Drip email marketing is one of the most efficient and effective tactics in your email marketing strategy. It is used to convey the right information to customers and prospects through emails. Considering its cost efficiency and ease of use, drip email campaigns are a powerful tool in email marketing strategy. 

It’s essential that you follow certain drip email campaign best practices in order to produce high-quality results. But first, let’s shed some light on what a drip email campaign exactly is!

What is a drip email campaign?

Drip emails are automated emails that are sent to your recipients with the goal of keeping them engaged in your product. 

Let’s say you send periodic emails to prospects in order to push them further through the sales funnel. But the problem is your new subscribers are going to miss all the announcements or updates about your business you would send them before they sign up. This may negatively impact the experience your prospects are expecting from your business. Drip email campaigns are useful in saving small and medium businesses from this tricky situation. 

If a user subscribes to your blog, a drip email would be sent to that user containing information about the latest blog posts published on your website. If a prospect is interested in your premium plan but has not yet taken any action,  a drip email would be sent with a blog post on how the premium advantages of the product are beneficial for their business. 

There are numerous circumstances where drip marketing campaigns are used. However, the focus always remains the same: send useful information to the targeted audience to convert them into customers. 

Where to use a drip campaign?

Drip email campaigns are used across industries  for:

• Welcoming
• Recommendations
• Renewals
• Engagement
• Confirmations
• Nurturing leads
• Unsubscribes
• Courses
• Onboarding
• Abandoning shopping carts

Importance of drip email campaigns

Drip email campaigns allow you to send scheduled emails to recipients at predetermined times. It’s one of the best ways to provide useful information to potential customers without annoying them. 

According to research, when compared to generic email campaigns, drip campaigns generate 18-times more revenue. Additionally, the same study states that drip emails can give you a 119% increase in click rates. Don’t forget that all these outcomes depend on the quality of your content, which is reusable and can be sent automatically. 

Let’s discuss the case study done by Dynamics Online that touches on their drip email campaigns. The firm ran a drip marketing campaign for its clients. The emails were sent for four important reasons:

• Acknowledging a PDF download
• Informative content on a topic along with the link to the blog post
• Pushing for the hard sell
• Pushing for the purchase with a link to a form to fill in all the details

According to Dynamics Online’s data, the emails in this drip campaign achieved a 49% open rate and a 14% click-through rate. That’s triple the industry average. This shows the extreme importance of leveraging drip marketing. 

But this is not enough. You need to apply the best practices for drip email campaigns to make them more effective. Below are some of the best practices that you should consider to make your drip email campaign successful. 

Best practices for drip email campaigns

In order to make your drip email campaign successful, it’s important that you implement some critical rules in your email marketing strategy. Let’s dig into the five most important guidelines that generate the maximum benefit from drip email campaigns. 

• Focus on personalization

Segmenting your email list and leveraging the data gathered from email marketing is crucial. Use lead segmentation to send personalized emails created for a specific group in order to maximize the results of your email automation tool. 

Users like to receive personalized emails filled with informative content that solves their problems. Prospects tend to click on your calls-to-action more often if the content you are sending them is relevant and useful for their unique needs. Reaching out to users who take a particular action is another important way to cultivate leads. You can use the system triggers in your CRM to alert sales reps when these actions are taken, so they can reach out immediately.

• Develop creative content to increase engagement

In drip marketing, the aim is to keep your brand at top-of-mind for your prospects. So, it’s better to get a bit creative and send unexpected, funny and delightful content. It isn’t always mandatory that the content is related to what you are promoting. Create content that is properly aligned with your brand identity. 

In order to test this strategy, it would be better to try it on a small group first. A photo or a joke, special tips or deals, and other such things are commonly used to make prospects interested in your brand. 

• Automate the process to make your drip campaign effective

Running an email campaign involves sending a series of emails, which makes it a long and labor-intensive procedure. That’s where marketing automation comes to your aid. Efficient marketing automation tools make automated email marketing extremely easy by boosting overall results and reducing costs. 

Marketing automation makes automating email sends flawless and smooth. You can use various features of automated email marketing tools-such as A/B testing–to get the best results. 

• Reach out to inactive prospects and customers

Use drip campaigning to re-engage your inactive customers and prospects in order to upsell them. For the best results, incentivize customers for re-engaging. You can send them special messages or let them know that they are being missed. 

If the user is not at all interested in your emails, it is advantageous to send them messages informing that they will be removed from the list if they don’t respond. Don’t forget to add a link to unsubscribe in the email for the users who don’t wish to receive your emails in their inbox. This is helpful in updating your email list and targeting users, who are interested in your business.  

• Track at every step

Email marketing is always loaded with huge data. This data should be maintained and recorded safely. This makes tracking the results of your campaigns a significant aspect of understanding your effectiveness. 

Track everything including landing page conversions and click-through rates in your drip campaigns with the help of all the available metrics. 

Tracking also let you maintain insight into the overall progress of your campaign and helps you find the activities that increase customer engagement. 

Implement these five best practices and watch your drip email campaigns produce better results. 

Conclusion

Drip email campaigns certainly help you achieve larger goals. However, overdoing it will surely create problems. A perfect drip email strategy will help remind people about your product and increase your credibility. 

Implementing the best practices for drip email campaigns helps you achieve unimaginable success in your email marketing efforts, and results in more conversions.