A drip campaign is also known as a lifecycle email or automated email campaign.
It’s a pre-written email sequence delivered to leads at various points of the customer journey.
Typically, your leads do something that sends a signal to the autoresponder before they start receiving these emails.
They could have signed up for a newsletter, downloaded a free ebook from your website, or bought a particular product.
You can also set drip campaigns to be delivered at specific dates like anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, and other events that may be relevant to your customers.
Why Are Drip Campaigns Important?
Drip campaigns are essential additions to your marketing strategy.
A survey by Uplers Emails revealed that companies running successful drip campaigns generate 80% more sales at 33% lower costs.
That proves that drips deliver better results and save you more money.
That’s because with drip campaigns, you can efficiently engage with leads through emails based on their actions. That means they receive content that’s relevant at the moment.
For instance, if someone subscribes to a nice email newsletter, they can receive a welcome email instead of a generic one promoting your newest product. This last one might just turn them off.
Drip emails work like trails that bring leads closer by showing them the benefits of your services or products.
When you use drip campaigns, you’re building trust with your leads. Because of this, they’ll be more willing to perform the desired action when you ask.
Lastly, if you had to type a new email every time a customer buys a product or subscribes to a newsletter, you’d be tired of the process.
Imagine if you always had to do the same thing for every lead on your email list. Thanks to drip email campaigns, you don’t have to do that.
Once you have configured your automated emails, you’re ready to go.
Make sure you use compelling subject lines to ensure the emails are opened in the first place, though. There are AI templates you can use if you run out of subject line ideas.
Just add your email body to the template and specify the tone you want. You’re bound to find some creative options you probably never thought of.
Five Kinds Of Email Drip Campaigns To Consider
Now that you know why drip campaigns are essential to your business, let’s see the various email drips you can use to engage and nurture your leads.
1. Welcoming The Customer
Welcome emails are drip campaigns that kickstart your relationship with new leads.
It includes a series of onboarding emails that help new leads get comfortable with your brand.
According to MailChimp, sending a series of welcome emails to customers yields an average of 51% more revenue than a single welcome email.
Ideally, your first email is where you say hello, and tell customers about your brand–with a focus on how your product or service can help them.
Welcome emails sent immediately will get significantly higher open and click rates. Take note of this when you set up your welcome email campaigns.
You can start by saying thank you if they subscribe to a service or buy a product. It’s also a good place to give them what they signed up for.
They could have registered for a gift voucher, downloaded a free ebook, or gotten information about a webinar.
At this point, you can also tell them to connect with you on social media.
In the next email, you can offer value with educational content. You can also share a recent blog post or material that addresses pain points they might have. See the Ikea example below:
The final email is where you include a call to action that takes them to the next stage of their customer journey.
The welcome email sequence should be sent at frequent intervals when customers can still remember your brand.
Bonus tip: Encourage your audience to move your mail to their primary inbox because most autoresponder emails go to the promotions segment of their email inbox, especially if they are Gmail users.
2. Special offers
Special offers and promo emails are crucial to successful drip campaigns.
They help you reward loyal customers and build excitement about your products or services. Special offers give your leads a stronger motivation to buy from you.
You can use special offers to boost the sales of specific products or services.
That will work for your existing customers and the new leads you generate using social media, online ads, or email finder tools.
Special offer drips help you promote exclusive deals and take advantage of special seasons or holidays.
Use this drip email sequence to express value from different perspectives. Your first email can be an introduction to the offer. Its aim should be to get the customer excited about the product.
Your next email will focus on why customers should buy the products. J.Crew does this with the email series in the image below.
The caption “midsummer must-haves” indicates that the products are essential for the current season. That will encourage leads to jump on the offer.
With your final email, you can emphasize urgency (say the exclusive deal is only available for a short time, for instance).
This will encourage your potential customers to take action. They don’t want to miss out on a great deal after all.
Note that being too promotional with your special offer is one of the common mistakes in email marketing you should avoid.
Your message should focus on the value they get from the offer. If you need to give more details, you can link to a landing page that gives the explanation.
3. Special Days Like Birthdays And Anniversaries
Birthdays and anniversaries are great opportunities to build a personal connection with your customers.
You can use anniversary campaigns to acknowledge personal milestones like consumers consistently using your product or service for some time.
You can also celebrate regular business milestones by using recurring emails. These milestones include your business anniversary or your product launch date.
For instance, Modcloth used the email below to celebrate its first anniversary and offered a discount code as a gift to customers.
Personal and meaningful birthday emails earn significantly higher open and click-through rates than regular promotional emails.
Birthday emails also achieve 481% higher transaction rates and revenue.
Anniversary and birthday emails can significantly improve your customer retention efforts.
Show customers that you care by sending heartwarming messages on their special days.
Your birthday drip sequences can come with a discount coupon with a limited duration.
This way, you can send follow-up emails that encourage them to use the discount. See this example by Topshop:
Birthday and anniversary email drips will make the recipients feel special. These email drips can begin a few weeks before the big day.
Ensure that the emails come with exclusive offers and bonuses that your customers will love.
4. Upsell Emails
Upsell emails are drip marketing campaigns that suggest products to customers who recently bought something similar or added it to their shopping cart.
Here, you’re showing them an improved or a bigger version of the product they purchased.
The recommended product often sells at a higher price, so show them that they can get more value from it.
Upselling also works when you want your customer to upgrade to a higher subscription on one of your services.
With the upselling email sequence, you expose your audience to new offerings from your brand. It’s one way to improve customer experience and drive brand loyalty.
Your upsell sequence can start with an email that confirms an order. In this mail, you’ll show the products you want them to buy.
With the next email, you can highlight milestones users have achieved with your product. That is what Nike did with the email below:
Activate upselling campaigns as soon as customers buy a product or when you launch a new product with richer features.
You can also upsell offers to customers who have used a particular product for a specific period.
5. Cart Abandonment Emails
Cart abandonment emails are sent to shoppers who did not buy the products they added to their cart before leaving your site.
The truth is that people abandon their online shopping carts for various reasons, and that’s not good for your sales funnel. So how do you get them back? With a cart abandonment email.
Cart Abandonment Emails Get An Open Rate Of About 45%.
There are various ways you can tweak your abandoned cart emails. The important thing is that your email content aligns with your brand as much as it appeals to your target audience.
For example, Food 52 uses a friendly email to remind cart abandoners about the product they left:
Your cart abandonment emails should come with a sense of urgency.
There are various ways you can do this through a series of emails—you can add a complimentary gift, offer free shipping, or give a discount coupon if they complete the order within a specific time.
You can also let the customers know that the product might run out soon. Google store does this in the above image.
With this, the recipient will be eager to buy the product before it sells out.
Wrapping Up
Email drip campaigns can help you convert leads to customers. But to ensure successful drip campaigns, you need to understand your customer profiles.
Target the right people by creating different email drips for customers at various levels of your buyers’ journey.
You’ve also learned the different types of drip campaign emails that can deliver excellent results for you.
These include welcome, special offers, upsell, cart abandonment, and special day emails.
Go ahead and try out these drip campaigns. Watch how your conversion rate improves.
