What is a Drip Marketing Campaign?
Drip Campaign
A drip campaign is a series of automated emails sent to people who take a specific action on your website. For any given action, you can choose how many emails to send and the rate at which to send them. These emails can be personalized with data like the contact’s name and specific references to the action they took.
Why use drip campaigns?
Drip marketing can help you boost sales by turning visitors into buyers, increasing repeat purchases, and reengaging a dormant audience. By communicating your company’s value, you build a relationship with your audience and demonstrate that you’re a great resource for their needs.
A study of 2,000 people found that half of us are engaged in “a never-ending search for products, services, and content to support behavior changing.” A drip campaign can support this behavior.
Drip campaigns can also be effective because they’re targeted, meaning they’re based on a specific action and can be personalized.
Advantages of drip marketing
Automation
The best feature of drip emailing is that it is a guaranteed timesaver. Once you have planned your chain of messages, you just let them do the work for you. They keep you in consistent touch with the consumer, which means you won’t miss sales by slipping through the cracks or being forgotten.
Nurturing leads
Drip campaign nurtures leads for you. Say you send a cold email about your software to a prospective client, they open it and click through to your website. You don’t want this to be the last time they think of you. An automated campaign will send them a second drip email thanking them for viewing your marketing site and encouraging them to try out a free trial if they’d like.
Timely information
You don’t ever want to send people incorrect or outdated digital information. With an email drip campaign, you can edit your chain as needed for that not to happen. To ensure your lead sees the information they need, you can easily add or update old information in a drip campaign with relevant content.
The other appeal of drip marketing is that each client receives information relevant to their sales cycle step.
How to Set up a Drip SMS & Email Campaign Automation
Step 1: Layout your Target audience. Whom are you selling to? What do they know about the problem you will ultimately help them solve? Also, what do they know about your business and brand?
Step 2: Segment your Target audience based on their motivation to convert. While there will likely be some degree of overlap in how you communicate with all of your audiences, getting as tailored and specific as possible with each audience you’re talking to give you the highest ROI.
Step 3: Figure out your campaign goals. For example, do you want the prospects to sign up for a FREE trial or would you like to get them to purchase a full-blown version?
Step 4: Choose your Trigger. Will the sequence be triggered by a date (birthday, anniversary, renewal, etc.) or self-user action (upsell, marketing recommendations, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, etc.)?
Step 5: Create your drip sequence for email or SMS messages. These should be consistent with set expectations and should be a series of emails that lead the customer through the promised experience. Ideally closer to checkout. Again, the messaging should kept simple, while the content can educational, entertaining, or both.
Step 6: Measure & analyze the performance of your drip sequence in terms of open rates, click-through rates, and click-to-open rates. Thus. reporting can be such an eye-opener.
Step 7: Update your drip sequence based on A/B testing of send times, CTA, copy, design. And just the overall performance.