A Beginner's Guide to Drip Marketing

Customers are not ready to buy right away, even if they have subscribed to your newsletters. When the product is complex, the user needs time to explore it. The business task is to help the client make a purchase decision. This can be done in different ways. Your company can tell a story about the product, demonstrate its own expertise, build customer trust or offer favorable conditions.
Drip marketing makes all these actions possible. This is an automated marketing strategy that is planned ahead of time. Step by step — or drip by drip — such campaigns lead a client to a conversion or a target action through increasing loyalty, useful content, promotions and other methods.
In the post, we will tell you what benefits the drip method has, what emails are classified as 'drips', and how to launch such a campaign.
What is Drip Marketing
The trigger for newsletters can be the actions of the client on the website, reactions to messages, certain events. It can also be inaction if the subscriber stops responding to messages from the company. If you carefully craft your email series, users will get a personalized experience.
Benefits of Drip Marketing
8 Types of Drip Campaigns
Not every email campaign is a drip campaign. Here are some examples of drip emails:
Onboarding emails
Companies use onboarding emails to introduce the subscriber to their product step by step.
Now the user is more likely to be surprised if he doesn’t receive confirmation of the subscription, because we are used to such communication.
Feedback emails
These emails usually come after a purchase or brand interaction with a user. Use email surveys to collect feedback. This way, you will improve the company’s service and increase loyalty because people love it when a company asks for their opinion.
Holiday emails
Educational emails
You shouldn’t always send only sales emails to the client. Try sending useful newsletters containing life hacks or tutorials on working with your product. Such content is an indirect way of selling and another way of increasing loyalty.
Emails can be educational or redirect the user to other sites: a blog, a page for downloading manuals, or to a useful video on Youtube.
Reactivation emails
Trigger emails
Usually, they remind the user of some unfinished action: an incomplete registration or an abandoned cart. Customers don’t always stop the purchase intentionally, sometimes they are simply distracted and forget. The email will bring the customer back to action, and the additional discount will speed up the purchase.
Transactional emails
It is important for the client to know that his order has been accepted and work has begun on it. Drip campaigns include order confirmation emails, payment confirmation emails, delivery status notifications.
This also includes emails that report the status of the subscription. If the validity period ends and the client has not renewed it, you send an email.
Sales funnel promotion emails
This is a series of emails that encourages the customer to buy in different ways. For example, it offers a demo, webinar, discounts, and so on.
How to create a drip campaign
1. Set a goal
Specify what should happen when the drip campaign starts to work. Here are some possible goals: sales, increasing customer engagement or brand awareness, subscriptions to other sources, responses to content, etc. Describe the intended goal with numbers. Use ‘increase sales by N over time’ instead of just ‘increase sales’.
2. Define your target audience
Decide to which segments of the audience you will send messages and under what conditions. Buyers don’t behave in the same way and are at different stages of decision making. The task of the business is to divide customers into groups in order to send the most personalized newsletter. Don’t send everyone the same versions of emails.
3. Create campaign plan
4. Make content
It is the longest and most important stage, because without attractive content, the newsletter won’t bring results.
Here are a few rules:
- Write clear topics so that users don’t guess what is waiting for them inside.
- Personalize the newsletter not only with the person's name, but also with selections based on their interests and purchases.
- If you are going to bombard a subscriber with a lot of information, correctly format the text with highlighted paragraphs and subheadings in the article.
- Be helpful. Nobody likes trite content.
- Be moderate in design.
- Add CTAs to emails.
5. Launch a campaign
6. Analyze and optimize drip emails
Although newsletters are automatic, marketers need to work with analytics. Monitor results to optimize content, email subject lines, send time, number of emails, and more. Data analysis will be useful for future campaigns.
Conclusion
Drip campaign is a series of emails that users receive automatically when they take an action. For example, they make an order, abandon items in the shopping cart or browse the products they are interested in, but never buy.
Drip marketing increases loyalty, customer engagement, promotes content, simplifies the work of marketers, moves the client through the sales funnel and increases the company's profit.
Drip emails include onboarding, feedback, welcome, educational, reactivation, congratulations, trigger and sales emails.
Start creating a drip campaign by setting a goal and choosing a target audience. Next, you develop a plan, create content and launch a newsletter that you set up in one of the services. After that, you just have to analyze metrics and adjust the campaign.
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