Melissa IN Team | Email Marketing, India | Business, drip campaigns, email marketing, examples

Drip emails are an important part of every organization’s marketing strategy. They schedule interactions with customers to strengthen your relationship with them. A drip email campaign is basically a series of automated emails that can be personalized to the customer’s name and the action that triggers the email. Drip emails can be sent when customers sign up for an account, when a shopping cart is abandoned, after placing an order, etc.

Why Are Drip Campaigns A Good Idea?

Unlike marketing emails that are sent out to a large group of people, drip emails are targeted at individuals and smaller groups. They give you an opportunity to share the company’s value system with customers and connect with them. A study found that 91% of consumers are likely to make purchases from brands that recognize them and remember their needs.

Drip emails allow businesses to reach out to consumers at strategic times with relevant messages. These messages are cost-effective since they are pre-written and automatically triggered by customer actions.

There are many opportunities where drip emails can push customers through the sales pipeline. These emails can be sent to welcome new customers, wish them on their birthday, make product recommendations, remind them about abandoned shopping carts and subscription renewals, etc.

So, how do you start a drip email campaign?

6 Steps To Start A Drip Email Campaign

Drip emails work on automation but they need to be planned properly to be effective.

Step 1: Identify A Target Audience

The first step of setting up a drip email campaign is segmenting your audience. For example, welcome emails are sent out to people who have just created an account. Similarly, a reminder email can be sent out to people who have not made a purchase in the last three months. Other examples of target audiences are first-time purchases, free trial users and newsletter subscribers.

You also need to validate the selected audience and make sure that you have accurate and complete email addresses. Avoid adding official company email addresses to your mailing list and insist on personal email addresses.

Choosing the right audience is critical to ensuring that the message you send out is relevant and personalized. You don’t want to send an email about repeat purchases to a customer who hasn’t made a purchase as yet…

Step 2: Settle On A Campaign Objective

For any campaign to be effective, it must be directed towards specific, measurable goals. In the case of drip emails, your campaign objectives are likely to be actions you would like the customer to take. For example, you may want your campaign to be directed at nurturing leads, making people upgrade from a free account to a paid account, collect feedback on a purchase, sign up for a course, up-sell a new product, etc.

It is very important for these objectives to be measurable and realistic. ‘Increase email subscribers’ is a poor goal vs have 100 new subscribers. 

Step 3: Choose Trigger Events

Drip campaign emails are automated by specific actions or conditions. These conditions must be chosen to be specific to a product, service or audience. It could be customer actions like clicking on a particular link or page visits. The actions must be easy to track.

Drip emails may also be triggered by inactivity. For example, you may want to send out emails to customers who have not made a purchase in the last month. Or, you could email people who are nearing the end of their free accounts.

Choosing the right trigger events lowers the risk of missing out on opportunities to connect with your audience.

Step 4: Compose Your Emails

Though drip emails are sent out at different points of a customer’s journey, they must be consistent in terms of styling and the tone of communication. These emails should ideally be short and easy to read. Use simple words and stay away from industry jargon. You should also ensure that your emails provide information that your customers will value. It goes without saying that all content must be grammatically correct.

Following a standard design format makes it easy for customers to scan emails and find information.

Step 5: Decide On The Email Frequency

Sending a bunch of emails on one day can make your brand appear spammy. It increases the risk of getting blacklisted by mail servers. You should ideally schedule emails such that they are at least one day apart. You need to structure the number of emails being sent out for each campaign and their schedule.

For example, a welcome email campaign may have one email sent when the customer creates an account. On the other hand, you may want to send out three reminders for abandoned carts; when the customer adds articles to the cart but doesn’t make a purchase, two days later and a week later.

Step 6: Study Campaign Metrics

Though drip emails are automated, you still need to study the campaign metrics to identify opportunities for improvements. Some of the KPIs that can prove helpful include the email open rate, bounce rate, click-through rate and unsubscribe rate. For example, if you see the open rate drop after email number 3, there may be an issue with how the email is structured.

You can also conduct A/B email tests with different email subject lines to see what works better with your audiences.

Along with the emails, you will also need to test and monitor the email triggers. For example, if your trigger is placed on a page that does not get too much traffic, you may want to move it.

In Conclusion

Drip email marketing campaigns offer many benefits. They are cost-effective, require minimal effort, keep customers engaged and nurture relationships through the sales cycle. The key to having successful drip email campaigns is simply to create good content, time your emails correctly and send them out only to valid email addresses that have signed up to receive them.