How Email Drip Campaigns Can Help Your Business Grow

Email drip campaigns are a great and easy way to connect with customers to grow your email list. While we receive emails every day that wind up in our inbox, every now and then a marketing email sneaks through and cuts through the noise. Email drip campaigns are known to marketers as a great way to grab clients' attention. Typically, a drip campaign will tell a story, offer a personalized experience because they are segmented, and often arrive at the best time.

An email drip campaign can transform your business. They are a great way to help your business grow. We will cover all the ins and outs of writing the best email drip campaign to help increase your return on investment. You will also be led through all the ways you can use them for your business.

To start, what is an email drip campaign?

An email drip campaign is an automated set of emails that are sent based on either a certain schedule or user actions. They are great to help boost your engagement, promote new or popular products, and increase brand awareness. Most marketers will use six steps to create a drip campaign. These include: identifying your target audience, planning your campaign, analyzing your results, and then optimizing for future campaigns. This is designed to improve email engagement and reach more of a target audience via email.

A drip campaign is also referred to as an automated marketing campaign or automated email campaign. It is a series of emails that will be automatically sent based on a set schedule or when a user performs a certain action. The goal is that the email will be sent at the right time for a user when they are looking for your product or service. For example, a drip campaign can get triggered when a visitor has been browsing your website a few times, then you could send an email to them about pricing.

While drip campaigns are written ahead of time, they can still be personalized with other information to make the email more special to the recipient. Research from Rich Relevance states that targeted emails earn 5.7 times more revenue than nontarget emails. This is due to the fact that users are more likely to click the links in personalized emails. So since users are more likely to click on personalized emails, drip campaigns produce a 119% increase in click-through rates when compared to regular campaigns.

How do Drip Campaigns Work?

Drip Campaigns = Simple and Easy To Use

You start by setting a trigger. A trigger is an action that a user takes that will set off the email campaign. These could be things such as abandoning their cart or signing up for your email newsletter. Your prewritten email will be sent automatically once these specific actions are completed.

We always suggest that you segment your email drip campaigns, in fact we insist you do this. This is just putting your triggers and customers into specific settings where you’re able to send out targeted emails with ease. You can segment however you see fit but we suggest that your email content is as targeted as possible.

Drip campaigns are great because you’re able to stay top of mind without a lot of effort. It allows you to send relevant content directed to your user's interests. They also are awesome time savers while connecting to customers.

Here are a few examples of a drip campaign you can use:

The Welcome Email

Welcome emails introduce new subscribers to your brand and online community. You are also able to use welcome emails to provide a discount to give them some incentive to sign up. Welcome emails also give a sense of how your other email communication will be. These are great for providing a personalized touch to your messages and letting customers know that they are special to your brand.

Onboarding Emails

Onboarding email drip campaigns are similar to welcome emails but they are sent earlier on in the customer’s journey with your brand. They provide more hands-on and detailed information about your business. For example, an onboarding email might make users aware of anything important about your company or product. This is a great opportunity to give reasons as to why you’re better than your competitors, especially if you provide real-world examples and case studies.

Abandoned Shopping Cart

Oh no, looks like you left something in your cart! Shopping cart abandonment is when visitors come to your site, put a few things in their cart, but never complete the purchase. You can use drip campaigns to remind your customers that they left something in their cart. This helps remind them that they were interested in your product or service and that they should return to their shopping journey.

Subscription Renewal

Using a drip campaign is a great way to remind your customers of upcoming subscriptions and when they are being renewed. This helps establish your company’s validity and prove to your customers how much you value them. This is also a great opportunity to thank your customers for their support and business. Remember to always make it easy for them to unsubscribe if need be.

List Building

You can send drip campaigns targeting new visitors to your website. In this email you should give them the option to opt-out before receiving any new correspondence so once you have those who have opted out, you’re able to have a new list of subscribers who are genuinely interested in your content.

Benefits of Drip Campaigns

With drip campaigns, you’re creating a path that leads the customer to either take action or build brand awareness simultaneously. Even if they don’t open the first email, it is still beneficial to your email marketing. Constant messaging is a factor when it comes to your customers' decision process, when you do it right you’re able to remain in their subconscious and have new and repeat customers.

As we mentioned, drip campaigns aren’t just great brand awareness boosters, but it also helps encourage customer engagement. The reason is that drip campaigns help put a positive effect on customer engagement by providing an easy and consistent flow of communication between you and your customers. This is why email targeting is such an important factor. If a customer feels that they know you on a personal level and that you are speaking directly to them, they are much more likely to engage with your content. The email inbox is a sacred space for most customers, and as a result, you can really boost your lifetime customer value through email marketing.

You are also able to nurture your prospective leads with drip campaigns. Everyone likes to feel special, this includes new and unfamiliar customers too. You may have some people that are interested in making a purchase but need more information or some lead nurturing before making the final decision. A drip campaign is triggered, for example, by a potential customer spending X amount of time on a certain page of your website. You’re able to nurture this lead by giving them new information that may not be on your site and guiding them through the sales funnel.

How to Begin Your Drip Campaign

The best and most effective way to start building your drip campaign is by identifying your audience. This is the most important part of the process because you need to have a targeted and definite audience to receive these emails. As we mentioned, drip campaigns should make the recipient feel like they have a personalized message and experience, so make sure you’re segmenting and targeting a specific audience.

Typically, drip campaigns are based on two main types of triggers:

1. An action: an action trigger, for example, is if a user subscribes to your emails and then you will send them a welcome or onboarding email.
2. Demographic information: a demographic trigger is something that would be initiated because it’s a user's birthday and you’d like to give them

Targeting is an awesome way to personalize your drip campaigns while providing customers with information they need, at precisely the right time. Focus on targeting customers based on visit frequency, clicks, and user behavior.

Determine your goal. This is the second most important aspect of creating a successful campaign. You need to know your goal. A defined goal makes it much easier to strategically plan how you’re going to reach it. Think SMART, simple, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Smaller goals are great ways to make a big impact.

Next, you can now begin to write your email. You know the audience you will be reaching, and what you want to achieve out of communicating with them, now you can start writing your email copy. You want your email to be helpful, grab their attention, and make it easy and clear what the next step they should take with a call to action. Do you want the recipient to make a purchase? Or share more information about the product you’re promoting. Make sure that your message parallels your company’s identity and values but in a very personal voice.

You are just about ready to send, but make sure that you have planned accordingly. Ask yourself some questions:

• How many emails will you send and in what order?
• Do your triggers match your message?
• How will you measure your success?
• Who is your audience and WHY?
• What is the goal of your campaign?

After asking and answering these questions, you are able to send your campaign! After doing so, take a step back and start to analyze your results. What emails were opened the most? Who responded to your call to action? Start to look at your campaign both during and after implementation to get an accurate view of its performance. These statistics you gather will help improve your future campaigns and gain a better insight into your audience and what people respond to.

Are You Ready?

So are you ready to start sending out your campaigns? Before you do, the key ingredient to a successful campaign, that not many people remember, is that you have a clean and healthy email list. A clean email list where emails are verified and in order will help drive your overall success tremendously. When you use a service like Emailable, you can rest easy knowing that your emails are actually getting delivered and that all the time and energy you put into your campaign will be received.