Drip marketing is communicating with your customers and leads at a scheduled time triggered by their actions. The most common medium of communication is emails and SMSs.
Drip marketing is the best way to engage your customers and leads with you as you send personalized messages to them based on their actions. This way they get a feeling that they are given special attention. Drip marketing is also the best way to retain your existing customers.
The emails are automated and prewritten.
Benefits of drip marketing
- Through email automation, there’s no involvement of humans in many tasks. This reduces a huge amount of time and manual effort.
- Nurturing and engaging customers and leads through personalized messages.
- Be among the top choices of customers, leading to a good amount of customer retention.
- Higher leads converting to customers.
- Gaining the trust and loyalty of customers and building a brand reputation.
- Ultimately higher ROIs.
Components of a Drip Marketing Campaign
There are three major components present in every drip marketing.
Triggers
These are the actions of customers and leads. Whenever a customer does any kind of action then based on that drip emails or SMSs are sent to them. Eg- when a customer buys something, views a page but didn’t buy anything, leaves items in the cart, etc.
Conditions
These are the response to the actions of customers and leads. Whenever a customer does any kind of action then drip emails or SMSs are sent to them. Eg- when a customer buys something then a thank you message and product recommendations based on the product they bought are sent to them. When a customer views your page and didn’t buy anything you can send an email regarding you can send a drip message stating that you left the page unattempted. There are some offers available for you. Or if a customer hasn’t bought from you for a long time you can send them a message asking them for the reason and ask for feedback from them so that you know what went wrong and how you can improve.
These messages motivate customers or lead to a great extent to buy from you.
Actions
Based on the conditions actions are performed like removing subscribers from a group, You can move a subscriber to another email list, updating a custom field, notifying your team, etc.
Steps of setting up a Drip Marketing Campaign
1. Know Your Target Audience
You have to identify and understand your target audience. Accordingly, you have to focus on your target audience rather than wasting time on everyone. This would take a toll on productivity. Then segment your target audience based on their triggers. Their triggers will help you to understand them well and what kind of products and services they need. Based on that you can segment them and send them the appropriate drip messages.
2. Prepare Content for the Drip Campaign
After knowing your target audience and segmenting them based on their actions, create content for your emails for different segments of audiences. First, write the actual content and then format it properly and add layouts to it. Then set its frequency. Finally, make them a part of your email sequence.
3. Plan Out Your Campaign
Planning involves outlining your campaign goals, finalizing triggers, and drip campaign frequency. Be cautious with each and every step of planning.
- First, decide your ultimate goal and how you want your drip campaign to turn out.
- Then based on your understanding of the target audience and their triggers make the content of your message.
- Then finally, segment and set your messages for automation.
4. Start Your Campaign
This is the 2nd last step of the drip campaign. Here the workflow is set up. The sequence of workflow is
- Build the automation(i.e. triggers, conditions, and actions)
- Set up the email list
- Finally, let the automation tool do its job.
5. Test and Measure Results
This is the final step of the drip campaign. Here you analyze the performance of your drip campaign. You have to monitor the open rates, click-through rates, and click-to-open rates. On your reporting dashboard, everything will be available. Then update and optimize your campaign based on that.
Some types of Drip Marketing Campaigns
Drip marketing can be of many types but the main types are
Nurturing Leads Campaign
Whenever a customer signs up for your subscriber list then you send them messages accordingly giving them a glimpse of how good your products and services are, and how much they can be benefitted if they use them. This helps a lot in converting leads into customers.
Welcome Drip Campaign
Whenever a lead buys for the first time then they are sent a welcome message welcoming them to the company. This gives a personal touch and makes customers feel welcome. Here in the welcome message, you can give product recommendations based on the product(s) they bought. This would further motivate them to buy more from you.
Post Purchase Drip Campaign
Whenever a customer buys anything an email or message in response to that thanking them should be sent. The email/ message should contain the invoice, receipt, other shopping information about their order, and a review option. Also, give some similar product recommendations based on their purchase.
Abandoned Cart Drip Campaign
Many times people just leave products in their cart for further purchase or simply don’t buy them at all. This could be due to several factors. This left items in the carts of customers or leads containing a lot of revenue. Hence you should give offers on those abandoned carts. These will definitely motivate customers to purchase those items. Many abandoned cart drip campaigns have gained huge success and brought immense revenues to the company.
Conclusion
Sending general promotional messages to customers won’t bring their attention to your brand. You need to send them personalized and customized messages based on their actions to grab their attention. Drip marketing campaigns are the perfect way to send personalized and customized messages to the customers and leads and motivate them to buy from your brand only rather than going to your competitors. This will definitely build your brand reputation and generate immense ROIs.
