What is Drip Email Marketing and How it is done?

Drip marketing allows marketers to stay in touch with current and prospective customers by reminding them of available products, services, and special offers. But what exactly is drip marketing and how can it help your business? Here’s everything you need to know.

What is Drip Email Marketing?

Drip email marketing is simply sending a set number of emails to your target audience on a regular basis based on actions they take or changes in their status. Businesses use drip marketing to stay in touch with their customers in a personalised and targeted manner after significant events or dates.

Drip email marketing, also known as automated email marketing or automated email campaign, is a series of emails that are sent automatically based on a set schedule or user action. Drip campaigns aim to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time.

For example, you can set up campaigns so that anyone who signs up for your email list receives a welcome email, whereas a visitor who has been perusing your products page for a few days but hasn’t yet made a purchase receives an email with pricing information.

Drip marketing is powerful and distinct due to a few characteristics. Typically, the content is:

• Automated and prewritten.
• Sent on a predetermined schedule as a result of audience action or another strategic automation plan..
• Important engagement points have been “mapped” or “keyed off.”

Why run drip campaigns?

Drip campaigns are effective because they are targeted, which means that they are based on a specific action and can be personalised. A well-planned series of drip emails can be an excellent way to remind people to buy your product, teach them how to use it once they’ve bought it, and get new subscribers up to speed on your email newsletter.

Drip email marketing can assist you in increasing sales by converting visitors into buyers, increasing repeat purchases, and reengaging a dormant audience. By communicating the value of your company, you establish a relationship with your audience and demonstrate that you are an excellent resource for their needs.

How to set up a drip campaign

Here is a step-by-step guide to setting up a drip campaign:

Define your goals:

What do you want to achieve with your drip campaign? Do you want to educate your prospects, nurture leads, or retain customers? Knowing your goals will help you create an effective drip campaign.

Segment your audience:

Divide your audience into segments based on demographics, behaviour, or other criteria. This will help you tailor your messaging and ensure that each person receives relevant and personalized messages.

Plan your content:

Decide what type of content you will include in your drip campaign, such as emails, push notifications, SMS, or direct mail. Then, create a content plan that outlines what each message will say and when it will be sent.

Choose a drip email marketing platform:

There are many drip email marketing platforms to choose from, such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, or Marketo. Select a platform that fits your budget and has the features you need to run your drip campaign.

Create your campaign:

Use the drip email marketing platform to set up your drip campaign. This will typically involve creating templates for your messages, defining the triggers that will send each message, and scheduling when each message will be sent.

Test and refine:

Before launching your drip campaign, test it thoroughly to ensure that everything is working as expected. Then, monitor your campaign’s performance and make adjustments as needed to optimize its effectiveness.

Launch and evaluate:

Launch your drip campaign and track its performance. Pay attention to open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and other metrics to evaluate its effectiveness and make improvements as needed.

When should you use a drip campaign?

Drip email marketing can be used to streamline a variety of marketing activities, so you can save time and effort while still reaching your target audience with relevant and personalized messaging. Here are 10 examples for some inspiration:

Nurturing leads

You can use a drip campaign to nurture leads who are not yet ready to make a purchase. By sending them a series of automated emails that educate and engage them over time, you can keep your brand top of mind and build trust with them.

Welcoming

A drip campaign can help you welcome new customers and educate them about your products or services. This can help you increase customer loyalty and reduce the risk of churn.

Onboarding

Spending time on an effective onboarding drip strategy has significant engagement benefits. When your audience has a positive customer experience, they are more likely to feel connected to your brand and interact with it in the future.

Abandoned shopping carts

Emails from abandoned shopping carts are another effective and worthwhile way to use drip marketing. When a customer adds an item to their shopping cart without checking out, they will receive an email prompting them to complete the transaction.

A simple reminder is sometimes all that is required to secure a sale.

Recommendations

Drip marketing enables you to send personalised product recommendations to customers based on their purchasing history and interactions with your website.

Assume you own a pet store. You know what kind of pet a customer has based on previous purchases. You can then send out targeted product recommendations on a regular basis.

Renewals

Whether your user’s subscription has been extended or is about to expire, you can use drip campaigns to engage customers during the renewal process.

If your subscriptions do not automatically renew, design your drip campaign with a clear call to action, encouraging users to re-enroll in your service. And for those who do renew, send them a drip thanking them for sticking with your service and perhaps encouraging them to tell their friends about it.

Confirmations

You can also use a drip campaign to confirm your users’ purchase renewals; simply set up a “thank you” autoresponder that sends out immediately after they click the “purchase” button. You could include links to your product’s newest features in that confirmation drip to re-engage them with your brand.

Engagement

Re-engagement is another excellent application for drip email marketing. Over time, you’ll notice that some of your contacts are engaging with your email content less and less. Look at open rates and click through rates to see when this happens.

What you can’t tell as easily is which individual contacts on your email list are unresponsive. Drip campaigns come in handy here! Your drip email marketing software will automatically send targeted content to those contacts if you set up a drip campaign to re-engage subscribers.

Courses

When it comes to emails, people want to know what they’re getting. So, if you can offer a pre-planned series of drips—say, a six-week course on how to double your blog traffic—subscribers will not just pour in; they will interact with the content at an incredible rate.

Setting up a drip campaign that functions more like a multi-part crash course is easy, especially if you’re repackaging old content, and it provides a consistent flow of traffic from a highly engaged audience.

Unsubscribes

While you never want your target audience to shrink, unsubscriptions can be a valuable learning experience.

You could set up a drip email campaign after someone unsubscribes from your list to request feedback on why they no longer want to receive your email marketing campaigns. This type of feedback is useful for fine-tuning your marketing automation strategy.

Conclusion

Drip campaigns can keep current customers engaged with your company while also re-engaging former customers. Because they are powered by marketing automation software, they are also among the least taxing components of any robust marketing strategy. Your drip campaigns can skyrocket your marketing email open rates and click-through rates – and your sales revenue – with the right automation platform and smart planning.