Nurturing sequences
A nurturing sequence is an automated, multi-step email drip that fires for one lead at a time. You build it once: a series of emails, each with its own delay, plus a rule for who gets enrolled. After that, whenever a new lead arrives that matches the rule, Steeren enrolls them and sends each email on schedule - until the sequence finishes, the lead becomes a customer, they unsubscribe, or you cancel it.
This is the per-lead companion to newsletters. A newsletter is a broadcast: one issue, many recipients, sent on demand. A sequence is personal: each lead has its own place in the drip and its own clock. Set up a welcome sequence today, and three weeks from now a brand-new lead from your signup form walks through the exact same steps, on their own timeline, with no further effort from you.
This guide covers how a sequence picks the right leads, how to build and safely edit its steps, send windows so you never email someone at 3am, how a lead moves through the drip, what stops a sequence early, drafting step copy with AI, and one-click unsubscribe.
[!NOTE] By default, nurture emails go out from a system sender that just works - no setup. If you want them to come from your own address, that address's domain has to be verified for your workspace first. See sender domains.
The pieces
A sequence has two parts you build, and two you watch:
- The sequence - the overall definition: its name, who it enrolls, and its send settings.
- The steps - the individual emails in the drip. Each step has a delay (how long to wait before sending it), a subject, and a body.
- Enrollments - each lead's run through the sequence. You don't create these; Steeren creates one automatically when a matching lead arrives. You can watch them progress and cancel them.
- Sends - the record of every email actually sent, including opens and clicks. Read-only history.
You build sequences and steps. Steeren handles enrollments and sends for you.
From draft to live
A new sequence starts as a draft. Drafts don't enroll anyone - they're your workspace while you build. The lifecycle is:
| Status | What it does |
|---|---|
| Draft | Editable, enrolls nobody. The default when you create a sequence. |
| Active | Enrolls new matching leads and sends to them. |
| Paused | Stops enrolling new leads. Leads already in the drip stay put and don't get their next email until you resume. |
| Archived | Stops enrolling and cancels every lead currently in the drip. This is permanent. |
The usual flow: create the sequence as a draft, add your steps, write or generate the copy, then switch it to active.
[!WARNING] A sequence with no steps won't do anything, even when active - there's nothing to send. Add at least one step before you go live.
The first step's delay counts from the moment a lead is enrolled. Every later step's delay counts from when the previous step was sent. So a first step with no delay sends right away, and a later step with a three-day delay sends three days after the one before it.
Choosing who gets enrolled
A sequence's trigger decides which leads it catches. You can bind it three ways, from most to least specific:
- A specific form. Enroll only leads who came from one particular form - say, your ebook download form. The most precise option.
- A source name. Enroll leads whose source matches a name you set, like
blog_form. You can use a trailing*as a wildcard -form:*catches every source that starts withform:(form:guide-dl,form:webinar, and so on). - A catch-all. Enroll any lead that no other sequence caught. You can have one catch-all per workspace, and it only ever fires as a fallback - if a more specific sequence already matched the lead, the catch-all stays out of it.
When several sequences could match the same lead, the most specific one wins: a form-specific sequence beats a source-name one, which beats a wildcard, which beats the catch-all. If two sequences are equally specific, the one with the higher priority wins (priority is a number you set; higher wins).
A lead won't be enrolled if they have no email, have opted out or are marked do-not-contact, or have already moved past the top of your funnel (they're a customer, disqualified, or unqualified). You can always see what the matcher decided on the lead's CRM timeline - including why a lead was or wasn't enrolled.
Running more than one drip at once
By default, a lead only enters one sequence at a time. If a lead is already partway through any drip, a new match is skipped - so a generic "new lead" sequence and a specific "guide download" follow-up don't both start emailing the same person at once.
If you do want a sequence to run alongside others - for example, a slow educational series that should coexist with a faster product nudge - turn on run in parallel for that sequence. It will enroll a lead even when they're already in another drip.
Building and editing steps
Each step is one email: a delay, an optional send window, a subject, and a body. You can insert steps, reorder them, edit them, and delete them.
The important thing to know: editing a sequence is safe while leads are mid-drip. Steeren is built so that changing a step - its delay, its order, or deleting it - never causes a lead to receive the same email twice, and never skips them backward onto an email they already got. When you change a step's timing, leads currently waiting simply get re-scheduled to the new time.
Because timing changes can shift when in-flight leads get their next email, those edits offer a preview first: it tells you how many leads would be affected before you commit, so there are no surprises.
[!TIP] Editing a step's subject or body is always safe and needs no preview. Past emails are recorded as they were actually sent, so editing copy never rewrites history - it only changes what future sends look like.
Deleting a step: any lead currently waiting on that step moves on to the next one (re-scheduled against the next step's delay and window). If there's no next step, that lead's run is marked complete. The emails a lead already received are never touched.
Send windows
A step can carry a send window so emails only go out at sensible local hours. You can set a default window on the sequence that every step inherits, or give a single step its own. A window looks like this:
{ "start": "09:00", "end": "17:00", "tz": "Europe/Vienna", "weekdays": [1,2,3,4,5] }
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
start / end |
The local hours to send within, in 24-hour HH:MM. end is exclusive. |
tz |
The timezone the hours are in (an IANA name like Europe/Vienna). |
weekdays |
Which days are allowed - 1=Monday ... 7=Sunday. Leave it out to allow every day. |
When a step comes due, Steeren nudges its send time forward to the next moment that fits the window. If the natural send time already lands inside the window on an allowed day, it sends then. You can set an overnight window (e.g. 22:00-06:00) by making end earlier than start. Leave the window off entirely to send any time, any day.
[!NOTE] A send window only ever delays an email - it never cancels one. Even a window so narrow that no allowed day comes up soon will still let the email through rather than trapping the lead forever.
How a lead moves through the drip
Once a lead is enrolled, they walk through the steps one at a time on their own schedule. Each enrollment is in one of these states:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Enrolled, waiting for the first step to come due. |
| Active | Mid-drip - at least one email has gone out. |
| Completed | The last step has been sent. Done. |
| Cancelled | Stopped early - the lead opted out, became a customer, you cancelled it, or the sequence was archived. |
A lead can't be in the same sequence twice at once. Once their run is complete or cancelled, a fresh trigger can enroll them again - subject to the same "one drip at a time" rule above.
[!NOTE] Delays are best read as "no sooner than", not "exactly at". A step due "in three days" sends shortly after the three days are up (and after any send window nudges it to allowed hours), not to the second.
Send a step now
While testing, you can fire a lead's current step immediately instead of waiting out its delay. It's a convenience for trying a sequence end-to-end without sitting through the delays - the same double-send protection still applies, so you can't accidentally send a step twice.
What stops a sequence early
When a lead stops being a good fit for a drip, every sequence they're currently in stops for them - at once, automatically. Emails they already received are never undone; only the upcoming steps are cancelled. This happens when:
- The lead opts out or is marked do-not-contact.
- The lead becomes a customer, or is marked disqualified or unqualified.
- You archive the sequence (this cancels everyone in it).
- You cancel a single lead's enrollment by hand.
- An email hard-bounces or the lead files a spam complaint.
- The lead uses the one-click unsubscribe link.
A couple of things worth knowing:
- Moving a lead to a working stage like contacted, qualified, or nurture does not stop the drip - only the outcomes above do. The drip is meant to keep running while you work the lead.
- The fastest way to stop everything for a contact is to mark them opted-out (or do-not-contact). That cascades across every sequence at once, so you don't have to cancel enrollments one by one.
- Steeren also re-checks right before each send. So even if a lead converts or opts out at the last second, the email is held back rather than slipping through.
Drafting step copy with AI
You can have Steeren's AI writer draft a step's subject and body for you. It runs in the background and fills the copy in when it's done.
To write copy that fits, the writer draws on:
- the sequence's purpose (its name and description),
- the campaign brief and voice notes, if the sequence is attached to a campaign,
- your workspace brand voice,
- the previous step's subject and opening, so each email continues the thread rather than restarting,
- an optional briefing for the specific step, and a length (short, medium, or long).
Generation is one step at a time - add your step rows first (with their delays), then draft each one. A short briefing goes a long way, for example:
briefing: "Nudge them toward booking a demo"
length: "short"
[!NOTE] The writer drafts copy for the sequence in general, not for any one named recipient - it uses the trigger as a stand-in for the audience. Personal touches like a first name are filled in for each lead at send time, not when the copy is written.
One-click unsubscribe
Every nurture email carries an unsubscribe option in two forms:
- A visible footer link the recipient can click.
- A native unsubscribe button that mail clients like Gmail and Apple Mail show at the top of the email, so the recipient can opt out without leaving their inbox. (Gmail and Yahoo's bulk-sender rules expect this, and it's good practice for compliance.)
Both do the same thing. When a recipient unsubscribes:
- They're marked opted-out in your CRM.
- Every drip they're currently in, across all your sequences, is stopped at once. Opting out of one means out of all of them.
Emails already sent stay in their inbox; unsubscribe only stops what's ahead. Clicking the link more than once is harmless.
Reading what happened
| To see... | Look at |
|---|---|
| All your sequences, filtered by status or campaign | the sequences list |
| One sequence with its steps and how many leads are active | the sequence detail |
| Who's enrolled in a sequence and where they are | the enrollments view |
| Every email a sequence sent, with opens and clicks | the sends log |
| Everything nurturing knows about one contact | the contact's nurturing panel |
The CRM contact view's Nurturing panel updates live as steps send and a lead advances - no reload needed.
Good to know
A few honest edges of how this works today:
- Open and click tracking arrives a little after the fact - those numbers fill in once the email provider reports them, not the instant a lead opens an email.
- A cancellation updates the lead's enrollment but doesn't add its own entry to the contact timeline (to keep the timeline quiet). The cancellation reason is recorded on the enrollment itself.
- Step bodies render as basic formatting - paragraphs, bold, line breaks, and personalization tokens. It's lighter than the full blog editor.
- AI drafting is one step at a time; there's no "write the whole drip in one go" yet.
FAQ
Can the same lead go through a sequence more than once? Yes, but not at the same time. A lead can't have two live runs of the same sequence. Once their run is complete or cancelled, a fresh trigger can enroll them again - subject to the "one drip at a time" rule.
If I change a step's delay while leads are mid-drip, does anyone get an email twice? No. Changing a delay or window only re-schedules the next email; it never re-sends one a lead already got. Use the preview before committing to see how many leads will shift.
What happens to a lead waiting on a step I delete? They move to the next step (re-scheduled against its delay and window). If there's no next step, their run is marked complete. Emails they already received are untouched.
Does pausing a sequence cancel the leads already in it? No. Pausing just stops new leads from enrolling and holds in-flight leads where they are - set it back to active and their next email goes through. Archiving is what cancels everyone in the drip.
A lead unsubscribed from one sequence - are they still in the others? No. Unsubscribe is per-contact: it opts them out and stops every drip they're in across all your sequences at once.
Why didn't my sequence catch a lead it should have? Check the lead's matcher result on their CRM timeline. The usual culprits: the sequence is still a draft or paused (only active sequences enroll), a more specific sequence won, the lead was already in another drip, or the lead had already opted out or moved past the top of your funnel when they arrived.