WHAT IS DRIP CAMPAIGN?
A drip campaign is a triggered, predefined order of scheduled emails or SMS sent to a target customer persona to push them further into the sales funnel. To put it simply, you can associate drip marketing with Tesla’s self-driving car feature. Self-driving cars sense the roads and are programmed to drive to a specified destination, moving based on the direction on a map. In the same manner, drip campaigns are automated emails sent after sensing a prospect’s action, driving them on a journey to eventually make a purchase based on an already preset pathway (map). And just like self-driving cars require human supervision for optimization, drip campaigns approaches have to be optimized after launching.
LAUNCHING A DRIP CAMPAIGN
Set the goal of the campaign:
Launching a drip campaign should only be a strategy to achieve your goal. When it comes to goal setting, the first thing that comes to mind is the S.M.A.R.T technique, which also applies here. S.MA.R.T is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely. There is an inexhaustible list of possible drip campaigns with different objectives; they may take on many different forms. For instance, a goal could be to help your customers have a positive after-sale experience. It is important to set a metric to measure the performance of your drip campaign and to see how well your goal has been met. A workable metric, in this case, could be your customer retention rate. Another example of a goal is to increase engagement on your website or provide your customers with valuable resources. A good metric for measuring it’s success would be the rate of increase in RSS subscribers.
Plan out your campaign:
- Segment your audience
Segmenting your customers based on customer journey insights helps you visualize the interactions of different customers with your brand and how you can get them to achieve your goal from their standpoint. Send drip emails that are relevant to recipients and their journey through the sales funnel to boost your chances of positive interaction. For example, if someone just learned about your company, they’re probably not ready to buy. Before witnessing a sales presentation, you still need to nurture with additional instructive, helpful information. Subscribers that are familiar with your brand and have been contemplating it for some time might benefit from product/brand comparisons, coupons/discounts, and free trials.
Find out what your audience wants and needs, then tailor your communications to meet those requirements. This can help you build stronger relationships and get greater marketing outcomes.
- Draft the message
Add Value
Your drip campaign may backfire if the emails don’t bring any value—people will consider them spam and convert less frequently than if you didn’t send them at all.
Make it readable and concise
Most newsletters are not being read by the majority of users. They’re scanning the content, therefore grab specific attention by using subheads, bold segments, and other techniques to make it scannable. When drafting the content of your drip campaign content, consider what your customer needs to know to prompt them to take the action you desire. Long copy is an issue that troubles corporate style users. Too many marketers and salespeople believe that cramming as much information as possible into an email is the way to go. You’ve got an entire sequence for it, don’t try to fit in everything in one mail. Keep communications to a minimum; no one likes reading extensive sales emails. Keep your emails around 200 words, simple and concise with one message. Consider the recipient’s perspective: which copy are you more likely to read and respond to?
If you want subscribers to use your digital product, for example, you might send them emails that explain how it works and present case studies of how other people have used it successfully or a link to a blog post about it, if the message is too long .
Subject lines
Drip campaigns don’t work if the email open rates are too low. Catchy subject lines are important to prompt your prospects to open the mail in the first place.
Respect Choices
Email best practices demand that you provide a visible option to get out of the campaign through an unsubscribe button.
Stay Consistent but give a little breathing space
Consistency is important, but so is moderation. Maintain contact with your audience while leaving them wanting more. Too much communication might come out as hostile, leading to unsubscriptions. Don’t send prospects more than one drip email each day as a general guideline. This allows them to take a breather and better absorb your information.
Above all, an email drip campaign should be well-coordinated. To guarantee that this happens, compose all of the emails in one sitting. While this may appear to be time-consuming and scary, many emails are just a few paragraphs long and can be sent in a single sitting.
- Consider suitable triggers for each segment
Users will enter your workflow using triggers. Triggers describe the action taken to enter into the workflow. They’re basically a set of requirements that a user must complete in order for a drip campaign to be sent to them.
- Optimize
Even though your emails are automated, it doesn’t imply you can ignore them completely. When it comes to fine-tuning and optimizing your drip marketing, A/B testing is the way to go. In the context of email marketing, A/B testing is a common practice of delivering one version of your campaign to a subset of your subscribers and another variation to a different group of subscribers with the purpose of determining which variation of the campaign generates the best results. After spending so much time focusing on certain user segments, it’s critical to analyze and alter those segments as needed. It’s also a good idea to experiment with various aspects (subject lines, language, tone, CTAs, and so on) to discover what works best. Even seemingly insignificant changes like that might significantly boost engagement and conversions.
Measure your results
From one email campaign to the next, email performance comprises various standard metrics and reports to detect concerns and possibilities. Open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate are the most regularly measured email metrics. These metrics are critical for determining if you should edit or resend an email, change the content, or not even send the email at all.
Urchin traffic monitoring (UTMs) is a reliable and straightforward technique for tracking user engagement. They’re tiny strings of text appended to the URL that may be used to track user behaviours and connect them to your campaign analytics dashboard. You may use numerous UTMs in your email to track the success of certain elements such as links, coupon codes, and CTAs.
A few examples of drip campaigns you can start now on Sendmunk are cross-selling/upselling campaigns, re-engagement campaigns, cart Abandonment campaigns etc.
