Email drip campaigns are one of the most effective ways to provide valuable information to your target audience with the purpose of customer conversion.
Drip campaigns are applicable as both sales funnels as well as marketing funnels. To put this in other words, you can reach both cold and warm prospects with this strategy. Drip campaigns are also used to target existing customers with upsells and cross-sells.
The basic premise of an automated drip email campaign is that just one email is not enough. Instead, a triggered sequence of emails sent at a pre-defined interval to email subscribers can achieve a more potent result.
Drip email campaigns can generate up to 3x the click-through-rate of a typical email marketing campaign, leading to more opportunities for customer engagement.
Let’s look at some of the top tips to build a drip email campaign that converts –
Be concise and to the point
Besides making your website responsive, you need to make your emails responsive as well. Most of your readers are accessing their email on their smartphones and big blocks of text can seem very intimidating on a small screen.
Giving the text some breathing room so that it can be easily consumed is key to making an email that converts.
This holds even more true when sending an email to a new prospect. Your current subscribers might be willing to read a longer email because of the long standing relationship but new readers will not be so forgiving.
Be respectful of the reader’s time and use images or visual elements to break up the text. Graphics can also make your mail more engaging.
You could even break up your mail into two parts or two emails – Part 1 and Part 2.
Be a masterful storyteller
Human beings crave stories. They make sense of the world around them through stories. A story has much higher chances of being remembered than a data point or a statistic.
If your emails can excite, build suspense or evoke an emotional response, it has much higher chances of influencing the reader to take the action you want them to take.
One way of doing this is to get personal with your readers. We don’t mean that you should divulge your intimate details or personal stories! But you could always share an interesting anecdote or funny story.
Doing this is necessary as it builds a personal connection with the reader and makes you seem more human and believable. Readers can see themselves in your story and empathize.
And with a deeper connection comes the higher likelihood of conversion.
Understand the buying cycle of your customers
Your customer buying cycle contains all the touchpoints a lead goes through before making a purchase and becoming a customer. This buying cycle can vary depending upon the industry you’re in.
While B2B buying cycles tend to be longer, B2C buying cycles are usually shorter. A B2C customer might see your ad on Google or your email and instantaneously make a purchase, whereas in B2B these decisions tend to be more collective in nature.
Segment your leads basis where they are in the buying cycle. For those in the beginning of the cycle, they are not yet fully aware of your product and services. They’ll need to be nurtured via a drip email campaign.
For those who have been subscribers for a certain duration, focus on education and entertainment. Such readers will appreciate product comparisons, free demos or an exclusive offer.
Read more on behavioral segmentation
Abandoned cart email campaigns
You might already be using automation in customer service if you’re in the ecommerce business.
The best use of automation is with abandoned cart cases. Wherein the customer has added a product to the cart but lost interest along the way and moved on without checking out.
Using drip email marketing campaigns to solve this problem can be very effective. About 67% of carts are abandoned. And over 46.1% of customers open abandoned cart emails. That’s quite a high number and a good opportunity to deploy drip emails.
A good recovery email must have –
- A compelling call to action urging the reader to re-visit the website
- Any guarantee or refund information
- Convincing reviews from other customers who have used the product or service
- Images of the items they abandoned in the cart
The first email should go out within 24 hours, followed by 2 days and then the last after a week goes by. Anything more than that and you are annoying the reader, bordering on spamming them.
More than 50% of people engage with the emails they receive after completing a purchase. It’s a bit lesser for abandoned cart emails but that does not take away from the importance of sending those emails nonetheless.
Announcing a webinar or a virtual event
Post-Covid, virtual events are all the rage. Not because they are more effective but most businesses are left with no choice! Nevertheless, in this new paradigm of virtual event marketing, emails as before still play an important role.
Drips emails are superb additions to your webinar sessions as they can get you those last-minute attendees. And it shows in the numbers too!
As per GoToWebinar, 69% of registrations happen only a week before the webinar and a whopping 33% happen on the day of the webinar
This means that it is essential to have multiple touchpoints with your target list.
A catchy caption and message that can elicit a FOMO response, you’re well on your way to making your drip emails get your more attendees. But be respectful of the recipient’s time and do not be disingenuous in your offer.
Measure, Rinse, Repeat
The basis of a good drip email campaign is tracking all metrics. While you might already be tracking website visitors via cookies and tools to measure your website performance.
You need to bring the same rigor to tracking your email campaigns performance. Building a habit of measuring performance, learning from your mistakes and iterating with an improved strategy is the key to get conversion in any marketing strategy, let alone drip emails.
Drip emails by their very nature take time and you need to be patient to see results. Make sure to track metrics such as click through rates, open rates, bounce rates and unsubscribes.
A lot of this tracking should happen automatically if you are using a good email or marketing automation tool.
The data you get should help you to see any blind spots in your messaging, creatives or email layouts. You can even A/B test different email copy to see which one performs better for a particular audience segment.
For those campaigns that performed well, take note of what worked. If it is the content, save it or templatize it, if possible. If the campaign yielded high open rates and low bounce rates, model your other drip campaigns off of this one.
On the flip side, if the campaign performed poorly, look for what didn’t work or the weakest link in the chain (content, creative etc.). Retrace your steps while building this campaign and take note of any assumptions you had made.
But fret not, you can learn from the campaigns that didn’t perform well and improve your other campaigns based on what you learned!
The tips above are relatively easy to implement but hard to master if you want to achieve success in your drip email campaigns. Inform, educate and entertain should be the mantra when it comes to email marketing. Add to that respect for the readers time and inbox space!
Tell captivating stories and link your emails together with a common theme and great subject lines. There is a lot that goes to making a good drip email campaign but if you stick with the basics you can certainly make an effective campaign that can have a long run time.
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