Email Marketing Automation for Drip Campaigns
Email marketing has long been a powerful tool for businesses to engage with their audience. It allows you to reach out to potential customers, nurture leads, and build relationships with your existing customers. However, manually sending emails to each contact on your list can be time-consuming and inefficient. That’s where email marketing automation and drip campaigns come into play.
What is a Drip Campaign?
A drip campaign is a series of automated emails sent to people who take a specific action on your website. For any given action, you can choose how many emails to send and the rate at which to send them. These emails can be personalized with data like the contact’s name and specific references to the action they took. You might send an email drip campaign to someone who signs up for your online course, for example. Or, you could send a drip campaign to people who add an item to their online cart without buying it, also called abandoned cart emails.
The Power of Drip Marketing
Drip marketing is a strategy that involves sending a limited number of emails to your audience automatically, based on specific triggers or actions they take. This approach allows you to keep in touch with your audience in a personalized and targeted way. Here are some examples of triggers for a drip marketing campaign:
- Placing an order
- Attending an event at your store
- Signing up for a webcast
- Registering for a report or white paper
- Abandoning a shopping cart
- Engaging with customer service
- Not placing an order for a while
What sets drip marketing apart is its prewritten and automated nature. These emails are sent on a preset schedule in response to audience action or another strategic automation plan. The “drip” part refers to sending a slow and steady series of emails, typically 2, 5, or a number that suits your campaign without over-communicating. Once set up, your drip marketing campaigns happen automatically.
Why Use Drip Campaigns?
Drip marketing can significantly benefit your business in several ways. It can help boost sales by turning visitors into buyers, increasing repeat purchases, and reengaging a dormant audience. By communicating your company’s value, you build a relationship with your audience and demonstrate that you’re a great resource for their needs.
A study of 2,000 people found that half of us are engaged in “a never-ending search for products, services, and content to support behavior changing.” A drip campaign can support this behavior.
Drip campaigns can also be effective because they’re targeted, meaning they’re based on a specific action and can be personalized.
Explore some drip campaign examples to get a better idea of how this strategy can work for your business.
How Drip Campaigns Are Used
Drip campaigns are designed to reach out with a targeted message at the right time. Since they’re automated emails—like welcome messages, happy birthday wishes, and order notifications—they work for your business while you focus on other things.
Automated drip campaigns make it easy to connect with the right person at the right moment—without doing the work every time. Whether they’re triggered by dates or actions, there are many examples of drip campaigns that could work for your business.
Drip emails can accompany each potential customer through your sales pipeline. From welcome drips, onboarding sequences, lead nurturing campaigns, and abandoned shopping carts to new product recommendations.
Reach out on dates that are important to your audience. Date-based automations make it possible to communicate with your audience on the days that matter to them. You can use these automations on many kinds of occasions, like:
- Subscription renewal or reordering prompts.
- Birthdays, anniversaries, and other events.
Communicate Based on a User’s Behaviors
Many drip campaigns can be triggered by an action someone in your audience takes (or doesn’t take). Here are a few drip campaign examples:
- Welcome emails.
- First purchase automations.
- Product recommendations.
- Follow-up emails to educate and onboard your audience.
- Abandoned shopping carts.
- Lead nurture.
- Unsubscribe emails.
For a comprehensive glossary of email marketing terms, including “drip campaign,” check out Mailchimp’s marketing glossary.
How to Set Up a Drip Campaign
Drip marketing is an always-on marketing workhorse that maintains the marketing, nurturing, and selling essential to your success. Follow these 5 steps to set up and manage your drip campaign:
- Choose your trigger. What specific action or date will your drip campaign be based on?
- Identify your audience(s). For example, will your “first purchase” drip campaign go to all new audience members, or only those whose purchase is over a certain amount?
- Craft your message for each email. Your drip campaign emails don’t need to be long, but they definitely need to be consistent with your brand.
- Measure and adjust based on performance. The right measurement for your campaign will be based on the type of email you send, its audience, and other factors.
- Maintain your drip emails. Review all your drip campaigns periodically to be sure they don’t go stale.
Start using drip campaigns for your company. With all that you have to do, use drip marketing to help with company promotion efforts! While it’s sending the right message, at the right time, to just the right audience, you can be focused on other business priorities. You can use Mailchimp marketing automation software to set up an effective drip campaign. See how Mailchimp’s free marketing automation tools compare to the competition.
Keep the title of Email Marketing Automation for Drip Campaigns in mind as you explore the power of automated email marketing in your business. With the right strategy and tools, you can grow faster and build lasting relationships with your customers.
For more resources and information on drip campaigns, check out these links:
- Best Drip Email Marketing Apps
- Drip Campaign Examples
- Drip Marketing Insights
- Mailchimp’s Marketing Glossary
Happy dripping!
