There’s an art to an effective email marketing campaign. Too many emails can push your next customer to unsubscribe before they make a purchase, while too few can mean they forget about your brand. A drip email campaign is a great way to keep your business at the top of people’s minds as you guide them towards a conversion.
Email marketing is a lucrative marketing approach with an average return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every dollar spent. When done correctly, it’s a form of marketing that allows you to easily reach your target audience with personalised content. As always, it’s the “personalised” part that plays a crucial role in your success.
A drip campaign can play a major role in your overall email campaign strategy, saving you time, increasing your engagement and conversions, and nurturing your leads. You just need to know the best practices for creating a drip email campaign. These practices ensure the right people get your emails at the right times and you stay at the forefront of their minds.
What Is a Drip Email Campaign?
Also known as a “drip sequence”, a drip email campaign is a marketing strategy that involves sending a series of emails to a lead after they’ve expressed interest in your product or service. A user can take several actions that might trigger a drip email campaign: abandoning a cart, downloading a white paper, attending a seminar, etc. If there’s the possibility of a sale, you can trigger a drip campaign to occur under certain conditions. A campaign usually involves 4-10 emails sent over a period of weeks and months, but the specifics depend on the nature of your business and your campaign.
For example, if a customer signs up for one of your loyalty programs, you may send them a few short emails. You might start with a simple welcome message, followed by a promotion a few weeks later if they haven’t purchased anything, followed by a list of product recommendations and a call-to-action (CTA).
If you’ve shared a product demonstration with a potential client, you might run a post-demo campaign with information about a product they were particularly interested in or sign-up info.
A drip email campaign is different to a mass email campaign. While a mass email campaign is indiscriminately sent to the masses (or everyone in your contacts list), drip campaigns are specifically designed to reach users moving towards a conversion point.
To create a drip campaign, you need to identify the users you plan to reach and the triggers you’ll use to reach them. This can be as simple as sending a ‘welcome’ email when someone signs up for your email list or a happy birthday message complete with a discount code.
Best Practices to Get the Most Out Of Your Email Drip Campaign
There are certain qualities and actions that give any email marketing campaign a higher chance of success: using plain text, customising the information, and incorporating your customers’ interests. Here are some of the most prominent best practices to help you achieve drip campaign success.
Identify your audience and their triggers
The first step in any campaign is determining the demographics that would benefit the most from your products or services. Once you’ve identified your audience, you can identify the campaigns that you’ll need to reach them and make your information and strategies more personal.
Have clear goals
Determine what you want to accomplish with your drip email campaign and ensure it’s attainable and measurable. Decide on the objective of your campaign, whether it’s lead generation, scoring new sales or bringing back inactive users. Decide which demographic in your database will receive the emails and how you intend to track and measure your results.
Plan your campaign thoroughly
Approach your campaign strategically, planning every step from beginning to end. This involves determining factors such as your campaign length, how many emails you’ll send and what metrics you’ll measure your success by. The more detailed your plan, the more likely you are to stay on track with it.
Determine the action you want your users to take
To achieve the results you want, you’ll need to help your web users take specific actions. Whether they’re redeeming a voucher, watching a video, or entering their credit card details, it’s up to you to guide them through specific actions in your sequence.
Set KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics you’ll use to determine your campaign’s success based on your goals. These can include your open rate, clickthrough rate and conversion rate.
Automate drip sequences
It’s impossible to keep tabs on every trigger you put in place and every customer you plan to reach. With the right email automation software, you can set your triggers, load your content and save yourself a great deal of time.
Monitor campaign performance
Once your campaign is up and running, you can use analytics software to compare your results with your KPIs and determine whether you’re meeting them.
Personalise
Addressing email recipients by their names and customising your content to their interests helps it resonate better with them. Informal, cookie-cutter emails typically turn customers off, while a personalised approach leads to more sales and conversions.
Create intriguing subject lines
As the subject line is the first thing recipients will notice about your email, it’s essential to create an attention-grabbing and engaging one that motivates people to read further.
Make content compelling
Make sure the emails you send are meaningful, thoughtful, well-written, short, easy to digest, and informative.
What to Avoid In an Email Drip Campaign
Just like there are many strategies to enhance your drip email campaign, there are also missteps that can spoil its chance of success. Some pitfalls to avoid in your email campaign strategy include:
No-reply email addresses
Sending emails from no-reply addresses comes across as uncaring and impersonal, and when customers can’t reply directly to the emails, it creates a bad user experience.
Impersonal subject lines
A personalised email subject line leads to a 50% higher open rate than a stock-standard one. For best results, avoid generic subject lines that don’t spark sufficient interest and instead give your subject line the personal touch.
Poor spelling and grammar
Lack of spelling and grammar makes your brand look unprofessional at best and makes your email look like spam or phishing at worst.
Scheduling inconsistencies
Deciding how often to send emails and what time of the day or week to schedule them depends on your target market and industry trends. Simply replicating a competitor’s approach doesn’t always lead to the same results. Instead, you’ll need to study the habits of your potential buyers and customise a scheduling strategy.
A weak call to action (or none at all)
A strong CTA boosts everything from brand engagement to revenue and traffic, as well as giving users essentials like your contact details or the next stage of the funnel. A weak call to action—or worse, no call to action—offers users little incentive to move to the next stage of the process.
The hard sell
Being too salesy too soon can come across as desperate and pushy. Instead, brands should focus on being informative, especially in the early stages of the email marketing campaign.
Get the Most Out Of Your Email Drip Campaign with Anchor
Anchor Digital takes a big-picture approach to everything, including your email marketing strategy. We’ll help you launch a drip email campaign that centres your company’s identity, positioning, mission and message. Our brand strategy services include helping you solidify your brand identity, setting your goals, and finding your target demographics. We’ll give you the tools to outlast your competition and use your brand name to paint a positive mental picture.
We offer not just a marketing strategy but a creative strategy that helps you clarify what you want to communicate and how you want to communicate it. A full-service creative agency, we help you share what you’re doing better than anyone else with the entire world. Using precise customer and market research to establish who your target demographics are and how to target them, we’ll make sure we have the right marketing strategy in place before you send a single email.
To launch the right drip email campaign with the help of some expert advice, contact the Anchor team.
