There’s no doubt that marketing automation is a useful tool to help increase a business’ bottom line, but how do you strike the perfect balance between too much and too little when setting up an email campaign strategy with drip emails?
When done right, successful drip campaigns can lead to 20% more sales.
But, Why Use Drip Emails?
- Drives engagement
- Helps understand engagement levels and focus marketing/sales efforts on the leads that are genuine prospects
- Sends the right message at the right time
- Grows sales and drive revenue
- Acts as a sidekick and useful informant for the sales team
- Automation saves time
How to Implement Drip Campaigns:
While there is no one size fits all approach to the right frequency of drip email campaigns, there are necessary considerations to tailor your plan for success:
- Compare & Learn: Depending on your industry, an initial benchmark is to see what your competition is doing. Check out their frequency and consider beginning with something similar if they are a well-trusted and successful business.
- Industry-Specific: Based on your product or service, the frequencies of your emails will vary. For example, if your service is selling flowers, you’ll increase your marketing around holidays. If your product has a specific expected lifetime, like cosmetics, you’ll want to remind your customers to reorder based on when they last made a purchase. If you are a news service, daily emails are more relevant than once a month.
- Leave it to Them: Who knows more about what your customers want than your customers? Set up email preferences via a user profile so that they can opt-into the frequency and types of emails they wish to receive.
- Trial-and-Error: Marketing, especially email marketing, relies on testing to get it right. Use metrics to gauge whether you’re gaining or losing subscribers, and adjust your strategy based on engagement as feedback.
As mentioned, creating automated campaigns is a balancing act, and here are some of the email drip campaign content ideas to get you started.
How to Structure Drip Emails for Various Uses
The number one key to success across all these types of emails is to ensure you match the content to the prospect’s position in the sales journey to make the message relevant, timely and actionable.
You can set up marketing automation workflows to:
1. Remain Relevant and Trusted
Educational drip campaigns provide new leads with thought leadership content and information they need to know to help them convert into a paying customer. This type of email also positions your business as a trusted expert in your respective industry and promotes trust.
In the beginning stages, a customer is in the middle of many businesses competing for their attention, and of course, transaction, so by offering information or a differentiating factor to stand out, your preliminary emails can open the door to a new, and potentially, lifelong customer.
How to Do It: Write an email offering something useful to your client with a strong call-to-action to download an e-book or read more. Keep in mind that these customers are most likely researching your competition, so try to use data points to personalize the message so they feel a connection to your business from the get go.
2. Build A Relationship
With welcome drip campaigns, you can help grow engagement with a new subscriber. By creating a next step or promoting a new feature to keep them interested, you are leading them down the sales funnel in a seamless manner.
With smoove, you can set up a newsletter pop-up on your website, and once an email is captured, an automated welcome email will be sent with your desired content (and hopefully a call-to-action for the new user to take the next step).
How to Do It: Track a customer’s journey on your website, and then follow-up with a specific product they checked out and offer additional information to be a digital salesperson, informing them why they need to purchase said product.
3. Grow Your Prospect
Like plants need water and sunlight to grow, new prospects need communication and information to build trust, and loyalty. With lead nurturing drip campaigns, you can send different prospects content based on their position within the sales funnel. For example, new or active customers may receive tutorials whereas lapsed customers could receive an offer for a new trial.
Based on metrics and analytics, smoove uses smart data to move said contact into the next segment so that the next message they receive is based entirely on the action they took prior – whether they opened, clicked or ignored.
By setting up these customer journeys, your sales team has one less worry because follow-ups are automated.
How to Do It: Use customer personas and predict their steps and the questions they may have at each stage through their journey. Create a map with email triggers that automatically send tailored content to lead them through the sales funnel.
4. Retain Loyalty
Customers can choose to churn, but before you lose one, re-engagement drip campaigns can play a saving role in your retention efforts. It’s cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one, so you can set up parameters by which customers receive reminder emails to reorder or re-subscribe based on timing with their purchase history.
Additionally, re-engagement can come in the form of exclusive discounts and incentives that are compounded by an expiration date, adding a sense of urgency, or even a simple abandoned cart email reminder.
Even if an incentive is not involved or an immediate purchase is not the intended goal, an email to stay at the top-of-mind and maintain engagement and newsletter subscribers can be used to retain active contacts. Urban Outfitters provides a good example of this in their email that looks like a text message and communicates perfectly with their target audience by sticking to their brand’s voice.
How to Do It: Segment your database according to engagement levels. Create different content for those who have lapsed or not purchased in X amount of time. You can even break this list down further to those who haven’t purchased in X amount of time, but have also spent more than X amount of dollars in the past. Offer these customers a more enticing incentive to return than those who have provided less ROI historically.
5. Keep in Touch and Express Gratitude
For drip personalization messages, event marketing emails can be a very useful tactic. Whether you send emails to confirm a ticket purchase of RSVP, or send post-event surveys and recaps, there are multiple opportunities to really personalize the content and demonstrate your gratitude for a customer’s engagement.
Beginning by adding the event goers first name, you can also use dynamic content and incorporate photos of customers from an event which adds for a nice, personalized, and highly shareable touch.
Even if you don’t fully personalize the message, post-event marketing emails also offer an opportunity to gain valuable feedback and thank your customer for attending. On average, thank you emails generate a 40% open rate, so they should not be forgotten.
A nice example that combines different content within one neatly designed post-event marketing email comes from Marketing United.
How to Do It: Create post-event surveys and thank you emails before the event actually occurs. Then, automate the email to deploy the day after an event so that it is still fresh in your customer’s mind and it is relevant content.
Wrap Up
With email drip campaign best practices, you can utilize automation at all stages of a customer’s journey and make the message feel personalized using segmentation and triggers. It’s a time-effective way to stay on top of the sales funnel, while also being creative and strengthening your brand’s story in a timely and actionable fashion.
From welcome emails, drip nurturing campaigns, renewal drip campaigns, educational emails and more, drip email marketing is a seamless way to stay in contact with your customers at every stage and create a two-way street of communication to convert prospects to happy customers!
If you like what you’re reading, it’s time to turn the knob and get your drip campaign strategy flowing with smoove’s marketing automation platform.
