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Want to stay fresh in the mind of your customers even when they might not be in the market to buy your product or service? If yes, then you must consider employing drip email marketing to engage your prospects and customers better and more efficiently. 

What is Drip Email Marketing? 

Drip Email marketing is a strategy for communicating information about a company through a stream of marketing emails that are automatically sent out to a specific audience after they set off a trigger. 

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A trigger can be anything from marketing engagement – an email someone opened – to orders made, pages browsed, actions taken in a third-party integration, and more. It is an event through which the customer or prospect becomes a part of the workflow.

Drip email marketing, also known as lifecycle email marketing, focuses on building continuity of communication and, subsequently, nuzzles the prospect toward making a purchase. These can include a series of just three emails or they can be daily emails sent out over for a week or two.

One of the best things about drip emails is that they are automated and, therefore, the marketer doesn’t feel the need to write new email content and manually sending it out every day. 

In today’s marketing landscape, it is important to balance list building and prospect engagement. This is where the drip email comes in handy and many big giants have also been employing it to lure in prospects, educate leads, reward customers, and more — all within the same email campaign. 

Read More: 10 B2B & SaaS Email Marketing Tips That Work!

Advantages of a Drip Email Marketing Campaigns:

1. Boosts engagement with lesser efforts: 

A great drip email campaign essentially weeds out unresponsive site visitors by proactively sending relevant material to targeted prospects and since they’re already interested, it shortens the sales cycle by moving leads more quickly through the funnel. Also, emails triggered based on user actions have a better chance of getting a response because they’re likely to be relevant.

2. It acts as a lead nurturing marketing funnel

Drip email marketing translates to something as simple as having a sales conversation through multiple emails. Nurturing prospects with a drip-email campaign allows you to tell the benefits of your product or service, answer potential questions, and address any issues a prospect may have. 

3. Helps in increasing brand awareness:

Building a brand that speaks to your customer needs is not simple and needs consistent efforts. This is where sequential marketing becomes important because it helps your business develop and nourish those relationships that are crucial to your success.

4. Saves time and energy:

As the entire process is automated and we design the campaign to send emails based on the user’s actions, it helps the marketing team to run the campaign with no hassle. It also increases the efficiency of your marketing team, as they can devote more time to campaign strategy and planning.

5. Improve customer acquisition and retention:

Drip email campaigns have the potential to nurture leads from mere prospects to long-time and loyal customers. They give the leads the right information at the right time to push them through the sales funnel. The most common characteristic of these kinds of campaigns include welcome, onboarding or activation, recommendation, and abandoned shopping cart emails. Each email in the drip serves a specific reason and drives customers closer to the goal of the campaign.

As per a study by MarketingSherpa, a large majority of U.S. adults — 72% — prefer communication with companies through email. Thus, automated email campaigns can yield impressive results when carefully planned and employed for a specific purpose, but what really makes for a good Drip marketing campaign?

Read More: Top 10 Email Marketing Tips For B2B Businesses

Elements of an Effective Drip Email Campaign:

And good drip email marketing campaigns are all about it. They nurture the leads and take them on a journey from “awareness of the brand” to “making a decision”.

In a survey of over 27,000 people across 14 different industries, McKinsey & Company found that consistency has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also to lift revenue by up to 15%.” 

There are certain key points that marketers must consider before designing their drip campaign.

1. Customer Segmentation: 

The first thing in any drip campaign must be identifying the targeted audience and distinguishing the right set of people to whom you are sending out your messages. 

Not all customers have the same behavioral patterns and therefore the drip should also cater to the particular segment of your consumer base. Your target group could be subscribers, first-time buyers, app downloaders, or trial purchasers. 

2. Set the right objectives:

Having a clear aim is no exception in any marketing strategy. You need to ask questions about whether the drip campaign is for lead generation, upselling, or re-activating inactive users? Also, you need to ensure measuring the performance of your campaign at all times. Knowing your goals and objectives will help you run a successful marketing campaign.  

3. Set the campaign triggers:

Triggers or actions that you want your prospects to take depends upon the type of drip marketing campaign you intend to run. The actions could be anything like signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, visiting a specific page, or something as important as buying a product or service.

4. Decide upon the content:

A common question might arise in the marketer’s head. How many emails in the drip campaign? Well, you can send between 4 to 11 emails at an interval to your customer base. The emails include welcome emails, cart abandonment reminders, birthday messages, and so on. These are pre-written emails and we should send them as per a precise schedule using triggers.

5. Drip Email software:

A good drip campaign needs a good marketing automation platform. There are many excellent tools in the market to choose from, each offering a variety of unique features and pricing structures. Platforms like Mailchimp, Hubspot, Sendinblue are just to name a few. When choosing the drip campaign tool that suits your needs, pay attention to features like automation, flexibility, ease of workflow setup, advanced level segmentation, and omnichannel support.

6. Focus on A/B testing:

Whenever running a drip campaign, try to run multiple versions of the same campaign. Make at least two variations of the same campaign so you can make a side-by-side comparison and adjust accordingly. A/B testing your campaigns is an awesome way to increase the open and click-through rates of emails.

Hubspot’s mobile call to action is one outstanding example of A/B testing wherein HubSpot tested four different versions of the CTA bar, using thank you page views as the primary metric and CTA clicks as the secondary metric.

7. Attach a CTA with most of the mails:

The best part of any marketing strategy is keeping your audience hooked. A prominent call to action ensures that the audience is aware of what their next course of action should be. You may create a call to action in your emails by adding buttons or using simple links. For a great CTA, try writing a gripping CTA copy and define its purpose. Also, creating a sense of urgency is a significant part of CTA. 

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