Why Your Drip Emails Aren't Sending — and How to Fix It

Two places show you what's happening.

• Open the Drip Sequences page under Forms to check the sequence itself — it lists your email steps and shows whether the sequence is Active or still a Draft, so you can confirm it's switched on.
• Then open the lead in your CRM and look at their timeline and Email Activity, which track that lead's emails, opens, and clicks alongside their SMS, calls, notes, tasks, and stage changes.

If a lead is opening or clicking your drip emails, they're clearly going out; if a lead who should be in the drip shows no email activity at all, that points you to that one lead rather than the whole sequence. For the full email toolset, see SiteStakes email.

This is the most common cause by far. SiteStakes sends drips through your own email provider, and it will not send anything until one is connected. So check your provider connection first, under Integrations then Email. If the page says no email provider is configured, nothing will send until you connect Brevo, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, or SMTP. Walk through it in setting up your email provider.

If a provider is connected but your emails are still not delivering, the provider is probably rejecting them. The usual reason is that your sender is not verified. Each provider asks you to verify a From address, or to authenticate your whole sending domain. You do that by adding SPF and DKIM records at your DNS host. Until that is done, your provider may refuse the message, or drop it into spam. The steps are in setting up your email provider.

A sequence only sends when its status is Active. Open it and check. If it is still a Draft, switch it on. Also note that drip sequences are a Grow and Pro feature, so on the Basic plan they will not run, and upgrading turns them on. More on building and activating sequences is in creating email drip sequences.

A sequence can be live and still send nothing if no leads are enrolled in it. Leads join through a form's automation, the start a drip action. If that automation is turned off, or the form people fill out is not the one wired to the sequence, the automation is not firing, so no one enrolls and no emails send. Check the automation on the form that should feed the sequence, then submit a test to confirm new leads enroll. You will see the sequence's enrolled count rise.

Drips do not send the instant a lead enrolls. Each scheduled email waits in a send queue, and a background process works through that queue every few minutes. Two things decide when an email is due: the delay you set on the step, and the sequence's send schedule. If the sequence uses a fixed time, a smart window, quiet hours, or a specific timezone, an email can sit stuck in the queue until that window opens. Check the step's delay and the schedule settings, and give it a little time before assuming it is broken.

If most emails are sending but one lead stopped getting them, look at that lead. To see which reason applies, open the lead and check their recent activity. If they replied or engaged, the nurturing sequence pauses for a set window and then resumes on its own — that's working as intended. If there's no reply or engagement and their emails have stopped, the address has most likely bounced or been marked as spam, so it's been suppressed to protect your sending reputation.

If a sequence's stats show almost nothing going out even though leads are enrolled, the problem is usually on the provider side. The usual culprits are an API key that was rotated or revoked, a provider account that is out of funds or has hit a sending limit, or a sending reputation that dropped after a high bounce rate or spam complaints. Sign in to your provider, confirm the account is in good standing, and confirm the API key SiteStakes has on file is still valid. Work through these checks in order, and you will almost always find why your drip emails are not sending — and the fix.