How To Make Drip Campaigns Work For You October 08, 2019, | Posted by erin

If you’re new to email marketing, a term you might have come across, without necessarily understanding it, is “drip campaign.” It’s a term that gets used in a lot of advertising efforts, and basically represents a strategy of gradually presenting information in small bits--drips--to your prospect, to guide them along the path from curiosity, to interest, to purchase. Drip campaigns are particularly well-suited to email because they can be fully automated, and studies show that they generate 80% more sales at 33% lower cost. Site Impact’s experts are a big fan of the technique--so we’re going to arm you with the basics of what you need to know to make drip campaigns work for you.

Know your goal

The first step to creating your campaign is to know where you want to lead your prospects to at the end of it. It doesn’t make sense to take people on a journey if you don’t have a destination in mind, after all. Knowing your goal also helps you to focus your efforts when it comes to the development phase of your campaign--it forms the start of your map. Whether your goal is a specific product purchase, an inventory-clearing sale success, or anything else: knowing what it is you want people to do when you’ve finished communicating with them is the first step towards convincing them to do it.

Know what your prospects need to know

This may be a little trickier; after all, it’s easy to figure out what you want someone to do, but it’s harder to know how to get them to do it. All of the fancy sales techniques in the world won’t help if you are in the dark about what your prospects need to know about and learn about in order to take the action you want. Once you’ve figured out your goal, start asking yourself questions: if you were the prospect, what would convince you to take the action? What would you need to know about in order to make a decision? What features or benefits would appeal to you the most--and just as important: what drawbacks would make you decide not to take the action? Figuring these issues out will help you to create the individual emails you’ll be sending to your prospects, each one either addressing a probable question, highlighting a feature or benefit, or otherwise developing the all important answer to the question: “What’s in it for me?”

Schedule your sequence properly

One of the hallmarks of a successful drip campaign is the proper cadence, or sequence, of emails. If you send all of them in 24-48 hours, you’re overloading the prospect with too much information, can come across as either greedy or desperate for the sale, and generally make a bad impression. On the flip side, waiting 2 weeks to go from one email to another will all but guarantee that your prospects forget about the previous piece of information before they get the next one. Generally speaking, a few days between emails--or at minimum, one email a day--is a good best practice to adhere to. Depending on the usual buying journey for your customers, though, you can tweak the schedule to hit your prospects at the best possible time for them to receive the information you know they’re going to want and need to take the desired action.

Drip campaigns are a fantastic tool for driving conversions of all kinds; but it’s important to make sure that you develop and use them properly. By starting from the goal and mapping backwards through the information and questions your prospects will need answers for before they’ll convert, and timing your new information drops to them just right, you can reap the benefits easily. Contact Site Impact to hear how we can help you make the most out of your first (or any) email marketing campaign.