Email marketing is a great way to boost engagement and generate leads. A crucial element of the strategy is a drip marketing campaign. This helps automate the process of sending emails. You can use these campaigns to welcome new customers, convert and make new leads or increase sales.
What is Drip Marketing?
Drip marketing is sending several emails with the help of a CRM to prospects automatically. These emails can be timed and personalized according to the audience. Businesses often target drip campaigns on newsletter subscribers buyers stuck in the sales funnel.
Word “drip” refers to sending a slow and steady series of emails. Companies send prewritten emails according to the strategic automation plan. The best thing about drip marketing is that you only have to set it up once to reap all the benefits.
How to Use Drip Marketing?
Drip campaigns help you connect with the right person at the right time without doing the work every time. Messages such as Birthdays, Wishes, or order notifications are all automated.
These emails accompany a prospect through their sales funnel journey. It includes welcoming, on boarding, and nurturing leads into paying customers.
Important dates
Date-based automation helps you communicate with your audience on the days that matter to them. An example is wishing them on their birthdays or reminding them of the anniversary of their purchase. These steps reinforce your brand value and even prompt a sale.
If your business runs on a subscription or membership basis, then a drip campaign is the best way to remind them of renewal dates. Moreover, you can also propose exciting offers to them.
Communication-based on user’s behavior
An action by a prospect could also trigger drip campaigns. A typical example is welcome emails businesses send when someone new joins their audience. The gesture makes a good impression on the buyer.
You can also suggest related products to the purchase in the emails. For example, if someone buys a phone from your store, you can recommend phone covers that will go well with it.
And lastly, customers often add the products to the cart online but abandon the cart before making a purchase. It is where a well-crafted abandoned cart email comes in and encourages prospects to complete the purchase.
Pros of Drip Marketing Campaigns
Businesses that excel at drip marketing reap remarkable benefits. Here are a few reasons you should consider it:
- Boosts Engagement: Drip email marketing allows you to engage with customers efficiently. It happens because a targeted email is more relevant, which increases the number of responses. The open rate for drip campaigns is 80% higher than single-send emails.
- Creates Optimum Sales Funnel: The best way to nurture a lead is through drip marketing. Marketing automation saves time and resources for your business that you can invest elsewhere. Moreover, it also pushes leads towards conversion, resulting in more sales.
- Creates Brand Awareness: Sending relevant emails will help you impact the reader’s mind. Since your brand will stay with them, they might purchase from you and refer you to others. Drip marketing makes your brand seem more reliable and trustworthy; both are integral for success.
- Better than Cold Calling and Mailing: Days are long gone when people dialed prospects to make sales. Cold calling not only irritates the audience but also yields a low ROI. Moreover, it can also create a negative image of your brand. But with drip marketing, this is not the case since these campaigns can be profitable.
- Upselling and Cross-selling: Email marketing has a scope beyond converting leads into customers. Even after the sale, businesses want the customer to buy from them again. It depends on how much value you add in their life to your product. By expanding drip campaigns beyond conversions, you can gain some loyal customers.
Cons of Drip Marketing
While drip marketing may seem lucrative, you have to understand the disadvantages that come with it. Below are a few things you should know:
- Demands Time and Commitment: For drip marketing to work, you will have to stay persistent. Creating a strategy from scratch takes time and effort before you reap the benefits.
- Requires Ongoing Maintainance: Although drip marketing is automated, it does not mean you should set it up and forget. It requires ongoing monitoring of the process to ensure everything is working correctly.
- Not everyone likes sales emails: Some prospects may not dislike being bombarded with repeated sales emails. They might report you as spam which can harm your future deliverability. Moreover, they might think the business is tracking them with constant targeted emails. Therefore, you will have to be careful with what you automate.
How to Setup a Drip Campaign
- Identify your Goals: The first is to lay out the objectives you wish to gain from the campaign. For instance, some businesses use it to get more leads, while others improve sales. Having a goal will help you create a clear vision and measure results effectively.
- Identify your Target Audience: By knowing your audience, you will understand consumers’ needs. Learning demographics and the online behavior of consumers will be helpful. This step is necessary since it enables you to tailor content accordingly.
- Prepare Messages: This step is about creating the content that resonates the best with prospects. The campaign itself should not be lengthy, but it must focus on brand consistency.
- Plan your Strategy: The schedule of your emails plays an integral part in your success. Considering every favor, determine which customer segment should get a message at which times.
- Measure and Maintain: Once you have launched your campaigns, it is essential to keep an eye out for results. Closely monitor how each type of mail is working, which you can do so by checking key metrics. Based on the results, you can further improve your campaigns. Also, make sure to keep your copy from going stale since your offerings will become outdated eventually.
Final Thoughts
Drip marketing is an integral part of email marketing. With the right strategy and calculated risks, you can make an impact. Ensure a well-thought plan before starting the campaigns, which will increase your chances of success.
