You Too Can Be A DRIP With Email Marketing.

by Pat | Mar 29, 2019 | Email Advertising, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing | 0 comments

Time Base Drip Campaigns

can be defined as emails sent over a set period of time, in planned intervals in a progressive sequence. They are used to build and maintain customer awareness and to systemically move the customer into an active sales cycle.

Drip Campaigns are also known as 

Drip Marketing

Automated Email campaigns

Lifecycle Emails

Autoresponders

Automated Email Series

Why use a Drip Campaign:

• They are automated and prewritten.  This saves times as it’s not necessary to write a brand-new email for every customer that buys or a prospect who inquires
• Send relevant information at the right time: they should be personalized and contain content the recipient is interested in
• Maintains consistency with the subscriber
• Keeps prospects/customers engaged with your company: triggered emails are shown to have a higher response rate overall marketing emails
• Moves the prospect in the right direction: more opportunity for cross-selling and up-selling

How do they work?

Drip Campaigns are normally based on email triggers or prompts.  When a specific action is performed by an email recipient or website visitor, such as clicking on a link or filling out a form, their actions trigger an automatic response.  A website purchase, for example, generates an invoice, once paid online, a thank you email is triggered and a week later a follow-up email is sent to the buyer. The last email in this series has product information and a discount coupon with a shop now link – all designed to keep, in this case, the customer engaged with your products.

As you can see a drip campaign will allow you to distribute relevant information to your targeted list members, at specific times, which can translate into more sales. Dundee Internet Services use drip campaigns when someone signs up for a list demo. For example: with Dundee List services, when a prospect signs up for a demonstration list they receive a Welcome letter, followed by a series of emails, one per week for four weeks, designed to guide the prospect to become a customer.  These marketing emails include the features, the benefits and the ease of using our services.  Our goal, like all drip campaigns, is to keep the prospect engaged with our product.

When should you use a Drip Campaign:

• To Welcome a new list member when they subscribe to your email list
• Suggestions: they purchased a book from your store, suggest more titles by the same author with a “Thank You”  email.  A few weeks later, an email with “you might also like”
• Auto-Renewals: use the autoresponder feature in your list management tools to send an alert email to let them know their account is about to be charged. Include a link to update payment information
• Confirmations: Confirm reservations, events, and other important dates
• Shopping cart abandonment: When someone clicks out of buying – reengage those customers and bring them back
• Developing Leads: Use this opportunity to educate,  offer a free trial follows up, download white papers
• Engagements:  invite the recipient to revisit to your site and stay awhile, triggered either by some on-site activity or a general lack of activity.

Setup your Drip Campaign:

The Target Audience.  Several field experts suggest creating your content first, however, it’s always good to know who will be receiving it, so I believe number 1 is to identify your target audience.  To do this properly you have to know which group you’re writing for, why and how and of course the types of triggers to use, such as an action trigger.  For example, an action trigger can include:

A new email list subscriber: they get an automatic welcome letter

 A purchase: they receive an emailed receipt with a coupon

 A download for your latest whitepaper: they receive follow up emailed information and an invitation  to join a seminar

You can also use a drip campaign for a behavioral email from HotSpot “Behavioral email is the practice of sending automated, targeted emails to the contacts in your database based on their interactions with your company across multiple channels: social media, email, your website and beyond. Jan 8, 2016”  In either case, when you compile your target audience you can test your drip campaign by selecting member segments based on specific behaviors, such as buying frequency. Write the Content.  With the target audience in hand, the next step is creating a message(s) that do something,  that gets their attention and leads them to your end game.   Your message needs to be understandable, relevant and personalized, just for the reader. Campaign Planning. Next, figure out your strategy for your drip campaign—consider making a storyboard to represent the campaign steps from the first trigger to the purchase.  Consider at this point:

• The number of emails needed and the order they are needed in
• Consistency between the emails sent in response to the trigger set
• How do you know you’re successful, by adding more customers, collecting more demographic data, getting more sales?  This all depends on the goals you have set

How am I going to measure success?

Ready Set GO. When everything is in place, start your campaign with your ESP.  Dundee Internet will work with you to set this up.

Is it Working?  Only time will tell if your campaign is successful.   There may be adjustments needed along the way, monitor your results.   If you send receipts to customers who purchased with a coupon, are they returning to your website? Someone signed up for your email newsletter after they receive the Welcome letter did they go to their profile page and update their settings, did they sign up for your blog? Drip campaigns are a great tool to cultivate leads without taking up too much of your time.  It’s also ideal to help your users with questions, new features, and training.  They will appreciate the effort and time you take.