Drip Campaign: An Effective Email Marketing Strategy

Being a start-up, you might not be aware about the basic things that could make your audience engaged, before a final deal. Also, you need to adopt a method that helps you to be in continuous touch with your customer. Starting from the time they show interest in products till they buy the product.

Also, your prospect will take their time to make a final decision on your product. But, you can’t let them sit ideal till that time. You have to engage them.

To do the above thing, drip email campaign is a direct service, to engage your audience & warm up your leads !

But, before starting with the ins and outs of drip marketing, let me give an introduction about how this drip strategy are useful for marketing. Like,

• Giving frequent updates about the product
• Increasing customer retention
• Increasing website conversion
• Increase sales
• Build relationship with customers

What is Drip Campaign?

Email marketing is sending mail to your collected leads i.e. visitors/customers to let them know about the product updates, offers, etc.

In simple words, Drip campaign is one type of top email marketing, but here, a series of messages are sent in a pre-defined order and a pre-defined interval.

So you can start Drip mail from the time when the customer sign up on your website till he makes the deal.

You can also use effective form building tool like FormGet that allow you to store customer leads like their name and email directly from the sign form into your email marketing service like MadMimi, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, MailChimp, Aweber, iContact, GetResponse etc.

As you can see in the below image, FormGet allow you to do the following settings so easily.

 

Just need to click on the button to start any of the marketing service, like you can see in the below image MailChimp is getting turned on.

 

Now you just need to do set the few simple things-

• Just enter your API key of the email marketing service, here MailChimp API key is filled.
• Select your desired signup form from the “please select a mailing” option.
• Map fields of FormGet and MailChimp like email with email and name with name, as you can see in the image and then save it.

 

Now, all the leads coming from signup form will stored automatically into the dashboard of your email marketing service and you can use these leads for drip campaigning.

What is the need of Drip Campaign?

The only reason to create drip email is to eliminate the communication gap with your customer. Your customers don’t make an instant decision to buy products from you. They need a sufficient time to think about your product and it’s usage clearly.

So, it’s better to be in touch with them, just to keep them warm up with what’s new going on with your product and services .

The word “Drip” in Drip Emails itself suggests, emails are delivered in a sequence. It’s automatically triggered. Softwares such as Mailchimp, Madmini helps to send auto-responders. Let’s take a look at the stages where drip email is being sent one by one:

1. Welcome Email – Sent on Day 0 ……………….(As soon as user sign up)
2. Introduction – Sent on Day 1……………………(Promote your product)
3. Feature Benefits – Sent on Day 3……………….(Educate about your product)
4. Free Webinar (If any)– Send on Day 6…………(Method to give live product details)
5. Ask feedback or give offers– 15 day…………….(Re-engage your missed prospect)
6. Feature and service updates- 1Month………….(Educate more as required)

Above, are the few basic stages in the drip marketing. It’s just an example, you can set many more as pr your requirement.

Step To Execute in Drip Campaign

• Set Purpose

Before starting drip campaigns, clear yourself,  what end results you want from this drip campaign. Just want to inform about the products or services or try to make out the sales.

For example, if you want to make sales, define your product and it’s benefit in a short and simple manner. Include product’s output related image.

Like in our case, as a theme company, whenever we launched a new theme, in the drip email, we use to share preview links of the theme. So that,  it gives users a real idea about  the website looks and the theme features.

• Engaging Content

While creating drip mail, good content is the name of the game. It should be engaging and should be simple to understand.

How to keep it simple : Words that reflects benefits. If  your content is long,  break them into chunks. Sometimes, reading the whole mail is not likeable to the user. They just read the headings and bullet points. So, better give powerful heading. Give bullet points that talks about product benefits.

How to keep it engaging: As I said above, the content should be simple. And, if it happens so, it will automatically become engaging. Moreover, it should be connected from the starting till the end line.

Be relevant: There is a big doubt in keeping relevancy in contents. What makes the content relevant? No matter the content is simple, engaging but still where’s the relevancy lying?

Content should be focused on the type of email drip you are creating.  For example, if you are creating a drip to educate about product, then, it should not have promotional text.

Targeted user: Make sure that the correct marketing drip is sent to correct user.

For example, if you are an owning an e-store. And a user already make a purchase one of your product. If again, you will sent an email related to that purchased product, then one or the other day the user will be tired of getting unwanted emails. Certainly, he can hit on spam button or unsubscribe you. So, it will make your loss and you will missed a customer by your mistake.

• Good Plan

Keep a separate list of different targeted customer. Plan your email drips, their duration and their frequency.

As mentioned by marketing sherpa, 32% marketers top objective is to segment their email list.

But, there can be some conditions for segmenting the users in the list, important ones are given below:

• Email openers and non-openers
• Segment by date
• Segment by Interest

Why to segment email openers and non-openers  users? 

When you know who has opened up your mail and who has not, then you can easily follow the one who has not opened. You could maintain a separate list of non-openers and resend mail to them. Keep the time duration factor in mind. Don’t send the same marketing mail frequently! Keep a proper days gap while sending the same mail again and again. Make sure it does not irritate your mail receivers.

Why to segment users by interest?

In general, if you send user-interested content, you will not suffer from “spam or unsubscribe hit” and user will read your email. So, better to maintain a marketing list for segmented user as per interest.

Why to segment users by sign-up date?

Segmenting user according to user-signup-date is important, just to know which lead is extremely new or which one is old. This help you easily differentiate the users and the mails they need to be interacted with according to different level of sales funnel.

For e.g. Just-signup users has to be pinged by welcome mail. So, keeping a separate list of just-signup user will automatically trigger a welcome mail in their mail account.

Similarly, those who have shown interest in the product, promotional drip is the key for them.

Educational drip, Training drip are the important aspects for potential customers or real-time customers. Let’s understand these drips-

• Educational drip: As the name suggest this marketing strategy is about giving product-related information to your clients.  It should be very simple to read. No clutter while telling the feature. Like, here you can have an example of educational drip email that talks about collecting payments through online custom form.

 

• Promotional drip: It’s entirely meant to highlight your products. But, while doing so, keep in mind it should not include any hype or false information about your product. It should include true benefits, that the user is getting from your product.
• Training drips: These emails are meant for educating your clients like providing them video or audio tutorial related to your product. Like, in our case we have made a drip email for FormGet, where, we have provided video tutorials to our audience, without any cost. Here is the snapshot of email copy:

• Re-engagement drip: It is meant for gaining your audience attention. There may be a possibility when an interested user become out of your reach, just by mistake or accidentally. So just to re-communicate with them again, you can send them a mail with some nice engaging discount offer.

Like, in our case we use to send these emails to our FormGet subscribers every month. You can look at it’s screenshot.

• Competitive drip: As the name suggest,  these drips pins your competitor with your product.

Each of the drip plays an important role but focus on one objective that is to make the sales happen or increase the sales opportunity.

You have to plan out the sequence to make it a effective drip campaign The sequence can be like this:

#1 Promotional drip: Start up with your product promotion. It includes welcome message, product introduction message.

#2 Educational drip: Give details about your products, related to it’s features.

#3 Training drip: Provide Educational videos.

#4 Re-engagement drip:  Ask for feedback to the already existing customer. Also, make it re-engaging for your missed lead. Offer discounts.

#5 Educational drip: Provide your product’s new features and updates.

#6 Training drip: Give information about how to use product’s new feature.

#7 Competitors drip: Sometimes, you can target your competitor’s product. Show the difference between yours and theirs product. Make it like a warm up email but effective  for your conversion growth.

…….. and so on.

Tip: Take care of the time period and frequency of the marketing mails. 3-7  days gap is most trustworthy.

In all, you will come to know, which lead is fresh and which is close to sale and what kind of mails you will trigger to users.

Once you have all done, just sent drip email to users. Then what next? It’s time to track its performance.

Track Metrics

It’s said “No output without numbers”. You need to know how many people have opened your mails and how many have unsubscribed. How many have bounced up, or how many have really engaged. How many have clicked on your links and landed on your page. How many stays there and go through all your contents patiently.

And, after that if you have a well-defined sales page, with proper call to action, product benefits, your sales conversion will entirely depend on it. Whether you will win or loose, your sales page will decide.

Besides, to increase the number of email-clicks you can do certain experiments on your email-subject-line. In-fact, do it assuredly. According to socialquickstarter, 47% mails open just by going through email subject line. You can go through the screenshot below:

So, there is a good scope of  optimizing your email click-through rate by introducing new tweak to your subjects line.

In all, the drip emails need to be on track, to know the output of their performance.

Don’t put the spam impression on your viewers:

By spam, I only mean, the marketing mails you are sending should be interest of users so that they should not trash with out reading it. I would like to share some mind-blowing stats given by socialquickstarter. They clearly explain what percentage of users unsubscribe for what reasons.

Note: By default, upto .05% mails go to the spam folder.

So to avoid this, just keep a marketing list of targeted audience, who are actually seeking that kind of product.

Number of emails sent

You should contact your clients at least 24 times/year. The maximum can be 30-50, but it should not irritate your leads or clients. It’s said, “the user will start to know about you and your product from the first mail but they show interest to interact with you after fifth mail”.

So, in this respect, you need to increase the frequency of your mails but simultaneously, validity and relevancy of your mails should touch the heights. In other words, sent likeable content to the targeted audience.

Besides, the particular time in which the email is sent also plays a major role in making your drift campaign successful.

In a study, the best timing to sent mail is between 6pm-midnight or 6am-12 noon.

The reason behind is, people find it good time to go through mails at 9 in the morning or between 3-4 pm in evening. Here, you can see a screenshot where stats are given by getresponse.com.

 

Why people like to open mails in the morning?

In my opinion, audience want to start their day with the useful content. Other reason is, there work time starts at this time, so before kicking-off anything they just want to know what important stuffs they have in their mail accounts.

Why people like to open mails between 3-4am ?

In this time period, people want to overcome their routine work. They want to go through something refreshing and useful content. So, they usually check out their mail box at this time.

What is the best day to send email?

Maximum 19.9% clickthrough rates are experienced on Tuesdays and Fridays. I would like to share the related stat from smartinsights.com in the given screenshot:

Therefore, it seems Tuesday or Friday is the best day to send mails. You can try campaigns on Monday, or Thursday too. You can do testing and analyse the metrics.

Last but not least, induce trust image in your audience eyes.

Give exact contact details, show your brand

Audience don’t want clutters from anywhere. They don’t want to make contact from that place where they think “things are not open”. They don’t want any risks.

Give proper contact details of your company. That is, tell your company’s address, contact numbers, email-id. An ending signature of company’s owner with his image will going to be effective.

So, above are some of the key-points to make effective email campaign. You have to initiate first, it will gradually will become effective.

Conclusion

Let yourself optimize your business revenue. Treat your customer at different points in sales cycle. It’s the most powerful method. Implement it to grow your sales and to sustain your business.

Have a look at the essentials of drip campaign once again:

• Re-engaging missed audience
• Inviting potential customer

It’s easy, effective, and affordable too.

So, what’s your strategy to drive revenue for your business?

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