Drip Marketing: a very effective prospecting and lead nurturing marketing technique!
What makes Drip Marketing successful?
The primary goal of email marketing is targeting the right people at the right time, and that’s exactly where drip marketing comes into the picture. By crafting a series of flawless emails, you can persuade your target audience to subscribe to your newsletter, refer a friend, take a quiz, make a purchase, and more.
According to reports, businesses that adopt drip marketing can generate 80% more sales and enjoy a high open rate. So, running a drip marketing campaign can be beneficial if you want to better connect with your audience and increase your conversion rates.
In this guide, we’ll look at what drip marketing is, why it is needed, and how to create one.
What is Drip Marketing?
In general, drip marketing is a sequence of marketing communication (emails, social media posts, phone calls, printed brochures or flyers, etc.) spaced out over time.
In the case of an email drip marketing campaign, it is a series of programmed automation of emails. Customer behaviors and actions often trigger it. They may also be known as auto responders, email automation, or lifecycle emails. They are designed to reduce the manual effort when communicating with prospects. Drip marketing allows businesses to communicate the right thing at the right time.
This allows you to interact with your audience regularly, capture their attention and showcase your products and services and the benefits they can expect from you. This helps increase your customer engagement, conversion rates, and revenue.
The one for which drip marketing is most often used is lead nurturing in order to move your prospect forward through the sales funnel and eventually towards a purchase. After implementing drip marketing to nurture leads, businesses saw a 20% boost in sales. At the same time, it can also be used to achieve other objectives such as customer onboarding, educating on a particular service or product or re-engaging contacts who have been inactive for some time.
4 Prerequisites for a Drip Campaign
- A quality email file that perfectly matches your target and your message. The performance of your campaign will closely depend on the quality of the email.
- Powerful emailing software associated with your domain name to optimize the deliverability of emails.
- To pique your recipients’ interest and motivate them to take action, craft a message that is well-suited to the subject matter.
- Online appointment scheduling software for regular meetings with salespeople.
Why Use Email Drip Marketing?
“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches – at scale.” – David Newman.
Drip email marketing allows you to personalize your message. Everyone wants to feel like a business is talking to them directly when they receive an email from that business.
Drip emails allow you to put people into different segments, groups, or funnels so you can run campaigns that benefit them. This could be to welcome them, reward them for leaving their contact details, or follow up on their abandoned carts.
You can use many platforms to develop drip marketing campaigns that enable personalization, which together with relevant content helps to customize the emails delivered.
How To Create a Strategic Drip Marketing Campaign?
A strategic drip marketing campaign can do wonders for your business. If you create one, keep the following best practices in mind.
Set a goal
Ask yourself what you want to get out of your drip marketing campaign.
Are you striving to capture new leads?
Do you want to encourage your customers to come back?
Do you want to collect certain data to make informed decisions?
Creating an effective drip marketing campaign is impossible unless you have a specific goal.
Use marketing automation
A marketing automation platform is one of the best ways to manage a drip marketing campaign. Marketing automation software is designed to help you restructure your marketing and sales actions. They make it easier for you to generate more leads, sign more deals, and achieve your short and long-term goals.
You won’t have any issues segmenting your customer base, sending triggered emails, optimizing your campaigns, or, most significantly, raising your marketing ROI if you have a good marketing automation platform.
Don’t stop at a sales pitch.
Always keep in mind that the purpose of a drip marketing campaign is to persuade your clients to perform particular activities. Campaigns of this type aim to achieve goals gradually rather than all at once.
Concretely, your emails must go beyond the sales pitch. Make sure they offer useful information that can benefit your clients. Establish yourself as a thought leader by presenting compelling content that your audience can relate to.
Practice market segmentation
Market segmentation involves subdividing your customer base into different segments. This technique can help you create personalized campaigns targeting your customers’ specific needs and motivations.
You can segment your market based on demographic profiles such as age, geographic location, gender, and profession. Customers can also be targeted based on their behaviors, like purchasing, creating an account on a website, or signing up for a free interview. With a marketing automation platform, segmentation becomes a piece of cake.
Set useful triggers
The success of a drip marketing campaign depends on its triggers, in other words, the specific actions that customers must take to receive an email. For instance, you could want to send them emails to grab their attention whenever a consumer registers or subscribes to learn more about one of your services.
And if a prospect puts an item in basket before abandoning it, you will no doubt find it useful to send him emails to convince him to take back his basket and finalize his purchase. Your emails may offer special promotions, such as free shipping or a 5% discount for orders placed by a certain date. Consider including related product promotions in your communications that are likely to catch the customer’s attention.
Send friendly emails
Keep it light and stay positive so your customers feel good whenever they open one of your emails. Include content that will make them smile and want to hear from you. Never blame them for abandoning a cart, unsubscribing, or not making a purchase.
Decide on the frequency.
Consider how often you send your emails. Decide what tempo you think is appropriate for your goals and your customers. When in doubt, run a few tests to find the one that will make customer interactions easier.
Finalize your sequence
Your email campaign’s sequence should be in line with your objectives. Regarding the number of emails to send, it is important not to abuse the patience and attention of your customers. It is essential to send as many emails as necessary to get your message across without tiring your contacts.
Create catchy titles
Customers will be less likely to open your emails if your subject lines lack emphasis. To ensure that they will be read, create concise, catchy, personalized titles. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself what might grab your own attention.
“Since we cannot define the point at which people find something interesting, our best bet is to make everything as interesting as possible.” – Lee Clow’s Beard
Types of Drip Marketing
You can implement drip marketing campaigns in different ways, each based on visitor or customer action. The types of drip marketing include:
Welcome Email
You can send welcome emails with information about your business and other crucial details to visitors who sign up for your website, newsletter, or service. Welcome emails inform and educate visitors, help you connect with them, and encourage them to become potential customers.
Engagement Emails
Engagement emails are all about engaging a prospect and nurturing them. You can start a series of emails when they interact with your website or services but don’t complete the purchase or action you want them to take. By providing essential information via email marketing, you can help them make quick decisions so they can go ahead and buy what you are selling.
Email Segmentation
Segmentation emails are sent to categorize visitors based on different criteria such as location, interest, gender, etc. They are targeted and highly relevant with clear CTAs to promote a seminar, buy a particular product or service, etc.
Ascension Emails
Ascension emails are sent to entice a prospect to purchase your products or services by offering them an offer. It is highly targeted, specific, and goes to a visitor if they qualify for the upsell or qualify for the product. You can offer an attractive discount to attract customers for your products and services.
Re-engagement emails
Re-engagement emails, as the name suggests, are sent to customers who are inactive for any reason and have not used your products, services, or website for a while. You can win back those customers by sending emails containing relevant and encouraging information with enticing offers.
Conclusion
Inactive contacts are not to be taken lightly. It’s a mistake to treat them the same as active contact and ignore them, and it’s a bigger mistake to think that not sending them any more emails is the solution. Your inactive contacts are easily recoverable if you do it right, with the right strategy.
Given its slower pace and the ability to foster a certain level of customer confidence, drip marketing is also perfect for reactivation campaigns. In any event, a rash decision can harm the relationship with the client. Therefore, it won’t harm to stand back from your marketing strategies and reconsider your strategy.
