What is a Drip Campaign? The Ultimate Guide [2023]

Ammar Mazhar
Ammar Mazhar

Last updated on

March 29, 2023

In an age of technological innovation, businesses find it much easier to grow their customer base and generate and convert thousands of leads into sales. All of this is possible thanks to drip campaigns generating $42 for every $1 spent.

But before we delve deeper into the benefits of drip email campaigns, it is essential to know what a drip campaign is and why businesses use it.

Excited to create your first-ever drip campaign? Try Mailmunch, a complete email marketing tool that offers a free HTML template library!

What is a drip campaign?

Drip marketing campaigns are a series of automated emails sent to people who take a specific action or at a particular time. The frequency of the emails depends on the sender, i.e. the number of emails you want to send for a particular action. Also, the emails are sent based on the time zone of specific individuals. 

For example, if A and B are two prospects receiving your emails, they will get the subsequent emails in the drip according to their schedules and actions. 

Drip sequences are helpful for businesses to keep their customers engaged with their products and guide and educate them regarding what is new in the market. As per research, drip emails produce 18 times more revenue than globally broadcasted emails.

Why use drip campaigns?

Let’s suppose you run an apparel and fashion store. Now, you want to remind your customers about the ongoing spring sale. So, you can send emails to them as reminders, but make sure to personalize the emails. When you start getting leads and engagements, send more emails based on your preference for how many emails you want to send, and keep your customers up to date in a personalized and targeted way.

Drip email marketing can be based on the following: 

  • Subscription To A Newsletter
  • After Placing An Order 
  • Signing Up For A White Paper 
  • Shopping Cart Abandonment
  • Not Placing An Order For A While 

Automated drip campaigns are a great way to engage with dormant customers and boost sales by engaging with them in a personalized manner. Moreover, a study suggests that more than 90% of customers are more likely to buy from companies that remember them.

Hence, the emails sent must be personalized to the target audience when forming a drip campaign strategy. Also, these emails should communicate the value your products or services might bring to them. It makes building relations with customers easier.

When should you use a drip campaign strategy?

A drip campaign strategy, when done right, can bring about immense benefits to your business in terms of sales and boosting company value. Therefore, under the following conditions sending drip campaigns becomes compulsory.

1. Nurturing leads

Leads are potential customers you think might be interested in buying your product. Therefore, a little nurturing has to be done to convert such prospects into successful leads. So, for that matter, launch a comprehensive drip email campaign. You can educate your customers regarding your products and services or offer them a free trial. This way, you can acclimatize your customers with what you are offering.

According to research, nurtured leads can lead to 47% larger purchases, which is achievable using drip campaigns.

Drip emails have taken away the need to hand-hold every customer. Now, you can launch drips for welcoming, onboarding, abandoned shopping carts, recommendations, renewals, confirmations, engagement, courses, and unsubscribes.

Nurturing leads example

2. Welcoming

Once you successfully attract people to sign up for your newsletter or white label, it is time to welcome them and tell more about your company. But what be the most effective strategy to use?

The answer is simple: drip emails. Drip emails act as intros to what your product or service is all about. Use them to make your customers familiar with your company and how much value it will have for your customers.

You can use autoresponders to welcome customers too. Stats are a great way to determine whether or not customers will open your emails. Google Analytics can help you track your welcome drip’s open rate.

According to research, autoresponders have a 58.7% open rate, while normal emails only have a 14.6% open rate.

To increase the open rate, you have to make these emails personalized. The inclusion of emojis in welcome emails will surely make the customers open your emails.

3. Onboarding

You have successfully enticed your leads into opening your welcome emails. Now, it is time to make sure that they buy something from you. At this stage, your onboarding drip sequence will start working!

Let’s say that you want customers to subscribe to your newsletter. With the help of automated drip emails, you can convince the recipients to not only open the emails but also persuade them to subscribe. Onboarding emails are all about offering “sells.” These “sells” can be a subscription, newsletter, or the downloading of a mobile app.

The best example of an onboarding drip email campaign is Dropbox. Dropbox prompts its targeted users to download the desktop and mobile apps with automated and personalized emails. But there is a caveat to sending automated emails: don’t overdo it.

You can lose them by bombarding your potential customers with emails, sometimes forever. Therefore, a comprehensive drip campaign strategy is required to entice customers into buying your products and services.

3. Abandoned shopping carts 

Customers visiting your website browse through your products, fill their carts, but they don’t buy anything. Don’t worry! With an effective and targeted drip campaign, you can entice the customers to finish their shopping spree.

The content manager at Shopify, Mark McDonald, has pointed out that 67.45% of carts are left abandoned by customers.

With a personalized automated email strategy, you can follow up on the customers and tell them that the product is still available. You can also tell them about other complementary products that people have bought along with the product they were looking for. Cross-selling is a positive side effect!

It increases the chances of closing a sale. According to SaleCycle, abandonment cart emails have a click rate of 13.3%, an open rate of 46.1%, and generate $5.64 more revenue per email. So, don’t fret when your abandoned cart rates start to increase. Instead, devise automated drip campaigns to win back your customers.

Take a look at the reminder email by Gilt to reduce the cart abandonment rate below.

Gilt abandoned shopping carts example

4. Recommendations 

Drip sequences are a sure way to provide recommendations to your customers about the best-selling item in your store. Companies track their customers buying behavior and, based on that create drip campaigns.

Let’s say that you have bought a book from a leading online bookstore. Based on your buying history, they can send you drip emails recommending new authors in your favorite genre or recommend best-selling books of your favorite authors.

Create a unique and personalized drip campaign strategy based on the top-selling services and send emails that pique their interest.

5. Renewals 

Reminding customers that their subscriptions are about to expire can be done with drip emails. You can include links in your emails to the subscription pages, billing information, and shipping information pages.

You need to have clear call to actions included in your emails to encourage your customers to renew their subscriptions. Create and send thank you emails to those that renew their subscriptions.

6. Confirmations

After you close a sale, your drip sequence should move to the next emails. You should set an autoresponder to thank your customers. Also, mention the latest product features in the email for re-engagement purposes.

Confirmations in email receipts are sent right after your customers buy any products or re-subscribe to your newsletter. After a few days, send emails asking for a review about your product or service, and you can also offer them a few coupons in return.

7. Engagement

Engagement with a website is a clear indicator that your drip sequences are working and are bringing in more leads. Engagement emails entice the customers into looking at your website.

LinkedIn is a prime example of email engagements. If someone tags you in a post on LinkedIn, you get an email and an app notification. But reminder emails are also useful in increasing engagement. RunKeeper has devised drip emails that start working when you don’t engage with their app for quite some time.

You have to tweak your strategy even after you’re not seeing the engagement that you would have liked to see. You can add incentives, use a new call to action, or change your drip email schedule.

8. Courses

People engage with emails that come bearing new incentives. You might see increased engagement with your emails if you include a month-long crash course on copywriting with a discounted offer.

Emails part of a sequence have 80% more open rates and a 300% more click rate. Sending a drip sequence that offers multiple crash courses should ensure that your customers know what you are offering thoroughly. You will only see increased engagement with your emails, and thus, you can close a subscription deal.

9. Unsubscribes 

Unsubscribing is not saying goodbye. Maybe the user wants to engage with your service in a different way. Thus, you have to use your drip sequence to win back the unsubscribes.

A good way to do it is to get feedback from the unsubscribes. That way, you can ascertain what needs to be improved to retain subscribers. This will also allow you to revamp your email drip campaign ideas.

Sometimes sending too many emails can also lead customers to unsubscribe your subscriptions.

Want to reduce your cart abandonment rate? Increase your conversions 25x faster using Mailmunch’s email template library! Start by inserting catchy subject lines. No waiting!

7 Types of drip campaigns to nurture leads

Whether you own an eCommerce store or are a blogger, you should know the types of drip campaigns that are run by businesses to increase their leads.

7 types of drip campaigns

1. Onboarding campaigns

You have successfully nurtured a lead, and now that lead is your customer. Great! Now it is time to make your customer familiar with your products and services and how much value they will have in their lives. This is where onboarding campaigns come in handy.

An onboarding campaign is a fine way to make your customer acclimatized with your brand’s values. Moreover, you can use drip sequences to recommend products to your customers that align with their interests and past purchasing habits.

The chances that a business sells to an existing customer are 60-70% compared to 5-20% to a new customer, as per Marketing Metrics. Thus, this goes to show that you need to put time and effort into devising your email drip campaigns and make sure that they are eye-catching and personalized and as a result, boost your Average Order Value (AOV).

2. Retargeting campaigns

Another way you can effectively use automated drip campaigns is by retargeting lost customers. Reasons that might make your customers abandon you might include losing interest in your products, finding better products at discounted prices, or just better customer service.

Incentivizing your customers is one of the oldest tricks in the bag. People, in general, like to be approached and told that there is an ongoing sale at a store. So? Why not use it to your advantage? eCommerce stores do that all the time. They re-engage customers who have abandoned their carts with retargeting campaigns.

With an effective drip email campaign, you can launch your new sale by sending customers personalized emails telling them, subtly, about what they are missing out on. Thus, use FOMO to your advantage.

But don’t condition your customers to abandon their carts on purpose to take advantage of the discounts that will be available. Here Kenneth Cole does a fantastic job of offering incentives to their customers who have abandoned their carts.

Kenneth Cole drip campaign

3. Post-Demo campaigns

It’s done. You have demonstrated what your product is all about. You have put in the time and effort to make it as impeccable as possible. Now? What next? Start working on a post-demo drip email campaign!

A post-demo campaign is essential to close the deal. It can include a thank you to the customer for showing interest in your product or service. Also, you should include a clear call to action and state the benefits and perks of your product or service clearly and concisely somewhere in your emails.

Try to make your email catchy and eye-popping. A dull and dry email full of facts and boring details might not get the same engagement as compared to an email full of eye-catching versatility.

In your post-demo emails, inculcate your brand's value and make sure the message is conveyed.

4. Unsubscribe emails

Seeing a lot of subscribers unsubscribing from your newsletter? It might not be your fault! People might lose interest in your services or products, or they might have found a better service provider.

Your unsubscribe email drip campaigns should be unique and personalized. They should demonstrate the products and services they once loved to the customers. It should invoke a nostalgic feeling in them and highlight what they will miss once they unsubscribe from your newsletter. Moreover, you can throw in incentives based on the user's engagement history. It might attract and convenience them to remain your subscribers.

Such marketing tactics have proven their effectiveness in winning back dormant subscribers and adding to the customer volume of businesses.

5. Lead nurture emails

Have you got potential leads that you think might convert into successful sales? Need to have a winning lead nurturing strategy to help you? Then lead nurture emails are a great way to ensure that your leads get converted into sales!

A lead nurturing drip sequence should have personalized emails that also communicate your brand's values and principles to the prospects and build relationships with your prospects. Moreover, your leads should get the proper idea of how your products or services add value to their lives. Also, add appropriate newsletter images.

Newsletter images are extremely helpful in guiding your customers regarding your products. Also, the content of your emails should emit warmth and friendliness. If you are a wordsmith, then play with the words and ensure that your words convey the feelings of friendliness and not just a salesman trying to make a pitch. 

6. Promotional campaigns

Promote your products by offering incentives and discounts to your customers. Email that lands in the inbox with a promotional subject line might boost user engagement and increase the click rate.

Your emails should describe the benefits of your products. For example, the holiday season is the perfect time to launch an aggressive marketing and sales campaign. Therefore, you should offer promo codes and discount offers to entice customers to buy from you.

7. Informational/educational campaigns

If you are launching a new product that you want to tell about to your loyal customers or prospect leads, then informational and educational drip email campaigns are the way forward. User engagement with your emails will go through the roof if they have a personal touch.

Educating your prospects about the products and services will allow them to make informed decisions about whether or not they should buy the product or subscribe to your newsletter. Also, another benefit that you can gauge from educating your prospects is that your click rates and open rates will also increase.

You can accomplish this with informational and education drip campaigns by checking up on your customers from time to time. This will induce a feeling of worth and warmth in the customers. They will think that the company cares about them, thus, enticing them to purchase more products. SkinnyDip does a great job at informing and building relationships with its customers.

SkinnyDip's informational campaign

7 easy steps for your perfect drip campaign

Now that you are familiar with the types of drip campaigns, it is time to know the steps that can set up your drip campaign as the perfect one.

1. Identify the goal for your drip campaign

Whether you want to send an onboarding email, a thank you email, or an educational email, it is imperative that you first identify the goal of your drip campaign. An aimless and directionless drip campaign might not bear the results you want.

If your automated drip campaign aims to tempt back unsubscribes, then you should devise campaigns based solely on that purpose. Moreover, if you want to nurture leads, then personalized emails to impart your brand's values and standings should be made part of your drip campaign strategy.

2. Identify the target audience

The fundamental aim of a drip campaign is to generate leads. Therefore, it is important that you first get familiar with your target audience's niche and the triggers that might help enhance the click-through rate and open rate. Once you have identified your target audience, your drip should start working. A few examples will illustrate how a drip should work:

2.1) Action examples

  • When a subscriber first subscribes to your newsletter, your drip should immediately send a welcome message.
  • Whenever a customer makes a purchase, your drip should send an email with the receipt and shipping details of their purchase. 
  • Your drip should send instruction emails when a product is purchased by your customers. This will ensure that the customer is fully informed on how to use the product.

2.2) Demographic examples

  • An automated email should go to the subscriber who recently subscribed to your newsletter and is now dormant and should ask whether or not they need any help.
  • If a user started building something with your app but then stopped suddenly, what you can do is offer walkthroughs and tips on how to accomplish their task.

You can also employ behavior tracking to identify your target audience, identifies Vero. The characteristics, such as engagement with a certain product, visit frequency, cart items, and how long ago they signed up, help you devise the perfect drip campaign strategy.

 Also, asking your customers for more data and analyzing their interactions with your drip campaigns can provide additional insights, which you can then use to fine-tune your campaigns.

7 steps to create a perfect drip campaign

3. Choose a drip campaign software 

Selecting a drip campaign tool or software is extremely important, for it can make or break your campaigns. Depending on your requirements, there are dozens of email marketing tools, and each of these tools has its limitations, advantages, and prices. Therefore, you have to evaluate what do you want from your drip campaigns carefully.

4. Plan out your campaign

Effective planning of your drip campaign strategy can lead to desired results. From the first contact to support, each and everything of your campaign should be worked out before starting the campaign. Moreover, you should also go into comprehensive detail about what will be the workflow of your campaigns will be.

5. Decide how many flows your campaign will have

Your workflow planning should include the frequency of the emails you are about to send, aligning triggers with your messages, and the metrics you will use to analyze your campaign. Thus, all of these aspects of your campaign should be planned out so that your campaign might go on without facing any hiccups. A drip campaign flow chart, thus, should be carefully devised.

6. Craft your personalized message

The content of your emails should symbolize the message you are sending. Therefore, it should be personalized for your campaign. So, if you are targeting a new lead or an existing customer, you should craft personalized emails for every lead. This way, you can build a relationship with your customers and provide them with value.

7. Evaluate and adjust

For a drip campaign to succeed, you need to evaluate the incoming result and adjust your approach accordingly constantly. The data such as open rate, click rate, and engagement with particular products can help you make the necessary adjustments to your campaigns. Also, if you aren’t getting the desired leads and conversions, you need to revise your call to action. Thus, it is the process of constant evaluation followed by adjustments.

9 Benefits of drip campaigns you will be happy to know

The advent of email marketing, and consequently drip marketing, has benefited marketers looking to expand their customer base. Some of the benefits that you will be happy to know are:

1. Improved customer engagement

The major benefit of successful drip campaigns is that they help improve customer engagement with your emails and business. With the help of analytics, you can keep an eye on your improving click-through rate and open rates. With drip sequences, you can increase your revenues up to 18 times.

2. Promote content

With an effective drip model, you can promote the content of your email and websites more effectively. When emails with quality content are sent to prospects, it ensures that click-through rates and open rates increase. Hence, the inclusion of top-quality content is necessary to drive up sales.

3. Nurture the prospects

Drip sequences make it easy and more convenient for nurturing prospects. As the process becomes fully automated, thus, you don’t have to send emails to every prospect cumbersomely. Hence, the profound ease of use makes drip email marketing an effective tool in the nurturing process of prospects.

4. Create brand awareness

Drip campaigns are the most effective and easy way you can use to create awareness about your brand. With an automated drip campaign, you can reach out to hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals and businesses and guide and educate them regarding what your product truly is.

5. Recover zombie contacts

Drip campaigns become truly beneficial when reaching out to dormant customers who are inactive and unresponsive for quite some time. With personalized drip emails, you can make sure that your contacts open your emails when they see customized emails from time to time.

6. Abandoned cart reminder

eCommerce stores can make the most out of drip email marketing with abandoned cart reminders going to customers who have left items in their carts unpurchased. Once they are made aware of their abandoned carts, you can set autoresponders to guide them to complete the purchase. The average click rate has been recorded at 45% through drip campaigns, while the click-through rate has been recorded at 21%, and the conversion rate at 10.7%.

When cart abandonment emails are sent to 100 people, 45 of them open them. Out of them, 21 will click through and 11 of them make a purchase. Take a look at the image below for stats.

Abandoned cart reminder stats

7. Make customized campaigns

Another major benefit of drip sequences is customized campaigns. Gone are the days when you have to write and send emails individually for every campaign you might have been working on. With drip email marketing, you can reach out to thousands of prospects across multiple campaigns with automated emails. This has provided marketers with flexibility in designing campaigns and providing personalized services.

8. Completing all sale funnel stages

With drip sequences, completing the entire sales funnel becomes easier. With autoresponders and automated emails, guiding prospects to buy products or subscribe to newsletters or whitepapers. Thus, getting the customer to the end of the sales funnel saves the company time.

9. It saves time

With the use of drip campaigns, companies are now becoming more productive and proactive in closing sales. Drip sequences save a lot of time and save us from writing and sending emails manually. Now, you can have multiple email templates to work with. You can easily personalize as per the lead you are trying to convert into a successful sale.

9 benefits of drip campaigns

What’s the best time to send drip emails?

Our previous blog discovered that the best days to send emails are Tuesdays and Thursdays. For both days, high open and click-through rates have been recorded.

Moreover, if you are sending newsletters and subscription emails to office workers,  then early morning and just before the close of business are the best times to send any promotional emails. Also, the first two weeks of a month are the best time to send your emails and get orders.

Best days to send emails

12 Inspiring drip campaign examples

Nowadays, all industries send promotional emails to promote their products and services. So, here are a few examples of industries that have used drip email marketing effectively. 

1. Drip campaigns for real estate

Many brands have made effective use of drip sequences to highlight their brand’s values, offers, discounts, and much more. Here are some examples.

1.1) RealtyNinja

RealtyNinja's campaign

The first example of the effective use of drip campaigns is by RealtyNinjas. They provide accurate and reliable real estate information through their effective drip campaigns. RealtyNinja created a drip sequence that offers tips to real estate agents on effectively marketing real estate.

1.2) Valley Realty

Valley Realty campaign

From Valley Realty is a great example of an introductory drip campaign email. In this welcome email, they are telling prospects what they will be offering throughout the year. From marketing trends to property listings, every kind of information you will receive in your inbox.

1.3) Premium Realty

Premium Realty Group's campaign

Drip emails can be used to showcase listings, just like Premium Realty Group is showing here. It is an effective drip campaign that can generate hundreds of leads by showcasing them the listing of available properties.

Want to showcase your real estate listings to the target audience? Try Mailmunch’s real estate email templates with no coding required!

2. Drip campaigns for bloggers 

For Bloggers looking to increase their fan base and email lists, the following are some of the best examples of drip campaigns for bloggers from which they can learn.

2.1) Hootsuite

Hootsuite drip campaign

This drip email from Hootsuite is a great example to let your subscribers know what is new on their blogs. It is an example of both informational and promotional drip campaigns.

2.2) New Darlings

New Darlings campaign

The next example is from New Darlings who are trying to reach out to dormant subscribers with their simple yet effective subject line.

2.3) Wista

Wista's campaign

With Wisita’s drip email marketing campaign, we can see their catchy subject line used to entice the customer toward the informational content that they are putting out.

3. Drip campaigns for the fashion industry 

Fashion companies make use of drip campaigns all the time. They can use drip campaigns to offer discounts, showcase their new catalog, and offer information on incentives.

3.1) Topshop

Topshop's campaign

For example, Topshop uses drip emails to provide information on the coupons they are offering to their customers on their birthdays.

3.2) Chubbies

Chubbies campaign

Chubbies have used drip emails in a very engaging way to remind customers of their abandoned carts. They have used a very catchy call to action as well.

3.3) Frank & Oak 

Frank & Oak campaign

Frank & Oak has used drip emails superbly to boast about their brand. They have combined both email and social media marketing to pique the curiosity of their customers.

4. Drip campaigns for the eCommerce industry

eCommerce store owners can make the most of drip email marketing by running drip campaigns for abandoned carts, offers, and informational content.

4.1) Modcloth

Modcloth campaign

Modcloth has used drip marketing perfectly for abandoned cart reminders to their customers. The subject line is unique and eye-catching.

4.2) David’s Tea 

David's Tea campaign

This is a good example of using drip emails to inform customers about reward points from David’s Tea. Also, it is a great example of promotional emails.

4.3) BirchBox

BirchBox campaign

The example of Birchbox is a great example of reminder emails sent to customers to renew their subscriptions. Apart from that, it is also advertising its new offer.

How to measure drip marketing results?

The metrics that you should focus on when comparing analyzing the results of your drip campaigns are:

  • Open Rate 
  • Click Rate 
  • Response Rate
  • Bounce Rate
  • Unsubscribe Rate
  • Conversion Rate 

Include open rate in your analysis

Open rate tells you how many in your email list have opened your emails. It is not a definite metric and shows only one side of the picture. The average email open rates range from 15.22% to 28.46%.

Click rate is your friend 

Click rate can inform you about how engaging and receptive your subject line is that it induces the customers to open the email. 15% is considered a good click rate.

Response rates are great

Response rates tell you about the actionability of your call to action. They also tell whether your emails have been successful in coercing leads to the next stage of the sales funnel.

Include bounce rates as well 

The bounce rate tells us that your email list is not opening the emails that you have been sending. There can be multiple reasons why your bounce rate is higher. Maybe your emails aren’t as catchy, some of the emails in your list might be fake, or a spelling error has sent the email to the wrong person. If your bounce rate is more than 5%, you might need to rethink your drip campaign strategy.

The importance of unsubscribe rates 

The unsubscribe rate is important to consider as it can tell you at what stage of your drip campaign your subscribers are unsubscribing. This metric can help you visualize the changes you have to make in your tactics. Moreover, it can also guide you on whether or not you have to nurture the leads more.

The thing that is conversion rates

Conversion rates provide the data you need for determining how many leads are reaching the end of the sales funnel. This allows you to know the strength of your campaign and whether or not you have to change course with your approach.

Conclusion

Drip campaigns are a surefire way to boost leads and conversions. They are a proven and effective tactic for managing multiple email campaigns. Lead nurturing becomes easy with drip email campaigns as you can reach out to multiple leads.

Also, constantly analyzing the data of the drips can ensure smart decision-making when it comes to fine-tuning your tactics.

Do you want a smart and intuitive tool to help you create drip campaigns for your sales pitch? Then Mailmunch has got you covered! Mailmunch is a complete solution for email marketing and lead generation. You can create and design your drip emails with thousands of custom-built and SEO-optimized templates.

Moreover, you don’t have to know anything about coding; the highly intuitive drag and drop builder lets you customize your pop-ups, landing pages, and autoresponders in just a few clicks!

Frequently asked questions

1. What is a cold drip campaign?

Cold drip campaigns are used to communicate with potential prospects using automated emails triggered by actions. A successful cold drip is where your emails are read, and you also get replies in return.

2. What is the difference between a drip campaign and a drip marketing campaign?

Both are the same. Drip campaigns and drip marketing are names given to automated emails sent to customers or leads depending upon their actions, changes in status, or based on a schedule.

3. What is a drip campaign with a low frequency and high volume?

Drip campaigns with a low frequency mean that the emails in the drip are sent after long intervals. In contrast, a high-volume drip campaign is one where a large number of emails are sent after certain triggers or as scheduled.

Author Bio

Ammar Mazhar

A voracious reader and a music lover, Ammar has been writing engaging and informative content for over 3 years for B2B and B2C markets. With a knack for writing SEO-optimized content, Ammar ensures the results speak for themselves.

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