1 every 5 minutes, 50 every 1 hour, or 1000 every 1 hour.
3. Click Update Bridge.

The step summary and the bridge row show a drip tag with the pace, such as drip 2 per hour. Click Remove on the Drip line to switch it off.

Good settings:

• A brand new account: 1 every 5 minutes, or 2 to 10 an hour.
• A warming account: 50 an hour.
• An established account that just wants smoothing: 1000 an hour.

A single window can be up to 7 days long, and up to 100,000 contacts fit in one window.

How the pace is kept:

The pace is kept twice. Contacts are given slots evenly across the window, and delivery never goes faster than the rate. Even if your site sat quiet for hours and a backlog built up, catch up still flows at your pace. A very high rate is delivered in batches on each check, so the ceiling is how often your site runs its check.

Shared lanes:

Two bridges feeding the same app and list share one lane, because the thing being protected is the receiving account. The pace you set is the pace that app really receives. Different lists and different apps each keep their own lane.

Using a drip with a delay:

The two work together. For example, wait ten minutes, then drip one every five.

Watching a running drip:

The bridge row shows the queued count. The Activity Log shows each contact as it is delivered. Diagnostics, in the support report, lists each bridge's delay, drip and queue.

Controlling a running drip:

• Pause the bridge and the queue simply waits. Nothing is dropped, and it carries on at your pace when you enable the bridge.
• Deliver now sends everything that was waiting when you clicked, ignoring the pace. The confirm box says so. Contacts arriving afterwards keep to the drip.
• Discard drops the waiting contacts without sending them. A later Backfill can still reach them.
• Change the pace at any time. Edit the drip and the contacts already waiting are re-spaced to the new rate straight away.

Backfill and drip:

A Backfill into a dripped destination schedules every contact onto the drip at your pace. The results window says how many are queued to drip out, how many went right away and roughly when the last one lands. Running Backfill twice is safe, because anyone already waiting is skipped.

A real example:

yoursite.com opened a new Brevo account for its newsletter. Its bridge Warm up the new Brevo account copies new ActiveCampaign newsletter subscribers into Brevo with a drip of 2 per hour. After a backfill of the existing list, 90 contacts are queued and the row counts down as they go. In two weeks the owner will raise it to 50 an hour.

A helpful nudge:

When a large batch arrives in one check on a destination without a drip, WP Sync writes a note in the Diagnostics debug log suggesting a drip for that destination. It is handy when you forgot that an account is new.

The maths of a drip:

• 1 every 5 minutes: 12 an hour, 288 a day.
• 2 every 1 hour: 48 a day.
• 50 every 1 hour: 1,200 a day.
• 1000 every 1 hour: 24,000 a day, delivered in batches on each check.

Pick the number of contacts a day the new account should receive, then work back to the hourly figure.

A two week warm up plan:

1. Days 1 to 3: 1 every 5 minutes.
2. Days 4 to 7: 25 every 1 hour.
3. Week 2: 50 every 1 hour.
4. After that: remove the drip, or keep 1000 every 1 hour as a gentle smoother.

Change the pace by editing the bridge. Contacts already waiting are re-spaced to the new pace.

Drip and Migrate:

A Migrate run feeds the bridge in batches. With a drip on the destination, the migrated contacts join the drip lane and arrive at your pace, which is the safest way to move a big list into a brand new account.

Reading the queued count:

The queued count on the row is the number of contacts waiting for their slot. With a drip of 2 per hour, 90 queued means roughly 45 hours until the last one. The count drops each time the five minute check delivers the contacts that are due.

Tips:

• Raise the pace gradually as the account's open rates look healthy.
• Keep one bridge per destination list where you can, so the lane is easy to follow.