Understanding The Importance Of A Drip Campaign

Email marketing is an incredibly easy, affordable way to get more leads and sales for your business. Newsletters, promotional emails, they’re all great for staying in contact with your email list.

But let me make you aware by saying that there’s a real problem.

I’ve compiled everything you need to know to write, build, and measure effective email drip campaigns — right from your inbox. These tactics are especially relevant to anyone working in b2b sales, real estate, account management, and any other profession that wants to use automated emails to build relationships and grow their business.

So, you must have read the effectiveness of Email Marketing but do you know the No. 1 problem behind it?

No matter how good your last email was, if someone signs up today, they’ll never see it. Once your email has been sent, you can’t really send it to the same list again.

This is where email drip campaigns come into play. Whether you call it autoresponders, marketing automation, lifecycle emails or automated email campaigns, the idea behind email drip campaigns is simple: instead of manually sending out emails, you create a set of emails that are automatically sent to subscribers based on a predefined schedule.

In today’s article, we take a deep dive into email drip campaigns, giving you all the information and examples you need to master the essentials.

Drip Campaign-­‐ An Overview

Drip campaigns are automated sets of emails that go out based on specific timelines or user actions. Drip marketing is all about giving people the right information at the right time. “Drip marketing” is a blanket term that covers several different marketing strategies. But the goal remains the same: keep users engaged with your product. Drip campaigns are often executed through email marketing, where pre-­‐written content is automatically sent at predetermined times in order to engage these contacts. Drip campaigns are

also called automated email campaigns, lifecycle emails, auto responders and marketing automation. An effective marketing strategy sends prewritten messages aka “drips” to prospects and customers over a certain period of time.

If someone just subscribed to your blog newsletter, for example, a drip campaign could send a welcome email right away, and two days later, an email that shows off some of your most-­‐read content. Research shows that running a drip campaign to a segmented list can drive 18x more revenue for businesses and leads that are nurtured over time make 47% larger purchases. But the real magic of drip sequences is that they help you build trust with your audience. Rather than blast everyone with the same campaign, you can put your subscribers into different funnels and can run campaigns for rewarding your best customers or educating prospects or welcoming new customers or promoting certain pieces of content. It’s more relevant so it feels more personalized.

As you can see in this flowchart, which email the recipient gets next and how long they stay in the drip campaign depends on what they do. Even if the enrolment is manual, the rules for what to send and when to send it will be set in your marketing automation software.

Why Drip Campaign

Email marketing strategies have changed over the years. What worked five years ago, now no longer works. But it’s still a key player to any marketing strategy. In fact, for the very best online marketers’ email marketing is their go-­‐to marketing channel.

Why, you ask?

It’s because it brings in the results and delivers the best marketing ROI

According to SmartInsights, 30 per cent of respondents rate the time saving as the top benefit of setting up drip emails. It would be possible to simulate a drip email campaign manually if the numbers were small enough. But it would take a lot of time. One of the main selling points for marketing automation is that it’s a force multiplier for your marketing team. With it, you can send more emails – not only that, emails that are better targeted and more personalised – than would otherwise be possible.

Second is the chance to make better use of your content. We create a huge range of different content assets for our clients, so we know the importance of maximising the value of each piece. Automated, targeted emails can help get your best content in front of the right people at the right time.

Third is money. A study by MailChimp revealed that automated emails could improve sales by 16x. And that a series of emails – a drip campaign – outperformed one-­‐off follow-­‐up emails by 75 per cent. The reason drip emails can have this sort of tangible and significant impact on your bottom line links back to the other two benefits: saving time and making better use of your content.

Drip campaigns are an excellent way to achieve consistent growth and automate time-­‐consuming, demanding, or delicate manual tasks which otherwise could incur mistakes. Email marketing outperforms all online marketing strategies, including SEO, PPC, and content marketing!

An email marketing strategy is an important part of any marketing strategy. Email is the most cost-­‐effective way to promote your products, communicate with your customers and reach your business goals.

And on average, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect a return of $51 (up from $39 last year)!

The Next Part Is To Understand What Is Lead Nurturing & How It Is Important In Drip Campaigns…

Email is still one of the best channels you can utilize to nurture leads and get the sale, but it would only work if you study the data and have the right strategies for your business. It also helps to have an open mind about any upcoming trends, including artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and content intelligence. Lead nurturing through drip email campaigns is basically automated hand-­‐holding. And, yes, if you think that this use case can be just about anything, you’re right.

In lead nurturing, emails or messages sent are more personalized as they are based on the individual activity and behavior of the user. This is more like stalking your customer and noting down everything he does and how he does and what he thinks and then customizing your message based on your learning. This technique, in turn, goes on to save even more resources (emails) and delivers higher ROI in terms of revenue as well as customer’s trust. However, the effort required in personalizing those messages and identifying peculiar tastes of your customer can first look like a difficult task to pull off.

Nurturing leads can look like anything from product education, free trials, tutorials, case studies, or anything that your leads would find useful.

The primary business goal of most lead nurturing programs is to obtain more prospects through the sales funnel and get them qualified as sales ready. There are two main marketing objectives to this goal which are-­‐

• Increasing prospect engagement after getting their attention; and
• Re-­‐engaging old prospects with useful and appropriate con

It might sound strange sending drip emails to people who just signed up to your regular email newsletter. But everyone likes to think they’re special. Rather than just adding new subscribers into the next newsletter send, consider warming them up with some drip emails. The advantage for you is that you can resurface and reuse some of the content you’ve already created and sent out.

Lead Nurturing is great for brands that deal with expensive products. This way the sales department can focus better on retrieving the best leads, while the rest of leads get educated automatically. According to a study done by Marketing Sherpa, a reported 45% higher ROI was seen where lead nurturing was used as compared to those that did not.

The best lead nurturing campaigns take leads on an emotional journey from “awareness” to “decision.” Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing states that there are four elements of engaging lead nurturing:

• One of the biggest benefits of lead nurturing campaigns is the ability to build trust with a huge number of prospects in a short period of time. Trust is built in a number of ways, but two biggest “triggers” of trust are personalized content and content that proves you’re an authority in your industry. We’ll go more in depth into how to write personalized emails below.
• Relevance means that you should be sending out content that is specific to what your prospects want, when they want it. If you miss the mark and send out the wrong type of content, or send out an email that doesn’t fit with where they are in their customer journey, then your prospects might assume that you don’t really “get” them. And if they believe that you don’t understand them, then they won’t buy. You can build relevance into your lead nurturing sequence by segmenting and timing your emails to be delivered to the right people at the right time. We’ll talk more about this below.
• Multi-­‐channel strategy. If a lead is on your email list, then chances are they’re also following you on your other social media channels. Every time a lead interacts with your company, they expect to have a certain type of “experience.” If that experience feels like it’s disconnected across different channels, then that might reduce the level of trust they have in your company.
• As with any marketing campaign, you need to have clearly defined numbers so you know exactly what constitutes a “success” or a “failure.” It’s important to track open rates, click-­‐through rates, and increases in sales conversion rates for all your different lead “segments” so that you can see exactly how well your campaigns are performing.

New newsletter subscribers will have missed months or years of some truly epic content. A drip email of your greatest hits gets more value out of your archived content and also shows the best of what you can offer in the future.

You do not have to manually track the lead. All you have to do is set up the automation and the system monitors what the lead is interested in, giving you detailed reports and continuing to nurture them without you having to lift a finger. Here’s why we say Drip Campaigns are a secret trick:

• Emails opened on mobile devices are 55% more compared to
• 75% of the almost-­‐billion Gmail users access their email on mobile.
• People use mobile three-­‐quarters of their time to emai

You know the value of your business. But sometimes, your prospects need some convincing, or just aren’t ready to make an immediate purchase as soon as they learn about you.

Your potential customer may need some time or education to realize how your business is the right fit for them. In fact 50 percent of prospects are not ready to buy when you first interact with them. This is EXACTLY where Sales Funnel and Drip Campaigns need your attention.

A Symbiotic Relationship: Sales Funnel and Drip Campaign

The sales funnel (also known as a revenue funnel or sales process) refers to the buying process that companies lead customers through when purchasing products. You may have heard of the term email sales funnel before. It is sometimes called by a different name:

• Auto responder
• Automated email follow-­‐up
• Nurture/ Follow Up sequence

So what is the definition of an email sales funnel?

An email sales funnel is a series of emails arranged together with the goals of:

• Nurturing a relationship with an email subscriber
• Educating a potential customer on the benefits of a service or product
• Nudging them to make a purchase

Despite new and flashy marketing channels constantly popping up, email remains one of the strongest for so many companies. The key idea behind drip campaigns is to send consistent, relevant emails to your subscribers to either provide information or encourage email engagement. Email’s the delivery vehicle, but content is the carrot, laying the foundation and providing the initial touchpoint and enticement for successive brand interactions. The content you include in each email should match where a prospect is located in the sales funnel. Thought leadership pieces and engaging material like infographics are great for those top-­‐of-­‐funnel leads, and then you can start sending links to sales demos and case studies as they move further down the funnel.

Using an individual’s trail of activity, marketers can use their drip campaigns to send additional materials and content that will be relevant to the user. Were they browsing a landing page on cloud services? Well, there’s a good chance they would be interested in reading a white paper that provides a more in-­‐depth analysis of that technology and its applications and benefits.

And these kinds of insights continue to emerge throughout the drip email workflow. The more content a user consumes, the more fleshed out they become as a viable sales prospect. What are their concerns and pain points? What kinds

of solutions pique their interest? These critical pieces of information come into sharper focus before a sales representative has even picked up the phone.

Not all of your subscribers should receive the same drip campaign. So, your first step is to choose a specific segment so that you can create more personalized emails that solve one or more of their problems.

I will go deeper into the tips and tricks of an effective Drip Campaign in my next article, but for a quick idea, here are some great companies that have automated the process in their SaaS. I recommend having a quick view to get a general idea.

My Top 3 Tools for Drip Campaign

There are tools available online that can automate the “dripping” of your content. Marketing automation from Hubspot, Marketo and Drip top the list for Drip Campaign tools that allow the users to automatically publish pre-­‐written emails sent through timely campaigns. These drip campaigns usually have end goals in order to bring more prospects into the funnel or older leads back into the funnel and pipeline.

A lot of companies settle for this situation because they’re not ready to invest in a tool to simplify the process. However, email marketing tools don’t necessarily have to be expensive. You can find plenty of free email marketing tools that can help you save time and money. Let’s take a look:

1. HubSpot is consistently ranked as one of the top marketing automation tools across a spectrum of tasks. One of its top uses involves streamlining email marketing services through the use of automated

2. Marketo is one of the best overall automated email marketing services currently available. It gives businesses the ability to trigger email campaigns based on 40-­‐plus behaviors, which removes much of the “guessing game.”

3. Drip: As the name suggests, Drip is an app designed for streamlining the drip email process. It’s a surprisingly simple tool that packs quite the punch. The app features email gathering technology, pre-­‐made templates, and drag and drop elements for simple creation.

The current market is flooded with hundreds of best drip campaign software which claim to be equipped with Drip email facility. Choosing the right email marketing service can have a significant impact on the success of your marketing campaign. Email marketing is one of the most cost-­‐effective marketing tools for small businesses. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing on average sees a 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the United States. I’ve separated the wheat from the chaff for you, eliminating the frustratingly complex email marketing tools from your decisionprocess. Email drip campaigns may be the missing piece of your business growth puzzle.

These automated email sequences are very effective when it comes to brand awareness, increased sales, and consistent engagement.

The best part is, I have done the heavy lifting for you. I have sent some terrible emails in the past and learned from many trials and errors. So now I can help you send good ones. If you’d like some help setting up or improving your email drip campaigns, let me know in the comments. I’d love to help!