What’s a drip email campaign?
A drip email campaign, sometimes referred to as drip marketing, is essentially a series of emails designed to engage your database and encourage them to take a specific action (or specific series of actions).
Drip campaigns can be used as a key tactic in various strategies, including lead generation, sales, and remarketing.
The timing and cadence of these emails are very intentional, following a very similar structure to the awareness-consideration-action-loyalty phases of the marketing funnel.
Done correctly, your drip email campaign becomes an incredibly low-cost means of building out your prospect pipeline or remarketing to folks who showed interest in the past but didn’t take action.
At Formada, we help our clients build out more effective drip campaigns by focusing on a few key concepts. Here are some of the most important things you should consider when developing your drip campaign strategy.
Make sure you have a clean database
Now, I’m writing these tips based on the assumption that you’ve already got an idea of what email marketing platform you might want to use. There are a ton of options, including Mailchimp, Constant Contact, HubSpot, and many others to choose from, depending on your requirements, your budget, and your familiarity with the medium.
So, assuming you’ve got that covered, I want you to remember this: Before you write anything — and I mean absolutely anything — please make sure that your database is in good shape.
You want your list to be organized and its contact information to be up to date. You’ll also need to decide if you want to send your entire database the same emails, or if you want to segment your list to create more targeted messaging.
Why would you want to segment your list? The possibilities are endless. Geography, general interest in certain products or services, industry, and so on.
Just a word of warning: Segmenting can get incredibly complicated, so if you’re new to the world of email marketing, then I’d suggest you keep it simple, collect data for a few months, and then start segmenting and targeting.
Otherwise, you’re basing your entire strategy on assumptions.
Once you’ve got your database together, you can move onto the next step.
Carefully consider your messaging track
Again, don’t start writing yet! I know you really want to, but you’re still not ready yet.
Before you start writing the actual emails, you need to consider a few things, such as:
- The theme of this campaign
- The number of emails you’re sending in this campaign
- The cadence of their delivery
I think it’s fair to say that you can start with the overarching goal and then reverse engineer our answers to the above considerations.
Let’s say you’re building a remarketing campaign. Beyond having recipients open the email, what do you want them to do? Book an appointment? Fill out a form for more information? Download collateral?
Once you’ve made that decision, you can center the theme of the emails on that goal while creating content that is relevant to our readers.
Next, you can determine how many emails you want to send. A very basic set of remarketing emails could look like this:
- A reintroduction email, reminding the recipient of your brand, services, and products
- A pain points email, one that shows you understand the challenges they face, while including a solution or tip that
- A proof email, one where you can offer things like case studies, testimonials, or reviews that validate your the value of your organization
- A summary email, one that captures all of the above and a special offer that they can take advantage exclusively through your email
All of these emails should feature a clear, concise call to action. What exactly do you want folks to do?
Lastly, decide upon a cadence for sending your emails.
For the example above, you could send your emails once a week for a month, or once a month for four months. Or once every other week for two months.
It depends on your goals, how your recipients respond to your messages, and how aggressively you want to engage with them. Some businesses send emails daily, and while I believe that’s overkill, your best bet is to start simply, gather data, and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Create highly relevant, useful content (but make it succinct!)
As is the case with any marketing content you’re creating, your drip email campaign content — your subject line, body copy, call to action — should all be relevant and useful to your readers.
Yes, your goal is to encourage them to take action, but you mustn’t center yourself in your message. This message is about them, their needs, and the solutions that are most relevant to the problems that they’re facing.
It just so happens that you offer those solutions, and that they’re incredibly effective solutions that are available now via an exclusive, time-sensitive offer.
All makes sense, right? Here’s what can be challenging: Your emails need to be succinct. Like, 50 to 125 words-level succinct.
That’s a lot of information to fit into a very short word count, but trust me, it can be done. And with practice (or the right partner), you’ll be able to distill your message — your appeal, your proof, and your call to action — very easily.
Work with a proven partner who can help you create a successful drip email campaign
The Formada content team loves to help organizations with drip email campaigns. Conceptualization, organization, and content creation.
The Formada team specializes in developing campaigns and content that is customized to your goals, highly personalized to your end-user, and proven to improve performance.
If you’ve yet to delve into the world of drip email campaigns, or if you’re not satisfied with the performance of your current campaigns, then I’d love to speak with you.
We offer free initial consults to new clients, and our goal is to get to know you, understand your situation, and get a feel for how we might work together.
It’s a no-pressure conversation, oriented entirely around your goals and needs. So contact me. I’d love to talk with you right away, so we can help you grow your business through better email marketing!