How to Implement Strategy for a Drip Campaign

Creating Your Drip Campaign Strategy

If you’ve never heard of a Drip Campaign or haven’t used one, I’d suggest reading my previous blog where I have covered the basics in easily-­‐digestible details. Please check it out before we move forward so that you can get a clearer picture of the magic that Drip Campaigns can create in converting leads into customers. I know how much time and effort you put into building your email subscriber list. But growing that list is only half the battle. I’ve seen many companies having success with adding customers to their email lists but struggling with the content portion of their email marketing strategy.

Do you know that more than 280 billion emails are sent daily? This figure is expected to reach 333 billion daily emails by the end of 2021. Email marketing strategies have changed over the years. What worked five years ago, now no longer works.

Did you also know that an enormous percentage of qualified leads never convert? It comes down to a lack of engagement. Engaged leads convert. The primary goal of an email drip marketing campaign is to attract the right subscribers. And send subscribers highly relevant emails that encourage them to commit to your call to action. However, the usual “sign up to receive my newsletter” opt-­‐in box won’t cut it anymore. Nor will sending subscribers emails intermittently about topics they didn’t sign up for. But how do you keep leads engaged without spending all of your time babysitting emails? Automated drip email campaigns. In this post, I’ll show you how to set up a Drip Email Campaign for successful lead engagement.

Defining marketing goals always means defining company goals, because marketing is not an end in itself. The basic goals are always: more sales, more turnover, more profit. Ideally, all of this with the highest possible return on investment (ROI). The first step to crafting a lead nurturing strategy is to understand what different segment your leads fall into. A study by HubSpot found that all email marketing KPIs perform better when you segment your email list. If you segment your lists, you get better open rates, revenue, leads,

transactions and more customers. Another benefit is that segmentation goes hand in hand with GDPR and email marketing. Now let’s understand the importance of having Marketing objectives and how it can be linked to a Drip Campaign. It is best to define both qualitative and quantitative objectives.

Qualitative Marketing Objectives

Your qualitative goals should be about customers’ perception of your product and/or service. Awareness is also important when it comes to qualitative data. You must create an awareness of what you offer. This is important in order to get the consumer to purchase from you. You can often increase awareness through advertising efforts. Quantitative objectives help you define what success actually looks like for your qualitative objectives, so you’ll have a clear picture on how to execute your strategy instead of trying a hundred different things without any direction.

For example, increasing the perceived value by offering a discount or lowering the price of your offering. Positioning is also qualitative, where does your product and/or service rank when it is compared to your competitors. You increase the position of your product by educating on the quality of the product and/or service that you offer. You can also increase the positioning by going after a specific niche or targeted market and presenting that specialty as an expertise.

Quantitative Marketing objectives

Quantitative marketing is about the numbers. For example, how many attendees, how many units sold, or how many leads captured, etc. Quantitative marketing goals also refer to measures such as the so-­‐called “conversion rate”, a kind of “action/effect ratio”.

Your quantitative lead nurturing objectives might be:

1. Increase market share by X% in the next financial year
2. Increase the conversion rate by X% on the site within the next year
3. Increase sales cycle speed by X%
4. Reduce the number of leads rejected by sales to X%

When defining your marketing goals, make sure your goals are SMART. They should be specific, measurable, accepted, realistic and timed. Next, you’ll want to design an email funnel that hits your quantitative and qualitative goals.

At a high level, here’s the structure of a lead nurturing campaign that takes leads through the buyer’s journey. What makes this model a tried and tested outline of the typical process that leads follow from the moment they find your blog post or website page is that it is simple and applicable across every industry and niche. Your lead generation campaigns have the power to reach a huge audience. Only some will gain awareness. Only a few will continue on with interest in taking it to the next level. Only some of those will express desire and just a few will proceed to the final stage to take action.

Creating Your Drip Campaign Strategy

If you’ve never heard of a Drip Campaign or haven’t used one, I’d suggest reading my previous blog where I have covered the basics in easily-­‐digestible details. Please check it out before we move forward so that you can get a clearer picture of the magic that Drip Campaigns can create in converting leads into customers. I know how much time and effort you put into building your email subscriber list. But growing that list is only half the battle. I’ve seen many companies having success with adding customers to their email lists but struggling with the content portion of their email marketing strategy.

Do you know that more than 280 billion emails are sent daily? This figure is expected to reach 333 billion daily emails by the end of 2021. Email marketing strategies have changed over the years. What worked five years ago, now no longer works.

Did you also know that an enormous percentage of qualified leads never convert? It comes down to a lack of engagement. Engaged leads convert. The primary goal of an email drip marketing campaign is to attract the right subscribers. And send subscribers highly relevant emails that encourage them to commit to your call to action. However, the usual “sign up to receive my newsletter” opt-­‐in box won’t cut it anymore. Nor will sending subscribers emails intermittently about topics they didn’t sign up for. But how do you keep leads engaged without spending all of your time babysitting emails? Automated drip email campaigns. In this post, I’ll show you how to set up a Drip Email Campaign for successful lead engagement.

Defining marketing goals always means defining company goals, because marketing is not an end in itself. The basic goals are always: more sales, more turnover, more profit. Ideally, all of this with the highest possible return on investment (ROI). The first step to crafting a lead nurturing strategy is to understand what different segment your leads fall into. A study by HubSpot found that all email marketing KPIs perform better when you segment your email list. If you segment your lists, you get better open rates, revenue, leads,

transactions and more customers. Another benefit is that segmentation goes hand in hand with GDPR and email marketing. Now let’s understand the importance of having Marketing objectives and how it can be linked to a Drip Campaign. It is best to define both qualitative and quantitative objectives.

Qualitative Marketing Objectives

Your qualitative goals should be about customers’ perception of your product and/or service. Awareness is also important when it comes to qualitative data. You must create an awareness of what you offer. This is important in order to get the consumer to purchase from you. You can often increase awareness through advertising efforts. Quantitative objectives help you define what success actually looks like for your qualitative objectives, so you’ll have a clear picture on how to execute your strategy instead of trying a hundred different things without any direction.

For example, increasing the perceived value by offering a discount or lowering the price of your offering. Positioning is also qualitative, where does your product and/or service rank when it is compared to your competitors. You increase the position of your product by educating on the quality of the product and/or service that you offer. You can also increase the positioning by going after a specific niche or targeted market and presenting that specialty as an expertise.

Quantitative Marketing objectives

Quantitative marketing is about the numbers. For example, how many attendees, how many units sold, or how many leads captured, etc. Quantitative marketing goals also refer to measures such as the so-­‐called “conversion rate”, a kind of “action/effect ratio”.

Your quantitative lead nurturing objectives might be:
a) Increase market share by X% in the next financial year
b) Increase the conversion rate by X% on the site within the next year
c) Increase sales cycle speed by X%
d) Reduce the number of leads rejected by sales to X%

When defining your marketing goals, make sure your goals are SMART. They should be specific, measurable, accepted, realistic and timed. Next, you’ll want to design an email funnel that hits your quantitative and qualitative goals.

At a high level, here’s the structure of a lead nurturing campaign that takes leads through the buyer’s journey. What makes this model a tried and tested outline of the typical process that leads follow from the moment they find your blog post or website page is that it is simple and applicable across every industry and niche. Your lead generation campaigns have the power to reach a huge audience. Only some will gain awareness. Only a few will continue on with interest in taking it to the next level. Only some of those will express desire and just a few will proceed to the final stage to take action.

The biggest part of the funnel is the top. This is where you get most of your traffic from various sources. You may think that there is not much you can do to optimise this area, but, in reality, there are a few ways to improve your traffic generation efforts. For starters, you will need quality content that is optimised for search engines so that your leads can find you in the first place.

The middle of the funnel is where conversion really begins to become a reality. At this point, you have gotten attention and you have a real chance of hitting it home. Don’t assume that your work now is done. Rather than churning out content, your goal at this point is to engage on a deeper level. You may have plenty of content that is being read and even shared without conversions ever happening. It’s a simple approach that qualifies leads as they move along their journey.

When you have gotten leads to this point, you are very close to signing on the dotted line. Your work is not quite done yet, though, so don’t get too comfortable. Even the warmest lead can suddenly go cold if you have not taken the right steps to bring them home. The

bottom of the funnel comes down to acquisition. You will soon hand over leads to sales but first, you will need to be fully sure that the leads are ready. Some of the ways that you could optimise this part of your lead nurturing funnel could be to focus on all the final details that make or break a sale – checkout process, payment options, trust, customer service and support, sales service, after-­‐sales, and even order size and value. Here is a more simplied way to understand Sales Funnel.

My Quick Note On Lead Nurturing

You can use a Drip Email Campaign any time you want to keep users engaged with your brand through a pre-­‐written, timed or triggered series of emails. A Drip Email Campaign is an automated set of pre-­‐written emails that go out based on a specific timeline or user behaviors. Drip Email Campaigns are also known as autoresponders, automated email campaigns, email automation, and lifecycle emails. Drip Campaign, Lead nurturing and Sales Funnel all form part of the same marketing objective. They help achieve the common aim of building customer relationship, ultimately leading to conversion and long term engagement with the brand.

Your customers don’t always reach your site ready to buy immediately, so you need to have a method for taking them from where they are at in their customer journey and helping them move forward. Flashy web design and a friendly social media presence alone don’t impress modern consumers. They expect those things -­‐-­‐ it’s the bare minimum. Consumers have heard every line and seen every clever presentation. Before working or buying from any company, they need to know that their best interests are being kept in mind. They need assurance that you’re reliable and that you can continually provide value. The relationship needs to be nurtured.

Lead nurturing requires a personal touch. With lead nurturing, you’re reaching out to your consumers via different touch points, and providing them with the information they need to move on to the next stage of the Buyer’s Journey. On top of that, lead nurturing is a great strategy for companies who want to increase their sales without increasing their marketing budget. According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead. (DemandGen Report)

Lead nurturing practices require a lot of monitoring and tracking accompanied with efficient lead management. Each lead takes up a different path and reacts differently to your marketing efforts. So, the typical drip marketing has now evolved into behaviour-­‐ based lead nurturing drip marketing. You should create a variety of emails for your lead nurturing campaign that will keep your customers engaged and entertained. Depending on where they are in the buying process, your leads will be interested in different things.

The process of lead nurturing sounds complicated, but it’s well worth the effort. It will take some time to get everything implemented, but after with some small tweeks to your lead scoring, email copy, and other details until you start getting the conversion rates you want.

Quick tips while working on Lead Nurturing:

1. Create personas for your ideal
2. Segment your existing content by funnel location and what issues it
3. Decide on your timeline, frequency, and call to
4. Create a variety of emails to educate and entertain your
5. Start running your campaigns
6. Evaluate the
7. Rinse and

Lead Nurturing Begins With Writing An Effective Email

When welcoming someone online, we should not forget our manners! I always recommend to put together a welcome email sequence to introduce your new subscriber to your brand, the brand personality, and the products/services it offers.

The recipe works as follows: every time a user signs up, the trigger is automatically activated and a welcome email sequence begins. The sequence allows you to go into more detail regarding various aspects of the brand which may include a warm welcome, a reminder to whitelist your email address, information about the frequency of your emails, as well as a link to the unsubscribe page.

Don’t be guilty to entice the people on your mailing list to take any action that helps your audience and your brand increase affinity. You may ask them to follow you on social media, register for a webinar, explore some of your website content or take practically any action you may consider important when you welcome a new subscriber to your list.

The Very Important Welcome Email

A welcome email is the first and the most important email of your automation series sent when a new subscriber opts into your email list. This email would be the first impression of your brand. Welcome emails help your brand in setting up a relationship with your new subscribers.

When we say personalized email marketing, we don’t mean that you send an individual email to every single subscriber. Personalization means that you use customer data to create a personalized message.

The simplest form of personalization is to address the reader by name. Most email service providers (ESP) offer this within their functionality and this tactic alone will improve your campaign performance. Your emails should never appear automated or like a mass “blast.” Think outside the box. Consider addressing your emails from various departments in your organization, such as a member of your sales team, your founder, or a department that will help you close a sale. Personalized emails are extremely helpful towards the end of a leads sales cycle.

The example from Hubspot is great because it performs two important functions:

• Personalization. The email uses the data entered by the lead to download the content. Hubspot uses this data to address the receiver by name plus the text is written in a really conversational way. For example, “join us for a webinar” implies casual friendliness that is preferred by the most
• Support. Starting with the very first email, the company tries to make the lead feel important by providing several ways in which they can be reached. This is a great technique for demonstration that a company is serious about what it does.

Usually, welcome emails take the form of a landing page that thanks you for signing up and the benefits you’ll get while signed up. If your Welcome email is not well-­‐designed, you can’t really expect users to click those CTAs.

Let’s take another example. If you look closely, it instantly tells you how Smart Insights will help you in ‘improving your digital marketing capabilities’.

To get things rolling, Smart Insights offers a customized recommendation and also an “alternative”. Everyone wants to know their competitive ranking, which is why the green CTA with “See how you compare” words strikes the perfect chord.

My 3 top suggestions for Creating Optimized Welcome Emails:

1. Keep it simple: Keep it short for mobile readers and people who don’t have a lot of time on their hands (so… everybody). Keep your welcome email straightforward and use your follow-­‐up drip emails to deliver more valu
2. Send immediately: Your new subscriber/signup/customer is engaged with your brand. By subscribing or purchasing or signing up they’ve essentially said something to you. Don’t be slow in
3. Personalize where possible: You may only have an email address, but if you have more, use it. Merge tags aren’t exactly the newest thing out there, but they’ve still shown to have, on average, improve email click through rate by 33%.

After Welcome Email Comes Onboarding Emails

Welcome emails are usually followed by onboarding emails. Once a user signs up, an email is sent to that user. Each company has their own approach, but they all have one purpose – to educate and guide new users. There are certain requirements to ensure a successful onboarding process. Personalization, education and user behavior tracking are the keys for effective onboarding emails. Every user is like a baby learning to walk. A lot of education is down the road. Think about every lead magnet you ever signed up for. Of all of those free ebooks, courses & discount codes, how many of those company’s user onboarding flows convinced you to become a customer?

How many of them do you still buy from?

I don’t know about you, but judging by my own inbox, what happens after I hand over my email address is just… disappointing.

Educating customers on the key benefits they can receive from the product, and helping them reach the product ‘aha moment’ is one of the most effective ways to onboard new customers and drive long-­‐term engagement.

Let’s look at this classic example of User Onboarding email from Buffer:

I love how Buffer is accompanying the user along the journey. They then Follow up frequently and make sure the user’s on track. You must research and understand your customers before composing an onboarding email sequence. Start paying attention to how people are using your app, and what actions ultimately lead to conversions.

Onboarding emails should provide the user with the product knowledge they need and to get them interacting and engaged. Tell your new user explicitly what your app does and how it will benefit their life. Then, show them a story to cement that idea.

Here’s another example from MeetEdgar. Their Drip Campaign triggers email like the below when the user does not show any activity after signing up. What I love about this is that they are making sure their lead stays engaged. This is followed by a value adding guide link.

Personalized, timely user onboarding emails are great at moving users to the next step. To deliver those kinds of context-­‐aware emails, they need to be trigger-­‐based. One rule of the thumb with effective user onboarding emails is to keep it simple stupid (KISS principle).

Avoid rambling. Go straight-­‐to-­‐the-­‐point. Ditch the corporate lingua. Adopt a casual tone.

My Conviction In Drip Campaign

While marketers were getting distracted with the next shiny strategy or tactic, email didn’t go anywhere. People were still willing to communicate with businesses through their email, and the benefits of email marketing campaigns became much more clear, consistently delivering better results than the newest fad. Advanced lead nurturing campaigns include automated drip campaigns, but these campaigns are triggered based on lead behaviour and dynamic segmentation. Drip campaigns are perfect for this kind of situation because they allow you to get in touch with a lead when they’re still in the evaluation stage.

As a busy marketing and sales organization, you want those touches to happen automatically and to send to the right person at the right time. The way to nudge them to the mid-­‐stage is to speak to their needs with non-­‐salesy, helpful content, Get it right and you’ll be turning blog readers into paying customers, clients into repeat buyers and your regulars into brand loyalists who find it difficult to go elsewhere.