Drip marketing is when emails are automatically sent to leads with relevant information. They are set to send when they are triggered by a user’s action. For example, a welcome email triggered to send when a user signs up for an account on a website. This is different from standard email marketing due to the high level of personalization, making it much more relevant to leads in each stage of the marketing funnel.
Infographic by Pardot here: https://www.pardot.com/blog/basics-drip-campaigns-infographic/
Quietly efficient
The central idea behind drip marketing is to give leads the enticement they need at each stage of the funnel in order to get them ready to make a purchase. That’s it. While this may seem pretty simple (and it is!) you may be surprised to hear just how effective it really is.
- Every $1 spent on email marketing generates about $38 in revenue, making it easily one of the most cost-effective marketing tools out there.
- Personalized emails receive 29% higher open rates on average than regular, single send emails.
- Transactional emails have 8x higher open/click rates and generate 6x more revenue than regular emails.
As you can see, even something as straightforward as sending a receipt after a purchase can go a long way towards building up goodwill with users. Some other ways companies commonly use drip emails are onboarding, as well as recommending products similar to the ones they’ve purchased before. That being said, there’s still a lot of room for mistakes, and in light of that these are a few basic tips you can use to ensure that you keep things running smoothly.
Always Test
Users may view emails on a variety of different platforms, from smartphones to desktops to tablets. Even within these different platforms, there can be a ton of variation in terms of operating system or screen resolution. This is especially important to remember, considering about 53% of emails are now opened on smartphones. Then, consider that people could be using Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or even AOL, and emails might not even display the same way on each of those. Make sure you test a good range of systems before sending out emails, because sloppy formatting can easily make an email (and by extension the company) look unprofessional.
Stay relevant to your subject
Sure, your eye-popping, attention grabbing subject line will raise your open/click rates. But unless you can convert them into meaningful engagement, this can often backfire. It doesn’t matter if you get a ton of clicks if the content is misleading or has nothing of relevance to the reader. Eventually, your readers will tire of being let down and stop engaging with you.
Take advantage of the resources available to you
There are several professional email management services available, such as Mailchimp. On top of this, you can choose to integrate services like Google Analytics, for more in-depth reporting and data analysis capabilities. These are powerful, free to access tools for any business, and to not use them is to give up a huge pool of useful data.
It takes constant effort to stay ahead of the curve
Technically, drip emails are automatically sent, which makes it “low maintenance”. But it’s important to make sure you don’t get complacent with your results.
Keep in mind that whether it’s A/B testing or refining your segmentation, there’s always things you can do to improve your engagement and conversion. As with any other marketing strategy: are you ever really “finished” with your email marketing campaign?
