A Guide to Drip Email Marketing

What is Drip Email Marketing?

Drip emails are also known as lifecycle emails, drip sequence emails, automated email campaigns, marketing automation, or even autoresponders. Drip email marketing is an automated email marketing strategy where emails, sometimes called drips, are delivered to subscribers over a given period.

Each email, or drip, is pre-written, which gives the business enough time to craft the best message for each email in the sequence. The first email is sent out depending on a subscriber’s action, and the rest of the emails grow over time.

Several actions can trigger the first email. Some examples include completing a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, abandoning a cart, or simply providing details in the case of lead generation.

Drip email marketing is so effective because subscribers are put into different “buckets” and are sent information that is highly targeted and relevant to them. For example, you might send different emails to someone who subscribes to your blog and different ones to someone who signs up for a course.

No matter where the sequence is for other people when a person enters it, they will be sent the first email and receive the same series of emails as everyone else in the same segment. After all, all people in a single group or segment are interested in the same things or leave their details for the same reasons.

Why Use Email Drip Marketing?

Drip email marketing helps you personalise your message. Everyone wants to feel like a business is talking directly to them when they receive an email from said business.

Drip emails allow you to place people in different segments, groups, or funnels so you can run campaigns that are rewarding for them. This may be through making them feel welcome, rewarding them for leaving their details, or following up with an action they took in the past – abandoned carts are a common example.

A combination of relevant content and the personalisation made possible by the different platforms you can use to create drip marketing campaigns make the emails sent out feel personalised.

Drip Email Marketing Boosts Engagement

Engagement is essential for those who have already subscribed to your email list. You do not want to keep sending emails without any engagement, as that leads to a waste of precious resources. Drip marketing solves this problem by helping boat engagement.

It does this by giving you additional opportunities to engage with your readers and audience. Each time you do, you increase the probability of that reader or prospect becoming a paying customer.

Nurturing Leads

Building and managing customer relationships are crucial for the success of any business. These relationships help lead prospects down the sales funnel, which ends up boosting conversions and, thus, revenue.

A business can’t take every customer through these journeys, but drip email marketing helps them come close. It allows you to respond to your customers’ needs and desires, sharing solutions and information depending on their actions because of their wants and needs.

These solutions and information are personalised, relevant, and targeted, which makes it seem like you are with the customer throughout their journey. The result is higher conversion.

Driving Revenue

By increasing engagement and conversions, drip marketing emails help your business increase revenues. According to some studies, drip emails drive about 75% of all email marketing revenue. You should, therefore, incorporate them into your overall strategy.

Build and Nurture Customer Relationships

It is much harder and more expensive to gain new customers than to keep them around. Building and nurturing strong customer relationships should be a priority for your business.

Creating valuable content and regularly interacting with your customers through drip emails helps nurture relationships that lead to readers seeing you as an authority and trustworthy in your field.

Creating A Drip Email Series

Implementing a drip email campaign is a lot easier than it used to be. You can use CRM or email marketing software to set up a campaign without too much hassle. In this section, we will look at everything you need to know to create a successful drip marketing campaign.

Understand Your Target Audience

As with any other marketing campaign, the first thing to do is to understand your target audiences. Remember, you will create different segments or funnels with audiences with different needs and thus need different types of information and resources.

You can check the actions a specific user took before landing on your email list to know where to put them. This information will help you personalise your emails, as they speak directly to the targeted customer (s) and increase the likelihood of conversion or sale.

Setting Your Objectives

Setting your objectives is an integral part of your drip marketing sequence design because these objectives will guide all actions you take and give you something to focus on. Objectives also provide you with something to measure against when gauging your ROI.

The two main classes of objectives are qualitative objectives and quantitative objectives. Qualitative objectives give you an overall direction for your aim and what you want to achieve. Some objective qualitative examples include gaining trust among customers or ensuring leads move faster through their buyer journeys.

Qualitative objectives are objectives you can measure. They tell you precisely what you should be aiming for to tailor your strategy better. Examples include increasing revenue by X% in Y months or increasing conversions sales by A% in B months.

Some questions to consider when setting your objectives include:

• What do you want to achieve? Is it more leads, better conversions, etc.?
• How will you measure performance?
• Who will receive your emails? Which segments will you target with which kinds of emails?

Your Drip Marketing Sequence Design

Your drip emails should help leads go through the buyer’s journey easier and faster. Before that happens, though, you need to create an entry point. This is usually your call to action. You want leads to take specific steps, so put them into the correct funnels or segments.

Some actions you might want them to take include watching a video, completing a purchase, downloading an asset, or redeeming a coupon. Each of these actions must be tied to at least one business goal.

On the other end, the lead has to benefit from taking the required actions. Lastly, tie triggers for the next emails for the steps they do or do not take.

For example, you might entice a prospect who does not open an email with the content you think they will like or even a beneficial asset that contains marketing material that helps push them along the buyer journey.

With all this in mind, your first few emails should be educational with a thought leadership style to establish yourself as an authority in your field. Then you should send them additional information when they are in the consideration phase.

Finally, send them a strategic link that helps them convert, which can be signing up, completing a purchase, attending a webinar, or anything else, depending on your goals and objectives.

How Many Emails Do You Need?

There is no right or wrong answer to this question, so it depends. Some factors that can help you determine how many emails you need and how to space them out include:

• Your business model
• The type of campaign and its goals and objectives
• The buyer journey and sales cycle length
• How complex the product or service is, with more complex ones requiring a higher number of complex emails to convince buyers

Do note that longer campaigns do not necessarily yield better results because after you reach the point of diminishing returns, each subsequent email will have lower engagement levels.

This point of diminishing returns will depend on several factors, such as how easy it is to market the product, how long it takes to move a lead through the funnel, and the types of content you need for different parts of the customer journey.

Automate and Monitor

A drip campaign has many moving parts; keeping an eye on them can be challenging and even impossible. This is why automation is so important.

Additionally, you can use various tools to monitor your campaign. These tools will help you know how they are performing, the likely return, and if there is something you can tweak to improve your campaigns.

Conclusion

Drip email marketing allows you to take your subscribers on a journey that ends with a conversion. There are many ways of going about it but remember to segment your audience so you send them targeted and highly relevant material. Remember, many platforms make drip email marketing easier, which you should take advantage of.