Where to find it and what it does
From the sidebar, open Run the shop → Growth & Marketing, then open the Drip campaigns card — that takes you to the Drip campaigns page, home base for every sequence your shop has authored. A drip campaign is a multi-step SMS + email sequence: welcome flows for new customers, a review ask after service, a 90-day win-back nudge, a quote follow-up, and similar timed touches. Across the top you'll see three quick numbers — total campaigns, how many are currently Active, and how many customers are actively enrolled right now — and below that, a card per campaign showing its status pill (Draft, Active, Paused, or Archived), its trigger, step count, and live enrollment count.
Drip Campaigns are included with your SalesThumb plan — there's no separate subscription or per-shop fee gating this page, and no tier requirement to open it. Nothing on the backend enforces billing or a plan tier here (every drip mutation is either open to any team member or gated only on the "manage automations" role permission, never on plan). Sends from an active drip draw against your shop's shared SMS/email allowance and the same per-shop spend cap that governs every other text and email you send, so a busy drip roster can still push you toward that cap.
Getting started fast: seed the starter templates
If you're setting this up for the first time, skip the blank-page problem — click Seed starter templates (or, from the empty state, Seed 9 starter templates). That clones 9 pre-written sequences into your shop as Drafts: new customer welcome, post-service review ask, 90-day win-back, quote follow-up, annual reminder, birthday discount, pre-appointment prep, failed-payment recovery, plus a 5-touch owner-onboarding sequence. It's safe to click more than once — the button matches by name and skips anything already present, so re-seeding only adds what's still missing rather than duplicating rows. Seeding never sends anything on its own: every starter lands as a Draft, and you still need to open it, tune the copy and timing to your shop, then Activate it before it enrolls or messages a single customer.
Building your own, and one gotcha with triggers
Click New campaign to build a sequence from scratch, then add steps from the campaign's own detail page. Each campaign runs off a trigger: Manual enroll (you add customers yourself), Status change, No-visit days, or Segment add. Segment add fires when a customer newly matches a segment you pick — All customers, High LTV, Dormant 90+/180+, Churned, New (30 days), Just completed, or Replied to a playbook — and it has one built-in safety behavior worth knowing: the very first check after you activate it doesn't enroll anyone. It quietly records who already matches the segment today, and only customers who newly match AFTER that point get enrolled — so turning on, say, "All customers" doesn't suddenly message your entire existing customer list in one shot. If a campaign seems to be enrolling nobody right after you activate it, that first-check behavior is almost always why; give it until the segment's membership actually changes (a new customer, a customer crossing into Dormant 90, etc.), or switch to Manual enroll if you want to reach today's matches immediately. Also note the Activate button is disabled until a campaign has at least one step, so you can't accidentally flip an empty draft live; once active, the same button becomes Pause. And Archiving isn't a dead end but isn't a straight reactivation either — the card's third button reads Restore, but it only returns an Archived campaign to Draft status, so you'll need to hit Activate again afterward to actually turn it back on.
Who can touch it
Creating or editing a campaign — writing or renaming it, adding/editing/reordering/removing steps, and changing its status — requires the shop's "Manage automations & campaigns" permission (that's its exact label on the Permissions tab of Settings → Team & Permissions), which Owner, Admin, and Manager roles carry by default; Technician, Front Desk, and Service Writer accounts don't. Note also that Technician, Front Desk, and Service Writer roles don't see Growth & Marketing in their sidebar at all — it's off their nav allow-list — so in practice those roles won't reach the New Campaign or Seed buttons by following the navigation path in this article; they'd have to be on a direct link. If they do land on the page (a direct URL, or an Owner/Admin/Manager shares one), the New Campaign and Seed buttons aren't hidden from them, so a restricted-role user can open the form and start typing but will hit a permission error on save — worth knowing before you assume the button means you have access. Those same restricted roles can still manually enroll or unenroll one customer from an already-built, already-approved campaign, and anyone can click Seed starter templates, since that only clones vetted, inert Draft content that can't send until someone with permission activates it.
Not the same as Automations, Blasts, or Campaigns
If you're bouncing between marketing pages, it helps to know what makes this one different. Automations is a separately plan-gated feature with its own similarly-shaped trigger/step engine and preset templates — same idea, different page and a real tier requirement, unlike Drip Campaigns. Blasts and one-off Campaigns are single, one-time sends to a filtered list or segment of customers (dormant 90-day, high-LTV, a custom list, and so on) — they fire once and don't walk anyone through multiple timed touches. Drip Campaigns are the tool built specifically for multi-step, trigger-driven sequences that play out over days or weeks.