What Is Drip Marketing | How To Write The Perfect Follow Up
John O'Shea
As a marketer, you’re always working towards having a sales pipeline with enough leads by amplifying your lead generation efforts. This, as part of your strategy to close more deals and ultimately, increase revenue.
But your lead generation efforts alone will not get you the results you desire because not all leads are a good fit. To qualify your leads, you must also invest in constant engagement with both prospects and customers.
This is where drip marketing campaigns come in.
What is drip marketing?
Drip marketing is simply email marketing automation. We sometimes refer to it as email drip marketing, automated marketing, drip marketing campaign or email drip campaign.
By definition, drip marketing involves putting to use a set of automated emails which you schedule in response to a specific action from a prospect or customer. The action may be anything from engagement through a blog post to purchase of a product or an abandoned cart among others.
You predetermine the intervals within which to send drip emails. This means you get to stay in the mind of your target audience by sharing with them relevant content while driving engagement.
Drip Email Example
Welcome emails and onboarding emails are good drip campaign examples.
Take a case where you have a new subscriber signing up on your blog. As part of your email drip campaigns, you first send them a welcome email.
You then follow up with another email two days later, this time highlighting some of your popular blogs. If you have an online course, you’d like them to sign up for, you can introduce it in a third email five days later. And so on.
Why is drip marketing effective?
A good drip marketing campaign is extremely effective because you deliver your message to specific targeted readers, at the right time so that your brand stays connected with both customers and prospects in a meaningful way.
According to a report by McKinsey, when compared to Twitter and Facebook, email campaigns are 40x more effective for client acquisition.
Conducting drip marketing campaigns helps marketing teams to capture new leads and nurture them with relevant, timely and targeted messaging.
Winning drip marketing strategies will guide your prospects through their pain points and introduce your solution ensuring they go through the entire sales funnel while subtly persuading them.
With an effective drip campaign, you’ll close more sales with ease.
Using drip campaigns frees up time for your sales team so they can focus on other marketing related tasks better. You can see that if you aren’t already embracing email drip campaigns, you’re not only missing out on the huge potential to engage prospects and customers but also grow your bottom line.
Why use drip email campaigns?
80% of marketers using marketing automation report improved lead generation and 77% more conversions. Email drip campaigns are great when you want to:
- • Automate time-consuming tasks
- • Build your list and • convert subscribers to customers
- • Segment your target audience
- • Restore your revenue; abandoned cart campaigns and subscription renewals
- • Humanise your brand
- • Increase brand awareness
Benefits of email drip campaign
Drip campaigns are critical to achieving your revenue and marketing goals. Here are some benefits of marketing automation with email drip campaign:
Drive revenue
Revenue generation is at the core of all your marketing efforts. Statistics show email drip campaigns drive 75% of all email marketing revenue. This is because the messages in drip emails are personalised and targeted.
Lead nurturing
Drip campaigns have an element of personalisation making them an excellent tool to nurture your leads. It gives the impression you’re with them through every stage of their customer journey. Statistics from MarketingSherpa show businesses that engage in lead nurturing record a 45% increase in their ROI from lead generation.
Boost engagement
You need about eight touchpoints to get a potential customer to buy your products or services. Drip emails provide multiple opportunities to engage your potential customer and convert them into a loyal customer.
Increase brand awareness
Drip campaigns let you showcase your brand and give customers and prospects a reason to get involved or make a purchase.
Build strong customer relationships
It’s more costly to gain new customers than keep old ones. Drip campaign emails help in building strong relationships with existing customers to increase your customer retention rate.
What are the types of drip campaigns?
There are many types of automated drip campaigns you can include in your marketing to convert leads to customers. They are:
- 1. Lead nurturing campaigns – You need to follow up on cues from prospects and customers like downloading a white paper with drip emails that educate and inspire user actions. This will increase your sales and purchase value by converting potential customers to paying customers.
- 2. Welcome emails – Use welcome emails to gain trust, increase open rates and gain more conversions from new subscribers.
- 3. Onboarding emails – An automated email campaign will help to build relationships and educate customers how to benefit from your service or product.
- 4. Subscription renewal – Take advantage of drip campaigns to engage customers when their subscription is almost due for renewal.
- 5. Confirmations – Where a customer renews their subscription, you can still extend your drip campaign to confirm renewal.
- 6. Recommendations – Sending targeted drip emails with a discount code or products that related to your customers’ purchasing tendencies can help to upsell.
- 7. Engagement – This drip campaign invites prospects and customers to re-visit your site following a period of inactivity.
- 8. Unsubscribes – If a user no longer wants to patronise your services and they click the unsubscribe button, use an automated drip campaign to push other platforms like Twitter. Some users may unsubscribe just because they want to engage with you in a different way.
9. Email courses – A drip campaign will answer your customers’ curiosity by letting them know what to expect.
How To Write The Perfect Follow Up Emails
It’s all about the right message delivered to the right audience at the right time.
A successful drip campaign is pegged on how well you craft your emails. Your drip emails should match your motive. You should be personalise the message to address the client’s pain points by paying attention to the following:
Craft a click worthy subject line
This is the first thing a potential customer will see. It must compel them to open the email. Use direct and sharp subject lines to communicate the intention of your drip emails. For instance, you can include the recipient’s name in the subject line.
Contextualise your mail opener
Provide context in your drip email opener to remind customers about your first interaction. It could be an email you sent or a meeting you had. Providing context not only helps in jogging their memory but also makes it easier for them to respond.
Align your content with your goal
Communicate your motive in a clear and concise manner. Identify your main goal and then explain the primary objectives. For instance, if your goal is to introduce a new product or service, your aim can be to first get the customer to familiarise with the product features.
Create a call to action that reflects the end goal
Customers will in most cases respond to a specific offer. Make sure your CTA encourages prospects and customers to take specific action. It must also reflect your end goal.
Well, engaging your prospects and customers regularly can be challenging but not when you have a well-crafted email drip campaign in place and a good drip campaign software to back it.
Ultimately, using drip marketing will help in boosting sales by converting prospects to customers, re-engaging dormant audiences and increasing repeat purchases for your product or service. When you communicate your company’s value, you build strong customer relationships while proving you’re a valuable resource.
Are you interested in a lead generation strategies might work best for your business? Reach out to the Growthonics team, we’d be more than happy to help you with your outbound lead generation strategies.