Email marketing has been around for a while and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon. With an average ROI of 38:1, email marketing continues to be one of the most effective marketing channels. If email is still a successful channel, why not use email automation to save you time and make your emails (literally) work for you.
Email automation builds customer relationships by having a continued presence in your customers, or prospects, inboxes without having to do the work manually.
“Email marketing is one of those pivotal, game-changing facets of online marketing that nearly every serious marketer needs to not only know how to do – but do successfully." – Neil Patel
Words from the digital marketing man himself telling us why email marketing is effective. The use of email automation can step up your email game and make it even more successful. There are two different types of email automation – drip campaigns and time-based campaigns. In this blog, I am mostly going to dive into drip campaigns, but you can read more about time-based email campaigns here. These two types of email automation allow you to save time, seek qualified leads, convert more leads, create strong relationships, and so much more. But why are these types of email automation so important? Below we’re breaking down what a drip campaign is, why it is important, and how to implement it at your business. Let’s start learning!
What is a Drip Campaign?
Drip Campaigns are a form of email automation and are used to provide the user with the ability to nurture their leads and customers through targeted emails. A series of pre-curated emails are automatically sent to specific contacts based on a trigger or action taken by that contact. It’s essentially a “drip” of content that is dispensed based on the contact's interactions.
Why are Drip Campaigns Important?
Well, for starters, they are more successful than mass email blasts and help drive more revenue. Did you know that:
- Open rates for drip campaigns are about 80 percent higher than single send emails, and average click-through rates are three times higher.
- Drip campaigns can generate 50% more sales-ready leads through steady communication with customers.
- Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to mass email blasts.
- Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.
So why are drip campaigns so successful? It’s because you are sending more targeted, personalized content based on the buyers’ journey.
Drip campaigns provide you with the ability to be more personalized based on the actions that the recipient has performed. They help you stay on top of your contact’s mind through automation, which saves you time and converts more leads to customers.
How to Build a Drip Campaign?
To be able to build your drip campaign, you need to understand the different features and buzzwords you’ll see in your email platform. While all email service providers use different names for elements, you will most likely see the ones we are highlighting below (or something very similar).
Action
Actions allow the user to perform an act that will help automate their workflow. Just remember, an action is something that the user (creator of the drip campaign) does. There are various actions that you can select from including send an email, assign contact to a group, remove a contact from a group, notify a user, or assign contact to a user. Through these actions, you can deliver the right message to your audience, give your sales teams hot leads, or remove contacts that are no longer engaged.
Trigger
Triggers help segment your audience through the recipient’s behavior (or lack of it). Only a recipient can set off a trigger because it's based on what action they take. This helps make sure you are sending the right message to the right people. For example, you may want to engage users who are not clicking an email by offering a discount; while at the same time giving your contacts, who are clicking the emails, more engaging content.
When you select a trigger, you have the option to choose what the trigger will be – opened the email, clicked the email, added to a group, or submitted a contact form. Triggers will send contacts down different paths and help with being able to target them correctly based on their journey.
Wait
To wait is an action that allows the user to perform back to back actions with a waiting period of hours or days in between. This is used when you are not looking to split your group but want to automate emails to keep your audience engaged.
Stop
After each stage of your drip campaign, you have the option to select the stop action to end that specific path sequence. Stopping means you no longer wish to take any other actions or triggers. After a stopping point, your audience, that took that particular path, will no longer receive communications from this drip campaign.
Dynamic
Dynamic means the campaign will continually add new contacts in this group at the start of the drip after the launch date. For instance, if you add a new contact to a group assigned to a drip campaign, they will begin to receive this particular drip campaign from the beginning. This gives you the advantage of an ongoing campaign that is constantly engaging new contacts. They are going to get the same series of emails just based on when they complete an action.
Static
Static means that the campaign will not include contacts added to the group after the campaign launch date. To break it down, if you receive more contacts and add them into your contact group that is a part of the drip campaign after the start, they will not go through the drip campaign. An example of when this would work would be for promotions or events that have a time frame on them.
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Check it out here.
Importance of Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns help build the process and foundation of a relationship with a prospect or customer. With the ability to nurture, personalize, and save time, drip campaigns are genuinely Marketers' best friend. Let's take a more in-depth look into how drip campaigns help you achieve these 3 things.
1. Nurture
The drip campaign provides the ability for you to stay at the top of mind for your customers. Without spending hours each day segmenting and creating emails, drip campaigns allow you to pre-curate emails based on the contact's behavior and their position in the buyers' journey. By regularly keeping in touch with your contacts, you can nurture and build a stronger relationship over time.
2. Personalize
Drip campaigns give you the ability to engage with customers on a 1 on 1 basis. For instance, if two people enter the drip campaign, their journey may be different. The email flow allows you to personalize their journey no matter if it’s 10,000 people or 30 people receiving the email.
3. Save Time
For Marketers, drip campaigns (email automation in general) will save you time like never before. Not only does the campaign perform better, but it lifts the burden off your back to remember to send out emails. Put the effort and time in the beginning when creating the campaign to make it perfect; it'll save you time overall in the end.
Ways your Organization can use Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are the foundation of building a relationship with prospects and customers as well as a time saver. If you want to use drip campaigns at your organizations, I have listed below just a few ways they can come in handy.
- Welcoming – Create an email flow that will welcome and keep a new subscriber engaged.
- Downloaded content series – Build a drip campaign that feeds the interest of the contact based on the content they downloaded.
- Onboarding – An email sequence that nurtures a customer after the purchase.
- Re-engagement – Build a drip campaign that invites contacts to return to your site based off of triggers set from lack of engagement or purchases.
- E-commerce – Immediately be in your customers' inbox after a contact sets a trigger off by leaving items in their virtual cart without purchasing them.
With the world constantly evolving, email marketing does as well. We can’t just send boring, old emails out whenever we feel like it anymore; we will be forgotten about and sent right to the trash. Email automation helps make sure that your recipients recognize you, remember who you are, build brand awareness, and encourage the receiver to engagement with your organization. Tryout email automation with a free trial of DirectLync today!
