Most of the businesses opt for email marketing as a way to communicate with their customers. Right from sending out the company updates to informative content, email marketing is everywhere. While sending out these newsletters is a good thing, it is important to send it to only the right people at the right time when they need it. All of these emails are sent to the people when they sign up. This is where drip marketing will come into the picture.
Now, you may ask what this drip marketing means. We are going to discuss it in the next steps. When to send the emails and what to send is something that completely depends on companies and varies from one another. Let us discuss everything you need regarding drip marketing in this blog. Make sure to stick around, there is a lot of information that you will be needing.
- What is Drip Marketing?
- When Should You Use Drip Marketing?
- Main Goal of Drip Email Marketing
- How to Set Up Drip Marketing?
- Wrapping it Up
What is Drip Marketing?
Drip marketing is sometimes also termed as automated email campaigns, autoresponders, lifecycle emails, email marketing automation. The definition of this concept is so simple. The emails are sent to a set of audience automatically as per the schedule. Let us understand this with an example.
A user has signed up for your email newsletter- you will be sending first email immediately thanking them for signing up followed by some other marketing related emails according to a schedule. This is not the only way you can send emails, emails can be sent as per triggers, the actions that were performed like making a purchase, leaving a review, etc.
These emails can also be termed as behavioral emails. Sending out these drip emails is not an easy task. There is a lot of planning and testing that goes in the backend before the marketers blast these.
They are the automated set of emails that will go out to a specific number of users at the same time. This way businesses get a chance to stay in touch with their users as soon as they sign up to the emails and newsletters.
The best thing about these drip emails is that they are pre-written and sent in queue to the recipients. There won’t be any need to write them manually. You can give a personalized touch to the emails by mentioning the user name, company info, etc.
All of this are done with the help of drip marketing software directly, you just have to set it up one time. Marketers use this drip marketing campaign to reach out to the right people at the right time. This will make a world of difference for your business and costumers too.
You may ask how? Let us see it with an example.
A user has liked the content you are sharing on your website and wanted to sign up for your newsletter, you have to grab their attention by sending out a beautifully curated email just saying welcome and thanks for signing up.
If there is a user who has been lingering around one of your product pages but not making a purchase, you can offer them a special limited time discount which would prompt them to complete their purchase. Like this, being available to the users whenever they require with your emails is one of the best ways to reach out and stay in touch with them.
The beauty lies in the entire drip marketing automation. There can be multiple number of emails but none of them are sent manually. Depending upon the pre-set triggers, customer behavior and actions they take, these emails are sent immediately. You just have to define triggers as well as user segments and automation will take care of the remaining.
The one question here is- does drip marketing really work? Well, the answer for this is yes. According to a research conducted by email marketing company Emma, it has been proven that an email that is sent to the target audience, that is the drip emails, are 18 times more revenue than the regular broadcasting emails without any personal touch.
You won’t be surprised with this because the drip emails have a click rate of 119% and when there is catchy content in the email, it is imperative for the readers to click it which can eventually make them a buyer.
These statistics may surprise you given that you won’t be spending a lot of time and effort into drip email marketing. The content that you share can be reused for different customers, all the mails are sent out automatically,
These drip campaigns can be customized according to your requirement. You can educate the users, reward the best ones, etc. Apart from all that you can pinpoint the required user groups with drip emails, segment this email list, and reach out to the right people at right time.
The lists can be segmented according to your requirement. You can divide the lists based on purchase history, demographics, the emails that particular user has opened in past thus leading to more conversions, and less unsubscribes.
Anything too much is going to annoy the users. This is the reason why you have to focus on sending emails in batches. The segmentation of these emails should be done the right way so that your customers will receive it right on time without any hassle.
By the way do you know that the name drip marketing has been taken from a technique that is used in farming. With drip marketing, marketers slowly develop a relationship with their customers by nurturing them which is quite similar to sapling done by farmers.
When Should You Use Drip Marketing?
When we are talking about drip marketing, there are various marketing strategies present under its hood. However, there is just one goal- make sure that users are engaged with your product.
However, we have curated five use cases where you can use the drip marketing strategy.
Nurturing Leads
Leads is a term that is commonly thrown around in marketing and sales teams. Leads are the people who might be quite interested in purchasing your product but still need little nurturing. You just have to stick with them until they purchase the product.
This lead nurturing can be done at various stages in different formats starting from educating the lead about your product, show them the features that they need and are present in your software and offering them free trials.
According to a survey done by Drip, 50% of the leads turn into sale ready customers if they are nurtured properly. According to Emma’s survey, when you nurture a lead, they will be ready to make 47% large purchases.
It is not possible to nurture all of your leads manually right! This is where drip marketing automation will step in. It will do most of the work and requires very less of your intervention.
There are different types of drips that companies usually work on- let us check about all of those drips going forward.
Welcoming
So, you have achieved some exceptional results with your marketing campaign and a lot of people have already signed up for your newsletter. The main question now that you will be facing is “how are those people going to understand your product/service or in total your business?”
This is where your welcome emails are going to aid you. Welcome emails are a great way to introduce your company to the new users who are recently added into your email list. You can discuss your company, the product or services you offer, or anything that might help your business.
One thing that you have to remember here is that the content that you will be sending out in the form of welcome emails is going to have a long lasting impression on your customer. If you are planning to have them hooked up for your email, it is important for you to provide them value with the best content that you have got.
With drip marketing automation, anyone who signs up for your email list will get an immediate mail as soon as they do it. Their contact will be added into that particular segment and if you have any workflow set, the emails will be sent out according to that workflow.
Do you know that the welcome emails have a better open rate when compared to other normal emails? Yes, according to Experian’s research, the average open rate of welcome emails is 58.7% while normal emails get an open rate of 14.6%. If you send the welcome email immediately after they sign up within some seconds, the open rate is 88.3%. That is how effective these emails are and people actually expect a cool simple welcome email in their inbox.
What are you waiting for now? Create some interesting email content and put it in your drip marketing campaign.
Onboarding Email
Getting new users signing up for your brand is well and good but the real ROI comes when they make a purchase from you. When a customer purchases your product or service, it is important to get them onboard.
When a purchase happens on your website, that particular buyer will immediately get an onboarding message for that particular product or service. These onboarding emails should consist of the way your buyer can use the product or service, the features, benefits and a lot more.
Cart Abandoners
Cart abandonment- a common thing that most of us do. After putting in lot of marketing efforts and nurturing your lead, they can still leave the product in cart and abandon it. These kind of customers are common for both physical and virtual products. It is important to nurture these people enough to make them purchase something.
Once you create this workflow in drip marketing automation, these people will receive an immediate email about the product they have abandoned. You can send them an email asking them to purchase it before it goes out of stock or even offer them some reward if they complete the purchase.
This is something that matches with your business requirement.
Recommendations
You are browsing on Amazon for a product and you will come across a section called- ‘you might also like.” Companies analyze your behavior and suggest you the products that you will show interest in. These recommendations are quite common and most of the businesses offer this.
With drip marketing campaigns, you can also send product recommendations to your target audience. As per the behavior of your target audience you can design these recommendations and send it to them.
All of these are just some of the use cases for drip campaigns while different businesses are using these for various purposes. These drip marketing emails can be customized as per your requirement, so it is not something that you have to worry about.
Main Goal of Drip Email Marketing
Drip email marketing is important for businesses irrespective of the fields they are in and the products they sell. But why? What is the main goal of drip email marketing? Let us discuss this.
Turns Strangers into Leads
When a visitor comes onto your website, they are nothing but a stranger to you. Once they sign up, you will get to know their name and email address. With drip campaigns, you will be interacting with these stranges on daily basis.
This way you will get familiar about them and vice versa. Only customer knowing about your brand is never going to cut out, even brand has to know about the person and understand them before they can start any kind of marketing campaign.
The main goal of drip marketing is to make this possible. By sending interactive emails to the customers, they will get to know about your product, understand it and you may see what kind of emails they are preferring to open and what not.
Leads into Sales
Once customers start understanding your brand, it is time to turn them into buyers. Lead is a person who is familiar with your brand and has been present in your contact list. Just generating leads is not going to do you any good.
You have to make them your buyer too and drip emails can help you here. Sending automated emails at regular intervals will help in imprinting your brand on the mind of the prospects.
Once they become quite familiar with the brand, you can keep prompting them to make a purchase by sending offers, discounts and a lot of other things. Turning the leads into sales is the only way you will be able to get revenue right! So, make the most out of drip campaign marketing.
Sales into Repeat Customers
So, you have made a sale, is that it? No, right! That particular customer should become your repeat customer and should become quite loyal to your brand. This can also be done using drip management.
A returning customer is quite valuable and it is easy to sell products or services to them when compared to new buyers. With drip campaign, it becomes easy for brands to reach out to already existing customers and prompt them to buy something from you.
Repeat Customers Into Brand Advocates
Once you form a strong relationship with your customers, they can become your brand advocates too. It is that simple. You just have to nurture a relationship with them and that would be it.
All the above steps need a different different drip campaign and you can plan it as per your requirement.
How to Set Up Drip Marketing?
You may know what drip marketing means and some of the situations where it can be used. But without a clear understanding of what drip marketing is, all this information goes to waste. You need to understand how you can set up drip marketing to make it work effectively.
Don’t fret! It is not going to be that tough. Let us understand some details about drip marketing setup. It is quite easy if you have proper planning in place.
Know Who Your Target Audience Are
You may have a huge list of subscribers but you cannot send only one type of email to all of them right! The subscribers list must be broken down into different subsections to ensure that you understand who your target audience are.
You need to understand what kind of triggers you are going to use. Usually, there are two types of triggers that are used in drip campaigns- action based and demographics based.
One cannot understand what these are without understanding examples. So, let us see an example each to understand what these two are meant.
Action Based
A user has subscribed to your newsletter, it is an action and once this action is taken you need to send them an email welcoming them to your email list. Drip campaign does this and this is called an action based trigger.
Demographic
A user has visited your website or app once and hasn’t returned to it ever since. In such situations, you can remind them about the website or app with a drip email.
There is one thing that businesses need to focus on and that is behavioral understanding. When you do proper analysis of customer behavior, it becomes easy to understand what they need and how you can help them. You can build an entire profile mentioning all the details related to each and every customer.
You can try targeting the audience based on their characteristics such as visit frequency, would they click on the certain subject lines, when did they sign up, how often are they going to visit your premium services page, from when they have been paying customers.
Craft Your Message
Now you have an idea of whom you are targeting, the next thing that you need to focus on is generating the right message. What do you want the user to focus on? What do you want them to do?
Depending on your answer here, you can write a copy that is clear, attractive and actionable. Make sure that you are maintaining a consistent voice across all of the emails that you have been sending to your readers.
The copy must be clear, interesting, and make the user get hooked to it.
Plan the Campaign
Now, it is time for you to create a workflow for your campaign. Right from the first email that you send out to the user to sales and after sales service, you need to know about everything. When you set the workflow, you have to ensure that each email that you are sending out aligns with the other perfectly.
The frequency of your emails is going to play a very important role. You cannot keep sending emails to your users frequently right! There should be a balance. Know about your target user and understand what they need. That is when you can plan the email campaign.
Triggers are in Line
Your triggers are the next most important thing that you need to think about. The triggers must stay in line with the email context. You cannot send a 30% off coupon to a customer who has already made a purchase of the same product right! You need to send them a thank you note for shopping along with some product suggestions if needed.
This is the reason why you have to work on the triggers properly.
Run it Manually
It is time for you to run the drip marketing campaign manually. You have to run it manually for some times before you set the automation. If there are any hiccups in between, you can adjust them. You can also tweak the workflow as per your requirement here.
Wrapping it Up
Hope now you got to understand what drip marketing is and how you can set it up. For every business irrespective of the field you are in or size of the business, it is quite important to focus on segmentation of audience and sending targeted emails to them.
If you are ready to get your drip marketing started, then Office24by7 is here to assist you. Our advanced drip management tool can help you with lead nurturing, integration and many more. I know you want more details, give us a call on +91 7097171717 or email us at sales@office24by7.com.
