What Makes a Successful Drip Campaign?

What are Drip Emails?

A drip campaign refers to a sequence of triggered emails that are sent at certain times based on the actions of the user. They may also be known as autoresponders, email automation, or lifecycle emails. They are designed to reduce manual effort while communicating with contacts.

One example could be an email that is sent out when a website visitor downloads an eBook. You will then send them an email with a link or PDF attachment of the eBook as soon as they provide their information on your website.

A few days later, you might set up an email to send to them with other related resources that they may be interested in downloading based on their previous activity.

Eventually, you can then send emails that engage them more or encourage them to make a purchase. All of these emails are based on certain triggers and sent out automatically. Drip campaigns allow businesses to communicate the right thing at the right time.

When to Use a Drip Campaign

Drip campaigns can be used to help a company drive marketing goals at various different stages of the customer lifecycle. It’s a good idea to automate anything that can be automated.

Automation will help to make operations more efficient and effective, freeing up your time to create more analytical, creative, or experimental tasks. Some main examples of when it’s a good idea to use a drip campaign include:

Welcoming New Users with a B2B Email Drip Campaign

You can send a friendly email to welcome new subscribers or signups as soon as they land in your system. Over seventy percent of subscribers will expect to get a welcome email immediately, and welcome emails tend to be opened around five times as much as an average marketing email.

Sending a welcome email is a good idea since they are a good way to introduce yourself to a new subscriber and set some context.

Driving Engagement – Drip Marketing Ideas

Engagement rates are a good indicator of how interested users are, how likely they are to convert to customers, or if they are losing interest. Drip email campaigns give you the chance to take proactive steps when it comes to engaging your subscribers and bring back any that have become inactive over time.

Blogs, product updates, and product newsletters are just some good ways to keep your subscribers interested, and drip campaigns can be triggered if a user has not made any action, encouraging them to go back and try the product or service out.

Email Drip Campaign Examples for Nurturing Leads

It can be difficult to find a lead that is ready to make a purchase immediately. For businesses, this means guiding them to try out the website, product, or service so that they can get a better understanding of the value proposition offered.

Drip campaigns such as product onboarding emails can be an ideal way to provide more education and information to users about the key features and next steps involves. For example, you could include case studies, video tutorials, free trials, support articles, and anything else that can help the user get started.

Reduce Cart Abandonment with Successful Drip Campaigns

One popular example of how to successfully use drip campaigns is to reduce cart abandonment.

Abandoned carts are a fairly common occurrence across various industries as a lot of customers might just be browsing or adding products to their cart to save for later even though they are not actually interested in buying it just yet.

Triggering abandoned cart email drip can help you encourage your users to go back and buy the product, increasing conversion rates.

You can simply remind them that their items are still waiting in the cart or create more urgency by offering a limited discount period that they can take advantage of if they go back and buy now.

Reduce Unsubscribes and Deactivation

It is always worth triggering drip emails to reach out to any contacts who are unsubscribing from your email list.

While an unsubscribe or an opt-out means that they do not want to receive any further marketing emails from you and is a request that must be honoured, you can trigger a final email to find out what went wrong for them and if there is anything you could have done differently.

This will help you gather feedback that can be useful for reducing unsubscribes and cancellations in the future.

Encourage Renewals

If you run a business on paid subscriptions, sending manual emails to all subscribers can be a tedious and sometimes impossible task. Instead, you can leverage drip email campaigns to encourage renewals. If your subscriptions are set to auto-renew, letting your customers know beforehand is good practice.

You can easily do this with a drip campaign that is triggered shortly before the renewal is due, including information on the charges and which payment method is used.

On the other hand, if your subscriptions are set to be renewed manually, you can trigger a drip campaign for the purpose of reminding your customers that their subscription is about to expire.

Send a couple of emails that include clear CTAs to renew their subscription.

How to Set Up a Drip Campaign Strategy

It’s important for many businesses to set up drip campaigns in order to find a better way for their operations to function. It’s important to go through a process of putting together a drip campaign that is engaging and clear, which will take some careful planning.

Identify Your Goal

Each drip campaign that you launch will need to have a goal. Consider the activities that you want users to take when they receive your drip emails.

This could be subscription renewals, increased product awareness, collecting feedback from customers, selling products, or improving engagement among inactive users, for example. It’s important to set specific goals that are as measurable as possible.

Understand Your Audience for Drip Deliverability

Once you have a goal in mind, it’s important to make sure that this goal is aligned with your target audience.

Your drip campaign will need to reach the right people in order to ensure that the actions for your specific goals are driven. You will need to understand which customers are entering the drip campaign and the reason for it.

The more questions you ask, the easier it will be to segment your users successfully. You should also consider granular segments using factors such as engagement, behavioural data, demographics and more.

Plan the Campaign

Once you have your goal and audience determined, it’s time to put together an actionable workflow. You should determine the drip campaign triggers first since these define how users will enter the workflow.

Essentially, they refer to a set of conditions that a user will need to meet in order for the trip campaign to be sent to them. Then, decide on the number of touchpoints. The email schedule should be set so that the drip emails are not too frequent or infrequent.

Sending the right number of emails is crucial; on average, this is around 4-7 per campaign in the space of a month. Decide which metrics you will need to measure throughout the campaign based on your goals.

Create Engaging Content

Once the above steps are complete, it’s time to start writing the content for your drip campaign emails. It’s important to set aside plenty of time for this since what you write in the emails and how they are presented will have a huge impact on how they are received.

Every email in the campaign should have some context from the previous emails along with being unique. Each email should include a call to action that encourages the recipient towards taking a step toward your goal. Ensure that the drip campaigns are personalised to further engage your audience.

Run the Campaign

Once you have all the details figured out and your content written and proofread, you are ready to start your campaign. While running any drip campaign, it is important to consistently measure, iterate, and repeat.

How to Measure Drip Campaign Success

It’s important to regularly check on the metrics that you identified in the planning stage in order to analyse if your drip campaign is successful. You can do this by understanding your email performance and looking at commonly tracked email metrics such as open, click, and unsubscribe rates.

These metrics can help you get a better understanding of whether or not you need to resend an email, change your content, or stop sending emails to certain subscribers. You can also place UTMs or Urchin traffic monitoring parameters in your email to analyse the performance of certain components such as CTAs, coupon codes, and links.

These are small strings of text that are attached to the URL.

Drip campaigns can be useful in many industries to further engage with customers, meet business goals, and drive conversions.