From traditional marketing to influencer marketing, in the course of your business career, you might have heard or come across different sorts of marketing.
But the term ‘drip marketing’ might be new for you. The term first appeared in the vocabulary of millions of people in the year 2014 and has since left its mark in the marketing scene.
Drip marketing is an approach used by email marketers for marketing communication and it has emerged as one of the most powerful and effective forms of marketing in the business world.
If you are not aware of what drip marketing means and why it is such an effective and efficient form of marketing, then you have come to the right place.
In this blog, we will introduce to you the concept of drip marketing, explain to you its importance, and walk you through the steps involved in creating one.
Excited? Then quit waiting around and jump right in!
What is Drip Marketing? (Definition)
The name drip marketing is a comparison to the concept of ‘drip irrigation‘ in agriculture, where the crops are regularly and consistently watered in small amounts over a long period of time.
The same applies to drip marketing as well.
Drip marketing is a marketing strategy that breaks down marketing communication into bits or ‘drips’, which are spread across a certain period of time till the potential customer takes action.
This is usually done through long-term repeated exposure of the goods and services through emails, social media posts, phone calls, brochures, and many more.
The aim is to foster communication and then gently nudge the prospects into the direction of making a purchase, instead of selling it at point-blank.
Those automated emails you get from a website you browsed without making a purchase – that’s drip marketing in action.
In other words, it’s all about sending the right information to the right people at the right time. Now that you know what drip marketing is, let’s try and understand why you should use it.
Why You Should Use a Drip Marketing Campaign?
The thing about drip marketing is that if you are good at it, then you’ll be able to enjoy a wide variety of benefits! What are they, you ask? Let’s take a look!
1. Better Engagement
In a drip marketing campaign, you send out personalized emails to promote your business and products. These emails will be based on the user or website visitor’s actions.
Such emails are more likely to be opened than random mass-sent emails. This results in better and improved engagement rates.
2. Saves Time and Effort
Drip marketing allows you to push your leads down the funnel towards conversion automatically, without any manual intervention from an employee. This saves a good amount of time, effort, and money.
As a result, there will be an increase in productivity because you’ll have more time on your hands to invest in other important aspects of your business.
Read more: Marketing Psychology: 9 Strategies to attract Customers!
3. Eliminates Prospects’ Irritation
There’s no denying that even though cold-calling and cold-emailing might be useful for your business, it is irritating for the prospects as those tend to interrupt their day. However, that’s not the case with drip marketing.
Drip marketing focuses on sending emails to prospects at a particular time that they would want the email. They are often triggered emails based on the prospect’s actions.
4. Facilitates Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
Drip marketing campaign goes beyond conversion and enables cross-selling and up-selling. This means that you can get your customers to become loyal.
Through drip marketing campaigns like automated emails, you can convince them the customers make repeat purchases, buy new products, renew their subscription or even recommend your business to their friends. This will help increase sales and expand your business.
5. Increases Brand Awareness
Since drip marketing is all about triggered emails and targeted remarketing, it will help prospects and customers stay updated about your brand.
Your regular emails will act as a reminder to prospects or leads even if they don’t make a purchase from your business. This will in turn help you create better brand awareness.
In addition to all this, drip marketing campaigns are effective when it comes to welcoming, lead-nurturing, on-boarding, and even capturing abandoned shopping carts.
If you’re still not very convinced, here are some amazing statistics about the wonderful results from drip marketing campaigns.
- Open rates for drip marketing campaigns are roughly 80% higher than single send emails, with three times the average click-through rates.
- Drip campaigns generate 50% more sales-ready leads.
- Companies that successfully employ marketing automation generate 80% more sales at 33% less cost.
- Triggered email click rates are 141.6% higher than Business-As-Usual emails.
Now that we have established how crucial a drip marketing campaign is to a business, let’s take a look at how to create an effective one!
How to Create a Drip Marketing Campaign?
Step 1. Set Goals and Objectives
Every marketing campaign requires a set of goals and objectives that are to be achieved and a drip marketing campaign is no exception to it.
Setting goals and objectives will help you have an outline and framework of all the actions that you need to take to push your campaign forward. It acts as the driving factor.
Ask yourself why you chose to use a drip marketing campaign. Is it to nurture leads? Or improve conversion and sales? Is it because you want to establish a stronger and long-term connection with your customers? Or is it all of the above?
Answering these questions will help you determine the nature of your marketing objectives and the direction you want to pursue.
Step 2. Identify Target Audience
Identifying your target audience is a mandatory and crucial step in every marketing campaign, but is it particularly important for a drip marketing campaign as it is heavily based on a personalized approach to each individual.
You have to identify your target audience, their demographics, what they want, and how they behave. This will help you understand them better.
Since drip marketing campaign relies on trigger-based segmentation, you can divide or segment your target audience into:
- Action-trigger-based – Here, you group your target audience on the basis of how they interact with your business. This can include first visits to your website, time spent on certain sections, frequency of the visits, cart abandonment, past purchases, etc.
- Demographic-trigger-based – This involves grouping customers based on their age, gender, behavior, or psychographic profile to understand them, craft specific messages for each, and push them towards conversion.
Getting all the metrics and data related to your target audience can help you tailor your message and content in accordance with your consumer’s preferences and needs.
Read more: What is a Flash Sale & Why it is a Good Marketing Technique?
Step 3. Craft a Message
Drip marketing is all about providing ‘the right people the right information at the right time’. This means that, once you have identified the target audience for your drip marketing campaign, you must craft a personalized message to them.
The keyword here is ‘personalization’, which essentially means that your message should be appropriate for the cause and appealing to your audience.
Therefore, based on your marketing goals, your message should contain the call-to-action that you want your target audience to take. It could be anything from welcoming the prospect to your services, product introduction to re-engagement with your brand, and more.
Just ensure that you make it attractive and crisp.
Step 4. Plan the Campaign
Once you are done crafting a message for your target audience, the next step is to plan your campaign.
The essence of a drip marketing campaign is the fact that is ensures continuous and consistent communication over time. This means that you have to make sure that you send out your emails regularly and keep them relevant.
Here, you have to focus on scheduling. Ask yourself the following questions:
- How many emails should be sent during the course of the campaign?
- What time should the emails be sent?
- In what order should the emails be sent?
- How often should the emails be sent?
- How will the results of the campaign be measured?
The answers to these questions should ideally help you out in planning your drip marketing campaign.
Step 5. Launch the Campaign
When all the planning and preparation is ready and done, kickstart your campaign by sending out your emails to your target audience.
Here, you can utilize CRM software to automate your processes. They can help you launch your campaign by simplifying the process of bulk emailing, scheduling emails, and segmenting your recipients. This will also help boost the overall productivity of your business as well.
Step 6. Evaluate and Assess
The last step in your drip marketing campaign is to evaluate, assess and measure your results.
Even if you are a professional and your campaign is automated, you need to constantly monitor the effectiveness of your campaign and make changes and adjustments in order to be at the top of the game.
For example, you can take a look at some metrics such as click-through rates and conversion rates. If you want to get more click-throughs, then you can make changes, rewrite your call to action, etc.
Conclusion
No matter what industry you are in, drip marketing campaigns are one of the best ways to nurture your leads, build trust and foster a long-lasting relationship with your prospects and customers.
It’s also one of the most effective ways to increase your revenue as well! And we believe that we have helped you understand a thing or two about drip marketing campaigns through this blog.
Now if there is anything you should be doing, then it is to start your own drip marketing campaign and watch it work wonders on your business.
Time to take a trip down the drip marketing path!
Further reads:
How to Automate Content (And Why You Should)
Meme Marketing: Definition, Tips & Examples!
How Automation Changes Everything In An Email Outreach Sequence?
6 Ridiculously Simple Email Marketing Tips For Content Marketers!
Top 11 Gmail Extensions for Email Marketing!
Email Campaigns: What are they & How to Ace them with Steps!
9 Inbound Marketing Examples You Need to Know About!
