What are Drip Campaigns in Marketing?
Drip campaigns are a great opportunity for you to turn a potential customer into a paying customer, slowly but surely, in a way that’s geared as specifically toward that potential customer as possible. And you can do it in a way that makes it feel comfortable for them—because as you probably know from your own experience as a customer, seeing a salesperson come on too strong is often a good way to drive you off.
With that in mind, let’s dive right in (or drip right in, you might say) to look at the ways drip campaigns work and how you can successfully use them for customer conversion.
Understanding Drip Campaigns
When you think of a drip campaign, think of the steady drip, drip, drip of water coming out of a spout. Eventually, enough water collects under the spout that you have a small puddle. A drip campaign goes for a similar effect: It delivers small amounts of information at a steady pace, whether that’s once a day or once every few days, so that a customer has all the information they need to make a purchase.
It's important to note that a drip campaign is different from a one-time email or even your regular newsletter. These emails provide general news to your subscribers, plus they’re good for maintaining engagement, but they aren’t intended specifically for closing a sale. Drip campaigns are created with a specific goal in mind, and that’s to appeal to a specific demographic of customers and get them to follow through with a specific action.
Drip campaigns start with what’s known as segmentation. That’s when you divide your subscribers (aka your potential customers) into specific groups based on specific attributes. Let’s say you have a portion of your customer base that made a purchase in the past, but they haven’t bought anything in the past six months.
For this specific customer segmentation, your drip campaign might be about reconnecting with them and telling them about new products or services you’ve added since they last patronized you. Remember, this isn’t about bombarding them with a lot of information all at once—you want to steadily give them little bits of information over a period of time. This information should be tailored as specifically to their needs and interests as you can make it.
The result? You’ll likely see more purchases. Market Splash reports that when a business uses a drip campaign, it sees a rise in revenue by about 34%. That means you’ll be making more than one-third more than what you normally do!
Creating an Effective Drip Campaign
Putting together a drip campaign won’t be difficult, but it does take some strategic thinking. Before you automate a drip campaign, you want to determine exactly what it is you want to accomplish. Here are some general steps you’ll follow:
Figure out your audience.
Because a successful drip campaign is one that’s highly personalized, you should create segments of your audience based on demographics. Those demographics could be how much you expect them to spend per transaction, the length of time since their last purchase, or products that are most likely to appeal to them. Creating buyer personas that you’ll target with each drip campaign can be helpful.
Develop your content
Now it’s time to actually come up with what you’re going to send to those specific audience segments. This could include email copy, you also might provide them with visual or auditory elements, such as infographics or videos. You’ll also determine a sequence or schedule so that you know how often you are sending them emails and how those individual emails will build to a much bigger overall message.
Vary the frequency to test results
Like pretty much any aspect of marketing, drip campaigns can be unpredictable. There’s really no ideal timing or frequency, so trying out different approaches can help you figure out what works best for your specific audience. Try a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule for your first drip campaign, but then switch to a daily drip campaign if you think the greater frequency could be to your advantage. You want to find that balance between regular engagement and email fatigue, so guessing and testing will be helpful in this regard.
Choose Your Tool
There are a lot of popular email marketing platforms out there that you can use for creating your drip campaigns—MailChimp, HubSpot, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, and others. Although these are the leading email marketing platforms, each one has pros and cons that you should carefully consider before making a decision. (Even if you already use one for general email marketing, you might not find it’s the best option for your needs when it comes to drip campaigns.)
For example, MailChimp makes it easy to automate segmentation and personalized recommendations for creating a drip campaign, but some of those automation features are available only on paid plans. HubSpot gives you more capabilities than other platforms when it comes to automation, but a subscription is in a higher price range.
Be sure to carefully consider the pros and cons of each platform, not only regarding the automation features it offers, which you’ll use to create your drip campaigns, but also regarding the analytics tools they have, which you’ll use to measure success.
Drip campaigns can feel overwhelming if you’re not used to steps like segmentation of your audience or analyzing the success of a campaign. Our team at ASMM Digital can help you manage the workload and use these strategies to their maximum effect. Give us a call at 443-679-4916.