How to Do Email Drip Campaigns

What is an Email Drip Campaign?

Email drip campaigns are pre-written sets of messages that are automatically sent, or “dripped,” to recipients over time. Drip campaigns are commonly used to welcome new email subscribers, as well as support lead nurturing and onboarding strategies in email marketing.

Here’s an example of a what a lead nurturing campaign might look like:

Source

As you can see, there is a sequence of emails that are dripped according to whether or not the recipient opened the preceding email. So, it’s dynamic, too: emails can be sent based on behavior. Yet they are still pre-determined to an extent, so each subscriber is sent along the path they indicate they’re ready for (or, maybe more accurately, where the business decides they’re ready to go next). 

Become One of The Highest Paid Digital Marketer

With Purdue Digital Marketing PG ProgramExplore Course

The purpose of email drip campaigns is to:

• Learn more about your subscribers
• Personalize the communication
• Segment subscribers by where they’re at in the funnel
• Keep recipients engaged so they eventually convert

How to Do an Email Drip Campaign 

Now that you get the basic concept and operation of drip marketing, here’s how you can get started on your own email drip campaigns.

First: Decide Which Type of Campaign You Want to Try

If you’re just starting out with drip marketing, put together just one campaign and see how it goes. That way, you can use what you learn toward future campaigns. There are 3 main types of email drip campaigns, including:

• Welcome emails for new subscribers
• Lead nurturing emails
• Onboarding emails

Welcome emails are designed for brand-new subscribers who you want to bring into the fold right away, help them learn more about your business, and keep them engaged with interesting content and offers.

Lead nurturing emails are designed to move your leads through the funnel by sending them relevant content, such as case studies, white papers, videos, webinars, or product demos. 

Onboarding emails moves free trial users toward becoming paying customers by helping them get to know your product or service better, demonstrating how you offer solutions they actually need, and showing why you’re different. 

Second: Create a Strategy

Once you’ve decided which type of campaign you want to pursue, then it’s time to develop a strategy. To do this, you’ll need to: 

• Define a specific end goal for the campaign
• Create a pathway that accomplishes that goal
• Develop messaging that aligns with the pathway and goal
• Define the audience for this segment

Defining a specific end goal for your email drip campaign is important. It helps you shape the messaging you’ll create in a later step, and it helps you measure the performance of your campaign. Your end goal might be to increase sales by X percent, build greater trust among your audience, or get more paying customers. 

Creating a pathway helps you accomplish the end goal by laying out each step of the campaign — or, in other words, each “drip” to be sent to the recipient’s inbox. If you decide on a welcome email campaign, then your first email “welcomes” new subscribers and moves them along other milestones you determine to be important. Like in the example above, lead nurturing campaigns may go through a more complicated pathway to reach the end goal. 

Developing the messaging is next, and it should align with your end goal and the pathway. Since email drip campaigns depend on pre-written messaging, they need to make sense for every recipient in this segment. That’s not to say you can’t personalize it further with the recipient’s name or other identifying features, but you want the messaging to be hyper-relevant for the stage of the funnel. 

Defining the audience that receives emails from this campaign is critical. Since your welcome email campaigns are built around awareness, and your lead nurturing and onboarding focused on consideration and decision, you can place your recipients accordingly.  

Become One of The Highest Paid Digital Marketer

With Purdue Digital Marketing PG ProgramExplore Course

Third: Measure Performance

Here’s where you have the opportunity to learn how effective your strategy is, by measuring the performance of your drip campaign. You’ll want to monitor open rate, click through rate (CTR), and response rate — the percentage of all of the recipients who clicked on the link of your email drip campaign and completed an action.

Are you a professional who is aspiring to make a career a Digital Marketing? Check out Simplilearn's Digital Marketing Certification Program now.

Conclusion

Relevant emails, like drip campaigns targeted to a specific segment, drive 18x more revenue for businesses than emails broadcast to a single, wide-reaching audience. If you haven’t tried drip campaigns before, give it a chance. You might just find it gives your business that much needed boost this year.  

Take Your Digital Marketing Career to the Next Level

Digital marketing skills are in super high demand across all industries. If you want to get in on this hot profession, why not upskill to make yourself more marketable, and ultimately, more successful in your career? Simplilearn offers a wide selection of online courses and rigorous programs in this exciting field, including the Digital Marketing Specialist Master’s Program. You will learn about the eight disciplines that make up digital marketing, including email marketing through a mix of live, online courses, real-world projects, masterclasses from experts at Facebook, case studies from Harvard Business Publishing, and much more.