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What Is A Drip Campaign?
A drip campaign is a direct marketing campaign where information is “dripped” to an audience over a period of time. As opposed to a newsletter that you send manually, drip campaigns are automatically sent based on when someone joined your email list or took a certain action.
While you can create a drip campaign using your own content and any email client, a marketing automation or email marketing platform like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit can make the process 10x easier and offer insights like which contact are interacting with your emails the most and in which ways.
Examples of Drip Campaign Types
Lead Nurturing
This is the most common type of drip campaign, and involves sharing information related to your company’s offering to prospective customers. Lead nurturing campaigns typically use pain points to demonstrate how a product or service can help customers overcome them.
For example, a company that sells fitness equipment may send an email series focusing on the secondary benefits of exercise, like how it improves your mood, or how it suppresses the hormones related to appetite.
Onboarding
Welcome or onboarding emails are a great opportunity to share information about your product or service with new users, even if they’ve only signed up for a trial.
Not only can onboarding emails help familiarize a new customer with your offering, they can also serve as encouragement to explore features they may not have known about or used.
As your business grows, you likely won’t be able to guide every new customer through the onboarding process personally, so do the next best thing with an email series telling them exactly what they need to know to be successful.
How To Create A Drip Campaign
1. Identify Your Audience
The most difficult part of creating a successful drip campaign is deciding who it is meant for, and what problem it is meant to solve for them.
When it comes to understanding how to identify your target audience for a drip campaign, consider segmenting your email list based on recent actions performed, overall user behaviour, or demographic information. Being able to answer as many questions as possible about your audience will lead to better targeting.
Here are some sample questions:
- How long have they been a customer?
- How often do they log in?
- Are there any features they aren’t using?
- Have they communicated a specific pain point?
- Do they have an affinity for a specific product brand?
2. Plan Your Campaign
Planning a drip campaign involves two parts:
- Crafting the messaging
- Deciding on the logistics
When considering what you want to say, think closely about what the next steps might look like. A drip campaign that spans multiple emails has a singular, overarching goal, but assuming they don’t convert right away, what do you want the recipient to do or learn between emails?
Equally important are the logistics of the campaign. Consider the following questions:
- How many emails is this drip campaign going to consist of?
- What actions are going to trigger this drip campaign?
- What value or reasoning is there behind sending each specific email?
- How much information does the recipient need in order to do what you’d like them to?
- Is the messaging in each email aligned with the action we’d like the recipient to take?
- What’s the primary goal or action you’re trying to achieve?
- How are you choosing to measure the success of the campaign?
3. Setup Your Drip Campaign
Whichever email platform you decide to use, follow their process for setting up an automated drip campaign or drip sequence.
During this stage you’ll be uploading your email content, setting up the triggers that will determine when the drip campaign starts, and adding timelines to space out the delivery times however you’d like.
Once you set it up, hit “activate” or “start”.
4. Monitor The Results & Continue Revising
Nothing is ever perfect the first time, not everybody is going to convert, and drip campaigns have many complex variables which can easily be just slightly off.
If you aren’t getting the engagement you think you should, consider re-writing your calls to action before sending that next batch of emails, or adjust your audience segments to hone in on those more likely to convert.
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