In a world of spam and categorised inboxes, how can you make your emailers stand out? Opt for a drip email marketing strategy.
What is drip marketing?
The term ‘drip marketing’ refers to a marketing strategy designed to ensure that a constant stream of relevant marketing content is delivered to a customer or lead. The goal of such a campaign is to keep potential leads and/or existing customers continuously engaged with your product or service. Although it could be implemented using a number of communication platforms, a drip marketing campaign usually involves a series of emails.
A drip email campaign, therefore, is one that contains a set of automated emails, each of which is scheduled to be delivered based on a specific timeline or in response to a specific user action. Such a campaign is also known by many other names, including Automated Email Campaign, Lifecycle Emails, Autoresponders, and Marketing Automation.
When can you use a drip email campaign?
Lead Conversion
The most obvious circumstance in which a drip email campaign works is if you want to promote your product or service!
Begin by sending an email to a set of leads whose email addresses you have acquired through past interaction, online and offline events, or any other previous marketing activity. This email should include a call-to-action button, which can be clicked to take the person to a landing page with additional information about the product and a form that can be filled in for a giveaway of some kind – a free demo, a consultation, samples, or some content of real value to the end user.
Depending on how each lead has responded to this initial email, the campaign will set in motion a series of follow-up emails. This will include a different email for the lead who received the email and did not open it, another to the lead who read the email but did not click the button, another to the lead who visited the landing page but did not request a demo, and so on.
Welcoming/Onboarding
If a user subscribes on your website, then a drip email campaign designed for such a purpose will first send out a ‘Welcome’ mail and, a few days later, send out a mail with a curated set of posts from your blog archives.
In case of onboarding a new customer for a product or online tool you have sold them, a ‘Welcome’ mail followed by a mail on ‘How to Get Started’, and other helpful mails containing tips on making the most of the product features could be part of the drip campaign.
Reviving an Incomplete Purchase
If you operate an e-commerce site and a user seems to have abandoned their virtual cart after adding one or more products to it, then you can send them a couple of reminders about it using an automated drip email campaign. The user may have abandoned their cart because they were distracted midway through the purchase by a phone call or some other personal need that demanded their attention. They may have also abandoned the purchase when they saw the final amount on the checkout page and thought that they didn’t want to spend so much at the moment.
Keeping these possibilities in mind, your first mail can be a reminder about the abandoned cart a day or two after the trigger incident. The second mail, if the purchase hasn’t been made yet, could be on the following weekend when the user is likely to have more time. In this mail, you may want to include a few similar products too, so that your user feels like they can consider a few other options (if they are having second thoughts about the original purchase decision). The third mail could ask them to hurry up and purchase the product before it expires, runs out of stock, or relevant promotions end. You could even consider giving them a discount on the product, based on the ticket value and how much in-demand the product is.
Making Behavioural Recommendations
Say you run a travel-based website and a user made a search for good hotels in a particular city, viewed a few options and exited without making a booking. You just know they are looking at options on other websites too! Grab the user’s attention by sending them a drip email with a curated set of options that is relevant to their search.
Get creative and categorise your list with rooms that are budget-friendly, those with a great view, and so on. Depending on the user’s response, you could even consider sending them mails about package deals – inclusive of travel tickets, rooms, sightseeing and more – for the city they searched for!
If you have a fitness or music app that the user has already installed and is using, your recommendation drip campaign could involve free diet plans or a “Made for You” playlist! The possibilities for this kind of campaign are endless and limited only by your imagination.
How effective are drip emails?
The effectiveness of drip emails can be measured by using UTM codes that will tie into Google Analytics and give you the statistics of exactly how many people clicked which button on which of your emails to visit your website and/or make a purchase. Marketing automation tools like MailChimp will also be able to tell you exactly which user opened the mail and when!
It is proven that relevant targeted emails bring in 18 times more revenue than generic email blasts and a 119% increase in click rates. Up to 50% of leads can be converted to customers through a well-run campaign.
Is there such a thing as too many drips?
Drip campaigns are an excellent method to send out relevant content to a super-specific target audience, based on their interests or interactions with your brand/company. However, it can cross the line and soon become “Spam” if it’s not done in a thoughtful and adequately timed manner.
If you find that your subscribers are no longer showing interest or interacting with your communications, based on the numbers, then it’s time to stop. Here is a helpful illustration to help you understand the possible length and duration of your campaign.
So what are you waiting for?
There are numerous tools out there to help you set your drip campaign in motion. Some of the best-known are Drip, Sendloop, HubSpot and MailChimp. At Mot Juste, our favourite tool is MailChimp because it can be easily used to set up and send out any number of custom emailers on a regular basis.
Get in touch with us and get started on your first drip campaign today!