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A drip campaign is a marketing strategy of sending a stream of emails to customers and prospects in an automated and timely manner to boost engagement. This blog provides a detailed overview of drip campaigns, including their benefits, examples, types, best practices, and more.
A drip campaign, or drip email marketing, refers to the process of sending consistent, timely, and automated emails to prospective customers over a period of time. It allows you to stay top of mind with your audience, nurture leads, and build trust, all while keeping costs low and reducing the workload on you and your marketing team.
The term “drip campaign” comes from the concept of sending messages to users or leads over time, usually via email, like a slow drip — but one of content, not water. This series of targeted messages can build relationships and drive conversions. While the concept is straightforward, effectively executing a drip campaign takes skill, data, and the right technology.
Drip email marketing should not be confused with mass emails that are sent to everyone in your contact lists. Instead of delivering messages to all your subscribers, a drip campaign involves sending personalized and relevant content to specific individuals aligned with their interests and needs in a timely manner.
Effectively planning a drip email marketing campaign to send consistent and timely emails with relevant content engenders several advantages.
The key to successful drip marketing is to deliver personalized, relevant content that aligns with the user’s interests and needs. The open rate of drip email campaigns is ~80% higher than that of single, one-time email sends, and the click-through rate is three times higher on average.
Segmenting the audience and tailoring messages to their specific demographics, preferences, behaviors, and stages in the customer journey can significantly improve customer engagement and relationships.
As people move along their buying journey, quite often they consider different brands and products to meet their needs and might need additional details to make the decision. A timely email at this stage can do the trick to nudge the subscriber to move forward with your product. Planning a drip campaign with relevant content can help you nurture the leads and drive them towards conversion.
Sending personalized emails that are consistent and timely, works wonders to convince prospective customers that your product or service can help them address their challenges. Once that happens, the probability of them converting and completing a purchase increases considerably. It is important to note that every email in the drip campaign should have a call to action that effectively guides the contact through the funnel.
Leveraging marketing automation is one of the key aspects of setting up drip emails. While you’ll need to initially invest time and effort to set it up, once the campaign is set up, it runs forever without any manual intervention. Of course, you’ll need to review its performance regularly but it helps you save considerable time and effort, enabling you to focus on other core marketing activities.
Furthermore, drip campaigns help you drive more sales at a lower cost than other marketing strategies. Studies show that companies excelling in drip email marketing can generate 80% more sales at 33% lower costs.
Sending a series of emails consistently can go a long way to improve brand awareness and recall value. While the recipients may not always open and engage with the emails, regularly seeing your emails in the inbox can help your brand stay on top of their minds.
More often than not, subscribers tend to start ignoring emails, which can impact your engagement rate and other key performance metrics. This could be due to various reasons – they’re no longer interested in your product or service, your content is irrelevant, etc.
Understanding the reason that drove them towards disengagement on a case-by-case basis can help you better plan your drip campaign to pique their interest and re-engage them.
Drip campaigns provide valuable insights into what’s resonating with your audience at what stage. You can leverage this information to keep refining your campaigns for maximum engagement and conversion.
There are different types of drip campaigns for different purposes. Some of the most common campaigns are created to do the following:
Once you have a new lead or contact, it’s important to extend a warm welcome. A welcome email sequence should engage leads, offer valuable insights, and encourage them to connect with your sales team. In a welcome drip campaign, you can send leads:
After successfully engaging leads with your welcome emails, it’s time to focus on converting them into customers. Utilize automated drip emails to not only capture a new user’s attention but also persuade them to take specific actions, such as registering, subscribing, or making a purchase.
However, it’s crucial to strike a balance and avoid overwhelming potential customers with excessive emails, as it can lead to disengagement at the minimum and at its worst, uninstalls.
A drip campaign is an excellent way to educate potential customers about your products and services, and the benefits they can expect and raise brand awareness. A lead nurture campaign is also an effective way to establish trust and convince consumers to choose your brand over another. And of course, nurturing leads through informative content and valuable experiences will increase the likelihood of conversion.
When customers visit your app or website and add items to their carts but leave without making a purchase, a targeted drip campaign should entice them to complete their shopping experience. Statistics from Shopify reveal that a significant 67.45% of carts are abandoned by customers.
With a nurture strategy structured for abandoned carts, you can follow up with customers to notify them that their selected products are still available. You can also showcase complementary items that others have purchased, leveraging the power of cross-selling.
This type of drip campaign targets users who have shown genuine interest in your app and its content, but their interest is waning and they’ve not taken any key steps: subscribed, purchased, added funds — whatever is your main conversion event.
You can plan a drip campaign to re-engage them by offering even more specific prompts or content that can assist them in making a purchasing or other decision. Additionally, it provides an opportunity to gather feedback on the resources they have accessed.
Planning a robust drip campaign strategy involves a number of steps:
Before creating a drip marketing campaign, it’s important to define your goals. What is that you’re trying to achieve with your campaign – Is it to get more leads? Is it to onboard new users? Is it to cross-sell or upsell? Is it to win back lost subscribers?
The next step is to determine who your ideal customer is and classify your contacts into niche segments for running targeted campaigns. You can group them based on their interests, behaviors, and demographics. This allows you to personalize messages to make them more relevant to each subscriber.
Once your goals and audience have been identified, you need to plan the email sequence that you want to send. Be as detailed as possible and include details like key theme/message, timing, frequency, call to action for each of the emails, and so on. It is recommended to map out the customer journey to plan the drip sequence effectively.
Write messages that are engaging, informative, and personalized. Use clear and concise language, and please focus on the benefits of your product or service. Remember that a drip is intended to be consumed as a linear series, so ensure that your content remains useful and is on-brand even if it’s, say, the fifth email in a series of nine.
Use an email marketing platform to set up automated workflows that deliver messages over time. Schedule messages to be sent at specific intervals — such as weekly or monthly — and tailor the content to the user’s stage in the buying cycle.
Track the performance of your drip marketing campaign using metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Use this data to optimize your messages and improve the effectiveness of your campaign.
Continuously improve your drip marketing campaign’s effectiveness by experimenting with different subject lines, body content, and calls to action. See what resonates best with your audience, and try everything out.
Here are the best practices that can help you optimize your email drip campaigns.
The importance of classifying the target audience into specific segments based on their common demographic, geographical, behavioral, and psychographic traits cannot be overstated. It helps you better understand your audience and serves as the foundation for driving successful email drip campaigns that are tailored to the needs, preferences, interests, and behaviors of these specific segments.
Understanding the customer journey, their behavior before making a purchase, and the stage they’re at in the journey will help you improve how you engage with them at various touchpoints.
For example, for new contacts, you can plan a campaign to introduce your brand and how it can help them address their pain points and challenges. Or, for contacts who are browsing products on your webpage or app more than usual, you can plan a drip campaign with personalized product recommendations, offer special discounts, and more.
Crafting compelling emails with clear, concise, and easy-to-read content is essential for successful drip email marketing campaigns. More often than not, businesses tend to use company-specific and technical jargon to stay on brand.
However, instead of focusing on what you want to say, you should focus on what your audience wants to hear. Make it easy for them to skim through the content by ensuring the messaging is clear and to the point. You can perform A/B tests of various email elements, including subject line, body, and call to action, to see what’s resonating the most with your audience.
Drip email campaigns involve sending a stream of consistent and personalized emails. However, you don’t want to overwhelm your subscribers with several frequent emails. This can work against you and cause your contacts to hit unsubscribe. Conversely, sending very few emails is not advisable as the contacts might forget about you while making a decision.
What’s important is to carefully plan the number of emails in a campaign and space them out. This of course depends on your industry and audience. Generally, it is recommended to plan a drip campaign with around 3 to 10 emails and send each after an interval of around 4 days to 2 weeks.
To keep up with the ever-evolving needs, interests, and behaviors of your audience, it is important to regularly review how your drip emails are performing to make adjustments accordingly. This requires analyzing key metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, engagement rate, and unsubscribe rate. This data-driven decision-making will help you stay on track and ensure your campaigns are aligned with your audience’s needs.
Automation is an important aspect of executing drip campaigns. There are many drip campaign software available in the market today that help you automate your drip emails and related workflows, such as:
Most software solutions have intuitive and easy-to-use user interfaces that help you get your campaign up and running quickly. All you need to do is:
To learn more, read our blog on email marketing workflows.
Drip campaigns are not a one-time activity. You need to monitor their performance and make adjustments to improve their impact. This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in.
Before we get to the KPIs, it is important to note that you need to set goals and objectives against which you will evaluate the performance of drip email campaigns. These goals need to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
For example, your goal could be “to increase conversions by 15% by the end of 2025.”
The commonly used KPIs for drip campaigns are:
The KPIs provide valuable insights into what’s working and what’s not working. They also help you understand the root causes that led to sub-par results that you can address and optimize.
For example, if your open rate is low, it could mean your subject line itself is not effective or that the recipients are not interested in the topic, product, or service that you’re focusing on. You can perform A/B tests to determine what’s resonating more with your audience. Or, if your unsubscribe rate is high, you might want to review the frequency of your emails and maybe consider spacing them out.
You need to continuously make improvements to ensure relevance and alignment with the audience’s needs and behaviors.
Drip marketing is a proven strategy for engaging prospective users in a consistent and automatic way. It’s a powerful tool to guide early users in their journey, reinvigorate disengaged or uninstalled users, and gather valuable feedback to enhance app engagement and open rates.
With automation being a key aspect of successfully driving drip campaigns, choosing the right drip email marketing platform is paramount. This brings us to the question – What features should you look for?
There is a plethora of drip email marketing software available in the market today and choosing the right one could be exceptionally difficult.
Here are some of the key features that you should look for in drip email marketing software:
Some of the popular and widely used drip email platforms include CleverTap, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Omnisend, Klaviyo, Flodesk, and Brevo, among others.
Before you start considering these platforms, it is recommended to first identify what capabilities you’re seeking in the drip email marketing platform. List out your requirements and then review and compare these tools to choose the right fit.
The CleverTap customer engagement and retention platform can help you create drip campaigns based on your customer’s lifecycle. Here’s how:
With CleverTap’s advanced platform, you’ll gain deep insights into user behavior and preferences, and experience heightened app engagement as CleverTap empowers you to effortlessly provide automated, hyper-personalized content at scale, delivering a seamless and captivating user experience.
Want to see it in action? Request a personalized demo today!
Let’s look at some real-world examples of successful drip campaigns.
The leading streaming platform Netflix runs an effective email drip campaign targeting customers who have unsubscribed. Right from the first email confirming the subscription cancellation to every email in the series, it includes a call to action, which is bright and easy to spot, to nudge the contacts to subscribe again. It also includes personalized content recommendations based on the contact’s viewing history, newly added shows, trending shows, and more to pique the interest of the contacts.
A leading B2B e-commerce platform catering to small and medium businesses in the apparel space was seeking an integrated analytics and engagement platform to deliver consistent brand experiences across channels. With CleverTap’s all-in-one engagement platform, the company saw a multi-fold increase in its business.
One of the issues that the company was facing was high card abandonment rates on mobile devices. With one-time email reminders not helping with conversions, the company planned drip campaigns to entice customers to make the purchase.
Using CleverTap’s platform, the company created campaigns that sent emails to users who had added items to their cart but did not complete the purchase. The campaign included special discounts and reminders that the items in their cart can go out of stock. It helped them successfully convert about 50% of cart abandoners into customers.
Drip email campaigns, when planned and executed effectively, can provide the necessary boost to your marketing efforts and produce the intended results. With personalization and automation at its core, drip campaigns are a great resource-effective way of reaching out to customers, keeping them engaged, and driving conversions.
Furthermore, with the growing adoption of AI, the possibilities are limitless. From the current content and optimal send-time recommendations, we could see AI use cases where it provides recommendations for improving open rates, click-through rates, etc., on the go, enabling you to improve your campaign and outreach efforts. Together with multi-channel integration, drip campaigns can help you ensure a holistic, effective, and efficient customer engagement strategy.
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