Email marketing is a powerful tool for cultivating customer relationships for your business. And it’s even more powerful when the communication is consistent. Being consistent can be tricky, and that’s where the marketing drip campaign comes in.
What is a Marketing Drip Campaign
Drip campaigns are a facet of email marketing. They are a set of emails that are triggered through various user actions. They are tailored specifically to interact and engage with the user with minimal effort after setup is complete.
Drip campaigns are a great way to respond to interest in your brand. And they allow you to start developing a relationship with potential customers. Or keep you top of mind for existing customers.
In a drip campaign, emails are automatically sent out at specified intervals. Keyword: automatically. This constant stream of information keeps you in front of your potential customer. It also begins to build a connection to your brand.
When the emails are sent, how many are sent, and what they say are all determined by your strategy.
Creating a Marketing Drip Campaign Strategy
The strategy you develop for your drip campaign will drive your business goals for the campaign. Goals may be to promote your brand, deepen the brand connection, promote features, reinforce a partnership or sale, build brand loyalty, or all of the above.
As you brainstorm your strategy and goals for the campaign, think about how your emails will bring readers value. What does each email offer them or help them understand? An email has to be worth their time, or they’ll unsubscribe before you send out the next one.
Your strategy will depend on your business and your goals; however, consider the interaction you would have with your customers in person. Mirror this in your campaign to match the natural flow of your business.
For example, when someone inquires about a project with us via our website, we first thank them for their interest, then we reach out personally. And then, we touch base again with some reasons why we think that working with them would be pretty nice. From there, we send out a reminder of our services, just in case they are considering working with us but aren’t clear on what we offer. We set this up through our strategy session. Each email is an effort to connect.
If a potential customer goes dark, they get a series of emails that welcome them back into the nice world and ask for their feedback regarding why they left.
Your campaign will likely take on a structure of its own. But we recommend sitting down and mapping out the flow of interaction between you and your customers, identifying where you have gaps, and filling those with automated communication paired with a personal touch.
Sometimes it’s hard for you to see this as you’re the person running the business.
Reach out to us and we can take a consumer-first approach to your drip campaign strategy that will reveal the answers you’re looking for.
Segment Your List
To have an effective campaign, it’s imperative that the right people are getting your emails. For example, you wouldn’t want a welcome email to go out to a longstanding existing customer.
In order to use email marketing to its full potential, you’ve got to establish groups within your email list. In
MailChimp, this is simple, and
here is a great step-by-step resource for setting up your groups.
Establish Triggers
Once you determine what your messaging will be and who needs to receive the emails, next you need to nail down your triggers. The triggers are what send out the emails without you physically hitting “send” on each one.
Most likely, your first email will send when someone subscribes or fills out a form on your website. However, you might also set the first email to go out when you add someone to a certain list.
After the first email goes out, there are a slew of triggers available to set for the subsequent emails. These include, but are not limited to, sending to those who opened a certain campaign, sending to those who did not open a certain campaign, sending to those who clicked on a certain link within a campaign, sending to those who join or leave a certain group, purchase a certain product, and more. Additionally, you can simply choose to have subsequent emails triggered by time. Emails can be sent after a certain number of days after the previous email or after the start of the campaign.
Design Your Emails
Once you plan out your campaign and string them in the correct order, you’re ready to develop your copy and design your campaign.
Holla at the girls at Nice Branding Agency and we’ll get your emails created for you. We can come up with the strategy, design, and copy for these babies. Since your drip campaign will be deployed over and over, it’s important that what you’re pushing out there is a good representation of your brand.
Every email should have an eye-catching headline, concise and on-brand body copy, and a compelling call to action. Links to social and your website are a plus, and a personal approach is preferred.
Email Platforms
We’ve talked about MailChimp a lot here, but there are other ways to send out a drip campaign. MailChimp is one of the most popular platforms (and also the one that we use), but you can also use
Constant Contact or
Emma. It just depends on what features you are looking for. We compared
email marketing platforms in a blog if you want more information on the features of some of our favorite platforms.
Whichever scheduling tool you use, your drip campaign will help you engage people interested in you, guide them through working with you, and connecting more deeply with your brand.
If you’re ready to get into some inboxes,
contact us today. We can create a drip campaign strategy and design that sets you apart, keeps you connected to customers, and happens all with the touch of a button.
