Automation is an essential component of most modern marketing campaigns. Not only does automation save your team members time that would otherwise be spent handling manual tasks, but it also reduces errors and enables you to reach a nearly limitless audience.
These facts are particularly relevant for email campaigns, which often involve thousands of recipients in multiple time zones. Drip campaigns are an excellent way to harness automation to maximize personalization and engagement in your messaging.
This type of marketing draws its name from the world of gardening and farming. Similar to how a drip line efficiently provides your zucchini plants or peach trees with small and consistent amounts of water, a drip email campaign involves steadily nurturing leads with small and consistent communication.
A drip marketing campaign is a customized series of pre-written emails that are automatically sent to people when they take a certain action. For example, let’s say that you sign up for a loyalty program from your favorite fashion brand. You’ll likely receive a welcome email shortly after this action explaining what the program offers. A few days later, you might get a follow-up email sharing some secrets about how to get even more benefits from the program. A week later, you might get another email from the same email campaign, offering an exclusive discount on your next purchase.
Rather than manually sending those emails to you, the fashion brand’s marketing team would’ve created and scheduled them to be sent to anyone who signs up for their loyalty program automatically. These slow-and-steady emails nurture your relationship with the brand. As long as the messages are relevant and provide value, you’ll probably stay loyal to the brand and continue giving them your business.
Because drip campaigns are tied to specific user actions, they can be personalized in a way that stands out from generic automated messages, increasing the odds that the message will be read by the recipient and spur a positive response.
When you create a drip campaign, you determine how many and how often emails should be sent. Common actions to set off a drip campaign include:
Registering for an event
Ordering a product or service
Signing up for a newsletter
Abandoning a shopping cart
Calling customer service
Drip campaigns go by a few different names in the marketing world, such as lifecycle emails, autoresponders, or automated campaigns. The common denominator is preparing messages in advance and determining the frequency and recipients. This customization ensures that the right people are getting the right information.
Just as drip irrigation helps plants grow better than a one-time drenching of water, drip campaigns help recipients grow. They might develop from a casual website visitor into a card-carrying member of your loyalty program. Or they might convert from a frustrated customer to a brand evangelist.
A key advantage of these campaigns is that you can build a relationship and share a deeper story. Rather than telling your customers that you care about them, you can show them how much you care by providing relevant information and resources consistently.
This long-play method of marketing blends well with modern consumers who aren’t bound by tradition. Your grandparents might have gone to the same grocery store every week out of habit, but most customers today are constantly looking for the best price, service, and experience. Staying connected with them through targeted marketing enables you to demonstrate what makes your brand superior and better suited to meet their unique needs.
The ideal number of emails and sending frequency for a drip campaign differs from business to business and within your own brand on different campaigns. Approach each drip campaign as a new opportunity to engage your audience and then decide on the best way to activate the plan.
Once a drip campaign is programmed, you’re free to handle other business or personal tasks. Without fail or complaint, your drip campaign will run behind the scenes and make life better for your employees and your customers.
The efficiency of drip campaigns is unmatched. Rather than sending out occasional emails with vague topics, you’re addressing real-time events in a customer’s life. This enhanced relevancy allows you to build connections that give you preferential status over the competition.
Considering the lifespan and scale of a successful drip campaign, it’s crucial to spend ample time constructing it. Gather the right members of your team to share insights. Observe what your competitors are doing. Then, create a sequence of emails that will inform, inspire, and delight your audience.
Here are six steps to creating a drip campaign:
1. Choose your target audience
Because drip campaigns are tied to specific people taking specific actions, start by identifying your target audience. Which subsection of your email list do you want to focus on? And what will this drip campaign offer to them?
For example, you could create a three-email drip campaign for individuals who sign up for your upcoming webinar. You could send two emails prior to the event, sharing information on how to log in for the event and get the most from it. Following the webinar, you could send out an email sharing highlights from the webinar.
2. Confirm the campaign’s trigger
You’ve decided who will receive your drip campaign messages, so this step is just to confirm what the trigger is. The trigger is closely tied to your primary goal for the campaign.
As mentioned earlier, most drip campaigns are triggered by actions that your target audience takes. But you can also make the trigger based on your audience’s demographic details. For example, to promote your brand’s new downtown Chicago retail location, you could launch a drip campaign for your customers who live in the city. Or you could base a reengagement campaign on inaction, meaning the emails go out to those who haven’t purchased any of your products in the past 18 months.
3. Outline the campaign
After identifying your audience and your trigger, it’s time to assemble the nuts and bolts of your drip campaign. Two initial factors to consider are how many emails are needed to accomplish your goals and how often these emails should go out to recipients.
Within that framework, you can decide what will happen after the first send. For example, how will you measure success? Document the metrics that you’ll use throughout the campaign to track progress and effectiveness.
4. Develop the messages
At this point, you know what you want to say in your drip campaign and how many emails you’ll be sending. Now you must craft messages that grab readers’ attention and represent your brand in the best possible way.
After writing each email with clear and actionable copy, have someone unrelated to the project read it to ensure it makes sense at first glance. If any emails within the sequence feel superfluous as you go through this process, don’t hesitate to revise your campaign structure to remove them.
5. Put your plan into action
Congratulations! You’ve invested the time and effort required to build this campaign, so it’s a wonderful feeling to send it out into the world. From the moment you activate the campaign within your email platform, it’ll be a precise and reliable asset for your business. Day and night, your campaign will work behind the scenes to build relationships and drive results.
6. Continue to revise
Even the strongest campaigns can benefit from refinement. Using the metrics you adopted during the outlining stage, monitor your drip campaign’s performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
Subject lines are the gateway to each email, so they’re a crucial element to test and improve. Other key parts of your emails include the preheader text, headlines, and calls to action.
Twilio SendGrid provides the support and resources you need to help your drip campaigns deliver maximum impact. Our user-friendly Automation helps you create personalized conversations and experiences with customers and then scale those messages as broadly as you desire. And a suite of customizable tracking tools ensures you always know how your campaign is performing and how you can improve it.
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