A Short Guide To Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are designed to help companies provide subscribers with the right information at the right time over email. With email marketing automation being an integral part of any marketing campaign, many messages that your customers get are pre-designed.
The key problem with such an approach is that email subscribers start getting messages only after they sign up. Accordingly, nothing that you sent before that moment reaches their mailboxes.
This way your subscribers may miss important information and misunderstand new messages. That’s where drip campaigns come in.
What is a Drip Marketing Campaign?
A drip marketing campaign involves sending a string of email messages to the recipient based on the time they appear on a company’s email list. It consists of time-based emails that you send out over a certain period.
Drip campaigns are fully automated so you don’t need to design each email by hand. You can add some information to personalize messages. However, you don’t have to come up with new emails every time.
Each new recipient gets the same string of emails that keeps them updated about the company’s offer. For example, a day after sending a welcome email, you can send this month’s best offer emails. The rest of your email list has already gotten this message at the beginning of the month. With a well-designed drip campaign, a new subscriber can gain access to it as well.
Drip campaigns go out as soon as the person subscribes to an email list. It’s up to you to tweak the email design to suit your current marketing purpose.
When Should You Implement a Drip Campaign?
Automated drip campaigns are great for a variety of purposes. Depending on your marketing and business goals, they can tweak your efforts tremendously. In fact, drip campaigns contribute significantly to the possibility of achieving a 4400% ROI.
1. You Need to Nurture Leads
Many people subscribe to your list in exchange for a freebie. Once they get what they need, these prospects could forget your website exists.
That’s where lead nurturing emails come in. By adding content for nurturing leads to the emails that are part of your drip campaign, you are increasing your chances of scoring conversions.
To improve your efforts, you can add a video to your lead nurturing campaigns. A video inside a nurturing email can improve the conversion rate by 21%.
2. Welcoming New Customers
When a customer makes a purchase and signs up for your email list, you need to design a drip campaign. Welcoming new subscribers should be a big part of your email marketing effort.
The welcome series of emails doesn’t just make sure that the person didn’t sign up by mistake. It demonstrates your genuine interest in the subscribers’ actions and walks them through the first steps of working with your company.
Welcome emails can contain links to onboarding blogs. Meanwhile, they must be clear about the possibility to opt out of the email list.
3. Onboarding New Clients
When a customer signs up for your email list, they often need guidance. This is especially true for SaaS providers. However, many companies need to perform onboarding as well.
Onboarding emails are a big part of drip campaigns. They are sent out to a specific segment of your subscribers – people that just signed up.
While taking your customers through the onboarding process, these emails could also sell them additional products or ask them to sign up for a webinar.
4. Bringing the Potential Customer Back
The average cart abandonment rate across all industries is an impressive 88.05%. Consumers fail to go through with a purchase for a number of reasons. From being distracted to the inability to get timely answers, millions of customers around the world never revive abandoned shopping carts.
With a drip campaign, you can bring some of them back. You can design a series of emails that guides the customer back gently. They can contain suggestions about the purchase, a link to the support page, or free shipping offers.
You can have a series of several emails that go out over a certain period of time with the purpose of bringing the customer back.
5. Sharing Offers
Based on the information you gather about your clients, you can design a series of recommendation emails for each segment. Depending on which segment the new client falls into, their subscription can trigger specific recommendations.
These recommendations can come with deals designed specifically for new clients and the segments they belong to. They can also be triggered by certain actions like purchases or abandoned cart items.
6. Retaining Clients
With 80% of your business coming from 20% of your existing clients, retention is one of the pillars of a successful marketing strategy. To keep customers coming back, you can design a re engagement drip campaign that keeps sending them offers, content, recommendations, and more.
You can also use a drip marketing campaign to revive your relationship with dormant customers. For example, if the subscriber hasn’t touched base with you for a certain period of time, you could set up a drip campaign to bring a loyal customer back for repeat purchases.
Before running such a campaign, you need to use an email validation tool to make sure your old contacts are still valid.
7. Streamlining Brand Loyalty
Drip emails are also great for improving your brand awareness efforts. When a person signs up for your email list, you can send out an automated email for brand awareness purposes. Such automated email campaigns can help familiarize your customers with your brand and drive them down the sales funnel.
Informational emails with high-quality content can increase the authoritativeness of your brand, thus helping your marketing and sales team achieve conversions.
How to Start an Email Drip Campaign
If you are ready to increase your email marketing ROI, you need a successful drip campaign. The following steps can help you get started.
1. Identify Your Audience
Knowing your prospective customers can help you segment your subscriber list. An effective drip campaign starts with developing a buyer persona. This information can help you design relevant content with the right message for each segment.
2. Set Your Goals
Before you start designing a drip email, you need to understand which goals the drip marketing campaign has to achieve. From nurturing leads to bringing back former customers, you have to understand what you are creating content for.
To achieve different marketing and business goals, you may need to design several drip campaigns.
3. Create Emails
With buyer persona and marketing goals in mind, you need to create drip emails. Remember to keep your emails short yet informative. Try to create catchy subject lines and avoid sizable images and videos.
An email should have a clear call to action (CTA). Don’t overstuff your drip campaign emails with CTAs. Use one per email.
4. Plan the Process
Once you’ve written drip emails, you need to create a plan to help them reach the target audience at the right time. Figure out which consumer actions should trigger the drip campaign. Then set the time emails should go out.
You should also identify metrics that you will use to measure the success of your email drip marketing campaign.
5. Launch the Campaign
As soon as you are done with all the above steps, you can launch the campaign. The faster you take advantage of your email drip campaign, the faster it will start yielding results. Make sure to a/b test your drip campaign emails in the process.
The Takeaway
Drip campaigns are excellent email marketing tools that help you achieve a variety of sales and marketing goals. By designing a series of emails triggered by certain user actions, you aren’t just driving more sales. You are improving the relationship with your customers.
If you are looking for a way to streamline your marketing efforts, consider implementing drip campaigns. They are likely to increase your email marketing ROI.
