Drip Email Marketing Campaigns

Drip Email Marketing Campaigns - An Introduction

A drip email marketing campaign is an (automated) sequence of emails sent to a sales prospect over time. It aims to trigger a response (specifically a step that advances the prospect further through the sales funnel). The drip campaign can be applied in many ways that include the following.

• Drip campaigns help to onboard new employees like training, preparation for upcoming training.
• You may use drip campaigns to motivate leads, onboard new customers and so on. You can send promotional information that develops brand awareness, engagement or whatever the key motivation for the correspondent stage within the prospect's buying process (within the sales funnel)
• To develop your prospect's knowledge, you may deliver large, complex bodies of knowledge through smaller, more digestible parts (ie versus through a single, very long email).
• Keep your brand fresh in your prospect's mind. This is especially useful since the first contact with your brand is often not when your prospect is ready to buy. These are 'warm prospects' who may already be tied to contracts with other companies and prefer you to contact them again within the medium term future. Consequently, the occasional nurturing contact remind contacts of your brand and products until they are ready to advance through the sales funnel. 
• Nurture while you sleep. In addition to keeping your brand fresh in the minds of prospects, you may nurture at any point within the sales funnel. You essentially set and forget your marketing campaign over as extended a period as you wish. This is ideal when you see value in engaging your audience but prefer not to do so manually.
• Drip campaigns allows you to provide calls to actions to prospects. 
• Example, 'bring 10 friends to the webinar tomorrow' 
• Example, you can nudge prospects to return after they abandon carts. Merchants often report seeing over 10% increase in return rate after using drip email marketing campaigns
• Remind prospects of upcoming events (like webinars, tentpole events, etc).  

Considerations when creating drip email marketing campaigns

• Align your drip email marketing campaigns with different stages of your prospects level of buying intent and your corresponding process, specifically within a sales pipeline or talent pipeline. After all, prospects are not all alike. Consequently, create prospect tiers, ie further classify each prospect according to their current stage within the sales funnel, readiness, etc. For instance, a prospect may be new, hot, warm, cold, etc. Creating prospect tiers enhances customer experience (CX) because you tailor drip email marketing campaigns content accordingly. Prospect tiers may be labeled like 1a, 1b, etc
• Prepare your team to recognize and understand the prospect tiers. 
• Develop content for the different prospect tiers.

CONTENT RELATED TO DRIP EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

• Take steps to create content for a drip email marketing campaign or autoresponder email sequence. 
• Follow steps to create a drip email marketing campaign / workflow in MailChimp