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Picture the mighty stalactites and stalagmites seen far below the planet’s surface, gracing so many striking caves. How were those impressive structures created? One drip at a time, of course.
Marketers can also use the drip approach for creating truly strong bonds with their audiences, cementing brand awareness, customer loyalty, and purchases, as well. Drip campaigns use a measured approach and pre-planned materials to reach out to potential leads at just the right times and, when executed well, can greatly increase the returns marketers get on their ad spend.
Below, I’ll discuss drip campaigns in advertising in detail, covering best practices, what to avoid, what has worked for others, and what marketing experts have to say on the subject.
What Is a Drip Campaign?
“A drip campaign is an automated sequence of emails triggered by customer behavior (or a preset schedule), like signing up, abandoning a cart, or making a purchase,” says Nina De la Cruz, a content marketing strategist at Getsitecontrol. “Each message is designed to guide the subscriber through the buying journey, from awareness to conversion.”
Drip campaigns can also include a series of scheduled emails sent to subscribers or past customers on a semi-regular basis, the intention being to maintain customer awareness and contact that lowers the barriers to action, like revisiting a website and making a purchase.
While drip campaigns can take on many forms and use varied approaches, they all have one thing in common: The emails (or in some cases text messages) are written ahead of time and are sent out via automation, not by a human’s action at the time. In that way, drip campaigns greatly free up marketers to focus on other aspects of their work.
How It Works
There are essentially two types of drip campaigns: One sends out emails on a pre-planned schedule, the other automatically sends out an email when a specific trigger occurs, such as when someone signs up for a service or leaves a website with a full shopping cart but no purchases.
As an example of the first type of drip campaign, online consultant and podcaster Yann Ilunga of YannIlunga.com says that, “”Drip campaigns often refer to a series of touch points, typically emails, that occur at a predetermined cadence. An email course is an example of a drip campaign. A five-day email course consists of a series of five emails that are sent daily over the span of five days.”
Brian Akdemir, director of e-commerce at Bahdos, explains the “trigger” type of drip campaign like this: “A lot of drip campaigns are set off by certain actions from users, like looking around a website without buying anything. In these situations, the drip sequence is meant to get the potential customer’s attention again and get them to take the action you want them to, whether that’s buying something, signing up for your newsletter, or something else. The behavioral data lets the marketer change the drip campaign’s message and timing based on the person’s interests and where they are in the buying process.”
Drip Campaign Examples
Lead Nurturing
Imagine an email that you get every Tuesday from a company that makes herbal tea, often featuring special offers, new product announcements, and how-to tips. You can call that a newsletter, but you can also call it a drip campaign. Any series of pre-planned marketing emails that are sent via automation, be it just a series of four or five emails, or be it a weekly, bi-monthly, or other such schedule, is a drip campaign.
Abandoned Cart Reminders
This is one of the most common trigger-style drip campaign approaches. When a customer visits a website, puts items in their digital shopping cart, and then leaves the website without making a purchase, an automation triggers the sending of an email to remind the person of their intended purchase, and often sends along an incentive such as a 10% off discount.
Welcome Letters
When a new person signs up for a service, subscribes to a newsletter, makes a purchase, or takes some other action, it’s common for an automated email to be sent out welcoming them to the brand and thanking them for joining the fold. There are often several follow-up emails still in this welcoming tone.
Political Campaigns
“Political campaigns widely use drip campaigns to build support for a candidate,” says Baruch Labunski, founder and CEO of Rank Secure. “They are highly effective in swaying opinion, especially regarding controversial subjects.”
Drip Campaign Benefits
Hands-Off Automation
Because drip campaigns use automation to send out emails or texts, they leave marketers free to focus on other aspects of their business, from studying data, to writing copy and creating graphics, to calculating the latest return on ad spend (ROAS).
Enhanced Brand Awareness
A drip campaign keeps a brand top-of-mind for its audience, serving as just enough of a touchpoint to keep people thinking about the products or services on offer without being annoying by approaching too often.
Increased Engagement and Re-Engagement
Drip campaigns are a proven way to increase audience engagement, and also to bring people who have disengaged from a brand back into contact with it. Drip campaigns are almost always more effective than one-off email blasts or other more limited marketing strategies.
How to Create a Drip Campaign
Define Your Goals
What do you want to achieve with your drip campaign? Are you hoping to drive sales, generate leads, nurture prospects, or onboard new customers? What specific actions do you want recipients to undertake? Purchasing a product, signing up for a service, downloading a file, or visiting a specific site? What will be your measures of success?
Choose Between Time-Based or Trigger-Based Emails
This isn’t an either-or situation, as you can by all means have time-based drip campaigns and also have trigger-based communication at the ready, but when it comes to planning a specific drip campaign, you have to know whether it’s going to work best based on scheduled emails or based on customer action.
Choose Your Software
There are many different platforms that can be used to create drip campaigns, as you’ll see below, so take the time to figure out which one is right for your organization, and then use it to create and schedule the campaign itself.
Drip Campaign Best Practices
Personalize the Messaging
People hate getting junk mail in their digital inbox just as much as they hate regular snail mail junk. You have to make sure the messaging each lead gets feels directed right at them, with customization details that make it something they’re happy to receive.
“From a messaging perspective, it’s best to make your drip campaign touchpoints as personalized as possible, from both a content and timing perspective, so you’re reaching the right person at the right time with the right message,” says Meagan Sweigart, principal and fractional marketing consultant at Kinetic Marketing Communications.
Make the Emails Relevant Based on Timing
Drip campaigns are anything but one-size-fits-all: They have to make sense based on myriad factors, including timing. “Drip campaigns are customized based on where the client is in their journey,” says Amra Beganovich, founder of Colorful Socks. “For holiday sign ups, we send an email series that includes gift ideas, bestseller highlights, and a final reminder prior to the shipping cutoff, for example.”
Use A/B Testing
Because drip campaigns by their very nature involve multiple emails (or other forms of connection), they provide marketers valuable data that can be used in making comparisons. “For instance, we can look at which subject lines or calls to action work best for our audience and then use what we’ve learned in future drip campaigns,” says Akdemir. “We can’t get this level of control with more traditional marketing methods, which is why drip campaigns are such a useful tool.”
Popular Software for Drip Marketing
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a cloud-based digital and email marketing platform primarily catering to small- and mid-sized businesses, helping them build and manage their digital marketing strategies. It offers a range of tools, including email marketing, social media marketing, marketing automation, and lead generation, all integrated into a user-friendly interface.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform, particularly known for its email marketing capabilities. The company allows businesses to create, launch, and track email campaigns, offering features like customizable templates, automated workflows, and detailed analytics.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a versatile platform used to manage myriad aspects of a business, including marketing. HubSpot allows you to create and send email campaigns to engage your audience over time or based on triggers.
Metrics to Measure Success of Your Drip Campaign
Improved Open Rate
If your email marketing campaign is working well, then those emails are actually being opened. Check the open rate, which is the percentage of people who actually open an email contrasted against the total number of people to whom it’s sent, and see if drip campaign emails enjoy better rates than those of other messages.
Click-Through Rate
Even more important than an email open rate is the click-through rate, often abbreviated as CTR. This is the percentage of people who take an action step, clicking on a link or button within the email, and being taken to a new page where conversion is possible.
Conversion Rate
The most important metric for a marketer is always the conversion rate, as this is the rate at which people actually take the action the marketer was hoping to prompt, such as a sale, a sign up for a subscription, joining a platform, and so forth.
Key Takeaways
“A drip campaign releases communication over a period of time based on timeliness or customer action,” says Beganovich. “These sequences can be initiated via certain behaviors, like cart abandonment, or they can be sent on a schedule, like a welcome series sent out over a few days. The idea is to lead them from awareness to purchase through clear messaging at spaced intervals that builds trust and relevance, not trying to stuff it down their throats.”
Drip campaigns maintain brand awareness and audience contact without annoying potential leads like over-served ads, pop-ups, and other types of advertising. Because drip campaign emails (or texts or social media DMs) are automated, they save marketers time and money, as the marketer can create all of the media for the campaign, set the schedule and/or automations, and then be entirely hands-off, focusing on other tasks.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Drip campaign vs. email blast: What’s the difference?
A drip campaign is a series of pre-written emails sent automatically to a specific audience over time, or that are triggered by a specific action or event, like a newsletter sign up or an abandoned shopping cart. In contrast, an email blast is a one-time email sent to a large group of recipients at the same time, typically for a broad announcement or promotion.
Drip campaign for abandoned cart recovery: How does it work?
A drip campaign for abandoned cart recovery works by automatically sending a series of emails to shoppers who have added items to their cart but haven’t completed the purchase. These emails aim to gently nudge the shopper back to complete the transaction, offering reminders, incentives like a discount, or by addressing potential issues they may have encountered during checkout.
A/B testing for drip campaigns: How does it work?
A/B testing in drip campaigns involves creating two or more variations of an email sequence and sending them to different segments of your audience to see which performs better. This helps you optimize your drip campaign by identifying which variations, like subject lines, copy, and images, lead to higher open rates, better click-through rates, and ultimately more conversions.
