What is a Drip Campaign?
Drip campaigns are a series of pre-written marketing messages that slowly take a lead from the top of the funnel to a conversion point by using measured, valuable information over time.
Drip campaigns are not necessarily interested in the quick sale, but rather in ensuring that consumers become repeat customers. Today, the most popular way to carry out drip campaigns is via email.
How To Choose the Best Drip Email Campaign Software
If your subscriber list isn’t very big, you can choose just about any drip email marketing software out there and pay for the basic plan or even use the service for free. However, if you need to create campaigns for thousands of active subscribers, you need a platform that can support and segment a large database.
Also, you need to consider your budget. The more contacts you have, the more you’ll need to pay. Most drip email software solutions have different pricing plans that vary based on the number of contacts. You will pay around $10 for a basic subscription plan that covers the limited number of 1000-2000 subscribers.
The number of features and their diversity is also extremely important. Some services are better at helping you segment your list, while others outperform them in terms of automation or A/B testing functions. All the platforms listed in this article provide a robust set of features, but you should choose the one that excels at the specific task you want to automatize.
Finally, it’s also useful to consider the level of user-friendliness, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with email marketing or time to learn the ins and outs of a new tool. In this case, a simple and intuitive email editor would be better for you.
What makes drip email marketing software great?
As mentioned before, there are several factors you should consider before getting drip email marketing software. There’s a myriad of options currently available, so you should choose one that meets your expectations. This is what will make a certain product great. If everything about drip email marketing is still new to you, here are a few highlights to consider when looking for such a product.
The number of features: a reliable tool is one that has plenty of capabilities for putting your email marketing campaign on autopilot. You should also analyze the price of each product based on the suite of tools they offer. Although some services are pricier, they’re usually more complex, therefore efficient.
Drip email marketing involves a high level of automation, so you need software with powerful automation capabilities. These tools help you implement specific flows based on customer behavior. A great software solution is one that immediately understands these behaviors and triggers an action accordingly.
The number of contacts a platform supports is also essential. If you’ve got a large list, you should get an email marketing tool that can handle it. Reliable analytics and reports are additional features a great drip email marketing tool should possess in order to help you optimize your email campaigns.
Why is choosing the best drip email campagin software important?
Email marketing remains one of the most accessible and cost-effective marketing strategies. You might think that people don’t have time to read emails anymore, but that’s not right. They just don’t have time for boring marketing emails. If you know how to tailor your message based on your contacts’ interests, people will surely take the time to read it.
This is precisely what you can do with a reliable drip email campaign software service. This tool will help you divide your contacts list into several groups based on specific criteria, such as demographics. This is important because people of different ages or with different income levels or purchase history should be approached differently.
Once these groups are well-defined, you can use the tool to automatically implement workflows. For example, once a contact fills out a form or clicks on a link, they’ll receive a particular email. If the subscriber fails to open the email, the tool will automatically resend it.
This is drip email marketing and it’s an automated process that saves you a lot of time and boosts your ROI.
What features should I look for in a drip email marketing tool?
These are the key aspects you should consider when you purchase an email marketing platform subscription:
- Integration: if you use several platforms to keep in touch with your customers or several marketing tools to create campaigns, you should get a drip email campaign software service that can integrate them and facilitate data transfers.
- Reporting: every email marketing software offers some sort of reports and campaign analytics; make sure you choose one that can easily generate and export these reports and help you view data in a logical and easy-to-follow format.
- Segmentation: this is a key element of a successful drip email strategy; you first segment your list into different groups and then send customized emails. A good tool will help you divide your contact list into as many categories as you need.
- Automation: once you get your hands on a reliable drip email tool, you start saving time and let it convert your leads. This software should allow you to easily implement workflows, autoresponders, or choose the best time to deliver an email.
- A/B testing: to make the best decisions for your email marketing campaigns, you need to perform certain tests. These are called A/B tests and they allow you to send several email variants to see which one works better.
- Customer Service: once you pay for a service, you also want to know that someone will be there for you if you’re in doubt. Good drip email tools offer different types of customer support, training materials, and educational resources.
What Is the Value of Drip Campaigns?
Although it’s always risky to invest in new marketing channels, email drip campaigns offer several important advantages that make them worth your time and money:
- Lead Nurturing: You should never view leads as wasteful just because they don’t purchase the first time you speak. Drip campaigns let you slowly and gently encourage leads to become shoppers without overwhelming them.
- Brand Awareness: In today’s marketplace, being relevant means being visible. Drip campaigns help build your brand awareness by reminding customers over time of your value and your offerings.
- Automation: It’s difficult to maintain correspondence with hundreds of customers manually. Drip campaigns rely heavily on automation to ensure that messages are sent exactly the moment they’ll make the most impact.
6 Ways to Help Your Strategy with Drip Campaigns
Nurture Campaigns
Building leads that will do more than shop once and abandon your brand is crucial for sustained success.
Similarly, nurturing early-stage leads and potential leads with valuable information, promotions, and other enticements can help more easily convert potential customers into loyal followers. Instead of a scattershot approach that is wasteful, drip campaigns let you focus each dollar where it will deliver the greatest impact—transforming leads into customers.
Brand Marketing
A constant but small stream of content can do wonders for customers to remember your brand.
Mixing it up and combining promotions, event updates, news, and product offers can help keep your content fresh and put you squarely in consumers’ minds. Your drip campaign is an ongoing conversation funnel that lets you slowly reinforce your brand’s positives.
Automation
Email marketing today involves sending correspondence to hundreds, and potentially thousands of consumers at a time.
Drip campaigns are simply impossible without automation, and most services today help you out with this feat. The ability to automate email marketing means you can be hyper-specific with your campaigns and create better flows that generate a greater impact among consumers.
Suitable Content
One underrated benefit of a drip campaign is that by using conditions to trigger the next email, your strategies will slowly become more precise, giving customers information that is more immediately relevant to them.
Instead of offers they may not care for, they’ll only see that information you already know they’re receptive to.
Push Engagement
Drip emails, because they’re seen as less intrusive than constant barrages, tend to lead to more engagement.
Moreover, the relevant content results in higher click rates and more favorable perceptions. According to some studies, drip campaigns can both shorten the sales cycle and lead to almost a fifth more sales opportunities.
Timely Information
Finally, understanding what your leads are and aren’t clicking on, as well as which emails they’re opening can give you a much better way to deliver timely information.
Instead of having to send out mass emails whenever an event happens, you can provide information that is not just relevant, but immediately so. More important, an open communication channel means easier ways to reach leads.
When You Should Start a Drip Campaign
There are multiple reasons why a drip campaign would be a worthwhile solution, including these common needs:
- Leads
- Welcome emails
- Onboarding
- Abandoned shopping cards
- Recommendations
- Renewals
- Confirmations
- Engagement
- Educational
- Unsubscribes
- Events
Let's have a look at them a little deeper...
Nurturing Leads – Not every visitor to your website, and not even every visitor who opens a shopping cart, is ready to make a purchase the first time.
Nurturing campaigns are focused not on the immediate sale, but on the eventual payoff. These campaigns can help you improve your conversion rates by slowly encouraging leads to learn about your brand and products’ value.
Welcome Emails – It’s a mistake to believe that registration or a single purchase is the end goal of marketing.
Welcome emails are the first step in following up with your consumers, making sure that they feel at home and receptive to your brand messaging. These emails will introduce users to your product, show relevant values, and even provide timely promotions and events.
Onboarding – Even with the soft sell, you’ll still want to have people signing up for your services or interacting with your company in a meaningful way.
Onboarding emails aim to get users to join your app, website, or service by offering small “sells” (downloading an app, signing up for a webinar, upgrading your subscription) that are easy enough to complete in a few seconds, but create deeper ties.
Abandoned Shopping Carts – Shopping carts are not the end of the shopping experience, and indeed is one of the steps in the sales journey where most consumers drop off (nearly 68% of online sales, according to Shopify).
These types of drip campaigns encourage users to visit their shopping cart and complete the purchase by offering added benefits, promotions, and similar products. The goal is to rekindle these lapsed sales and boost your revenues.
Recommendations – Today’s consumers are heavily reliant on online reviews and recommendations.
According to brightlocals research
Indeed, 91% of consumers aged 18 to 34 years old trust online reviews, and 78% of all customers do as well. Recommendation drips are great ways to build awareness of your products, as well as excellent opportunities for you to upsell products and even cross-sell to create repeat business.
Renewals – Even after your customers have been with you for some time, it’s important to keep lines of communication active.
Renewal drips will start long before your users’ subscriptions expire and will gently remind users why they should renew—including deals, discounts, and more benefits. This ensures that when the time comes, they’ll be much more receptive to renewing.
Confirmations – Confirming a user’s email, details, or even purchase is a great opportunity to add in some information about your company and its value to customers.
This includes introducing your new visitors to the many benefits your website or app provides, highlighting new promotions for users, and presenting your loyalty plans.
Engagement – Sometimes, the goal of your drip campaigns is simply to connect and rekindle your leads.
Engagement campaigns are not looking for immediate sales, but rather for brand awareness and higher levels of interactions. Engagement emails include links to blogs, newsletters, product updates, and simple information about goings-on at your company.
Educational – Sometimes, customers are seeking to learn more about your product or service, and a drip campaign can be a great way to leverage that.
Educational campaigns are great when you want to generate more buzz and awareness around your product, as well as create more receptive consumers.
Unsubscribes – Unfortunately, not every user will stay with you forever, and unsubscribers are not uncommon.
However, an unsubscribe is still an opportunity to hook users back in. Before they leave, ensure that your drip campaign focuses on understanding why they’re leaving, and providing relevant reasons to stay.
Events – Planned events are an important way to engage with customers, but they require audiences.
Event drip campaigns help you drum up interest for upcoming planned meetings and are a great way to hype products, services, or special occasions.
>>Check out examples for each email drip campaign options.
5 Steps to Plan an Email Drip Campaign
With such a versatile range of uses, it can be hard to know how or where to start planning. However, you can follow these easy steps and get your campaign on the way in no time:
- Determine Your Drip Campaign’s Goals – Before writing a single email, you need to understand exactly what you want from your campaign. Knowing your goal will also tell you exactly what to write, and how.
- Identify Your Target Audience – Although “everyone” is technically a target audience, going too broad can limit your campaign’s effectiveness. Instead, focus on specific qualifiers to segment your audience, including things such as visit frequency, specific clicks, number of registrations, time as paid subscribers, and more. These will let you know what type of messaging to choose.
- Craft Your Message – Here is where you must choose your words carefully. Each type of campaign requires different tones, styles, and even vocabulary. Make sure that the message you’re crafting supports your campaign’s goals.
- Plan Your Campaign’s Specifics – The next step is scheduling. You’ll have to decide how frequently, how many emails, when, and in what order they’re being sent. Your message should fit the timeline of an offer or campaign (i.e. it should not go on indefinitely).
- Deploy Your Campaign – With the details out of the way, the last step is to click send, and start seeing the results of your hard workflow in. At this stage, you’ll want to measure your success, using analytics to track conversions, clickthroughs, ROI, and other key metrics.
Best Practices for your Email Drip Campaign
Even with the perfect plan in place, there are some things you should keep in mind as you launch a drip marketing campaign. Accordingly, here are some best practices to follow:
Focus on Segmentation – Aiming for everyone is a surefire way to not get anyone to bite. Focus your efforts on specific groups and tailor your messages so that each segment of your audience will receive a personal message that will make consumers more receptive.
Prioritize User Experience – Give your users the ability to call the shots about how often they hear from you. Even at a drip, not everyone enjoys being bombarded by messages. By giving them the choice, you can ensure those who are listening are already willing to hear you out.
Test Constantly – No campaign is fully perfect at launch, and you shouldn’t expect yours to be the first. See what works and monitor your results with analytics, and make smart decisions based on facts to improve your campaigns’ reach and each dollar’s ROI.
Take Advantage of Your Toolkit – Don’t feel compelled to do everything yourself. Take advantage of automation and AI tools that reduce your workload by streamlining large portions of the project. Use your CRM integrations to feed better data into your campaigns and get better results.
Drip Campaign Template Examples
If you’re ready to start planning your next drip marketing campaign, look at some examples for inspiration and ideas:
-Onboarding:
Hi [NAME]!
I want to be the first to welcome you to [Company Name] and I’m happy to say that we’re thrilled to have you with us.
Our company is designed to help you make the most out of [problem], and I think we could do great things together. Check out our services page and download our app here to get started. We’ll even give you a [trial period] on us!
Remember, we’re here for you,
[Company]
-Engagement:
Hi [client],
We’ve got plenty of exciting news for you, and a few deals you won’t be able to pass up! Check out our newest posts on social media and our blog, and let us know what you think by sending us a message.
If you’ve read enough, keep scrolling to see our new deals, and join our community to get the most out of your experience!
Best,
[Company]
-Unsubscribe:
Hi [name],
We’re sorry to see you go! If you change your mind, we’ll still be here, waiting for you!
See you soon!
[Company]
Top Trends for Email Drip Marketing in 2021
A bigger emphasis on data privacy – As consumers become more security conscious, it’s important to consider data privacy and safety when you’re planning out campaigns to avoid violating regulations such as GDPR.
Automation, but better – As AI and automation tools improve, you’ll likely get more out of your tools than ever before. This includes deeper insights, faster response times, and much greater customizability for your campaigns.
Design Goes social – Social media is designed to keep users hooked, and email is following suit. There will be a greater emphasis on visual, flashy designs that are both relevant and personalized to each user.
Summary
There are numerous excellent drip email software choices out there. To choose the best one for your needs, we recommend you start by setting your priorities. Understand what interests you the most. It could be simplicity, a comprehensive set of automation features, or numerous integrations. Once you know your main requirements, you can start looking into the 10 platforms above and you will definitely find the right match for your needs.
1. What are the benefits of drip emails? |
These email campaigns help you build a connection with your audience. They allow you to do this progressively, by sending a series of targeted pre-scheduled emails to your list at specific intervals. This way, the potential client doesn’t feel overwhelmed and is less likely to unsubscribe. |
2. How to optimize your drip email campaigns? |
To make the most out of your drip emails, you should apply different optimization strategies, such as conducting customer surveys, using split tests, making your emails more personal, and segmenting your contacts list thoroughly. |
3. Should I analyze my drip email campaign’s results? |
Once you implement an email flow to convert your audience it’s essential to track campaign performance, monitor how many people have opened the emails, and how many have clicked on the links. You’ll then understand what needs to be improved to get better results. |
4. How frequently can I send drip emails? |
The whole purpose of drip email campaigns is to avoid overwhelming your audience with too many emails. You need to send these messages at regular intervals (maybe once a week or once a fortnight) so that you keep your audience connected to your brand without being pushy. |