Want 50% Conversion Rate? Introduction to Email Drip Campaign

Did you know that for every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made in return? That's an insanely high return on investment, beating social media, paid ads, and all other major digital marketing strategies.

But that's not all:

Email also has the highest conversion rate of all digital marketing. In particular, you can expect anything between 30-50% conversion rates. One report states that amongst B2B audiences, email is the 3rd most influential source of information, preceded only by colleague recommendations and industry-specific thought leaders.

What do all these numbers translate into for you?

Despite the emergence of new technologies like social media and chatting tools, email is still the #1 channel of communication, especially for those who want great business results. Email is definitely the option if you're looking for a marketing strategy that gets high returns on your time and money investments.

Savvy marketers understand this. That's why they've been sending an estimated 246 billion emails daily.

86% of business professionals say their go-to communication channel for business purposes is email and 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel for revenue generation.

While emails are great for reaching your customers, what is even better is that you can get many potential customers with relevant and highly personalised messages at the right time.

But to do this, you have to understand a particular type of email marketing called "Drip Campaign." Through email drip campaigns, you can get your message across to prospective buyers, and nurture and turn them into purchasing customers. Even better, you get to do this frequently, consistently, and with less effort.

In a moment, you will get to see the benefits, examples, and best practices of email drip campaigns, but first, let's get to know what an email drip campaign means.
 

WHAT IS AN EMAIL DRIP CAMPAIGN?

An email drip campaign is a technique of automatically sending relevant messages (usually via email) to prospects over some time, to nurture them to a purchase-ready stage.

The timing of the drips can be based on one of the following:

• A specific user behaviour or interaction

• The status of the recipient in the sales funnel

• A predetermined time interval.

Drip campaigns come with many different names, including drip marketing, automated email campaign, lifecycle emails, autoresponders, and marketing automation.

So, what makes an email drip campaign tick? Why is it important, and what are the benefits of running this marketing campaign?

That's what we will be looking at next.

WHAT DRIP CAMPAIGNS DOES FOR YOUR BUSINESS

According to the Aberdeen Group, drip marketing automation can boost conversion rates by over 50%. Apart from high conversion rates, several other benefits are associated with drip marketing. Here are some of them:

1. Timely Information to the Right People

When it comes to content marketing, the easiest way to close deals (or at least get people to become interested in your offering) is to deliver relevant content to potential buyers.

And one surefire way to do this is through email drip campaigns. Drip marketing campaigns allow you to deliver the correct information to the right leads at the right time.

This is easy because the information delivered via a drip campaign is usually triggered by factors like user interaction with your brand, their same stage on the sales cycle, and so on. The ability to deliver content based on user action drives more traffic to your website, boosts engagement and, most importantly, increases your chances of getting the conversion.

2. The Ability to Create and Nurture Your Leads

Most businesses operate a passive marketing strategy where they wait for buyers to come to them. But wouldn't it be better if you could CREATE your buyers, anytime you want?

Email drip marketing helps you do this — it allows you to nurture your early-stage leads until they are ready to buy. One study found that boosted leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.

That's certainly something you want for your business—large sales.

3. Less Effort, More Sales

By using an automated email campaign to nurture and educate your leads, you get to automate the most tedious part of the sales process.

This means you'd be spending less time trying to get buyers' attention and more time bringing in the sales and making more money. Beyond saving tons of time, you'll stay in touch with leads consistently and frequently throughout the sales cycle. This helps you close deals faster and quickly grow your customer base with minimal effort.

4. The Rule of Seven is Covered

In marketing, there's an old but prevalent concept called "the rule of seven." So the rule of seven states that for a prospective buyer to make a purchase, they'd have to see/read/watch/hear your marketing message at least seven times.

With an email drip campaign, you get to achieve this—your marketing message will get to your prospects several times, which also means more sales.

TYPES OF EMAIL DRIP CAMPAIGNS

There are several different types of drip campaigns that can be used for other purposes. Each drip is differed by the message type, the recipients of the message, the action that triggered the news, and most importantly, the purpose of the message.

Here are the types of email drip campaigns and how you can use each of them:

1. Educational Drips
 

Educational email drips offer potential buyers relevant product information and prepare them to make a purchase. This type of drip education leads to the benefits and features of your product.

2. Competitive Drips

Competitive drips are usually sent to a competitor's customers to turn them away from the competitor and to your product.

3. Top-of-Mind Drips
 

TOM drips keep your brand “alive and active” in the minds of prospects and customers. This drip keeps engaged with your brand and product throughout the sales cycle, even if they are not presently making a purchase.

4. Re-engagement Drips
 

Just as the name suggests, re-engagement drip campaigns are used in reviving or winning back the leads that are inactive or cold. For instance, you can rejuvenate tips that signed up but never bought from you or those who bought from you once but never returned.

5. Promotional Drips
 

If you have a promo or special offer running and want to get prospects to become interested in it, this type of drip campaign is your best bet. Promotional drips can help you entice potential customers to take up your offer.

6. Training Drips
 

Training drips work much like educational drips, but only that here, you'd be training and educating new clients to become familiar with your offering. Whereas educational beads are used to provide potential buyers with relevant product information, training drips are used internally to take readers through a training program.
 

EXAMPLES OF EMAIL DRIP CAMPAIGN

You've probably heard that the brain processes visual content several times more than text-based content.
With that in mind, here are some visual presentations of how drip campaigns work:

And another illustration:

The visual examples above illustrate simple forms of drip campaigns. Here’s an example that shows a complex drip campaign:

As discussed above, there are many types of drip campaigns with different purposes. The visual presentation shown here demonstrates one-way drip campaigns can be used.

EMAIL DRIP CAMPAIGN BEST PRACTICES

It's not enough just to run a drip marketing campaign. If you want your drip to be effective, you must be excellent at it.

Here are some valuable tips and best practices to help you run a successful email drip campaign:

1. Tailor your campaigns. This is particularly important if you have more than one segment in your prospect list. Tailored drips will target each part of the list with relevant and well-personalized content. The more personal your messages are, the better your chances of converting the leads to purchasing customers. Lyris Annual, Email Optimizer Report shows that email list segmentation companies see 39% higher open rates and 28% lower unsubscribe rates.

2. Design your drips for your audience. The simple idea here is that you shouldn't be the boss regarding drip marketing. You have to design your beads to favour your prospects by giving them the power to choose the kind of content they'd like to receive, when they want to receive the content, how they want to obtain it, and how many times they wish to receive the content within a given time interval. Dripping forcefully (or out of line with your audience's choices) can turn prospects off and cause them to unsubscribe from your campaign.

3. Test everything. Drip marketing, just like other forms of online marketing, requires testing. You need to know what works, what needs changing, what strategies are producing results, tactics you need to improve on, the tools that need tweaking, content that need to be sharpened, and so on. Testing also includes reviewing your campaign goals, KPIs, and metrics like bounce rates, opens, click-through rates, CRO, etc.
    

EMAIL DRIP CAMPAIGNS TOOLS AND APPS

An online marketing campaign's effectiveness depends on the tools used in powering the movement. Drip campaigns are not different. Several helpful marketing automation apps and devices include analytics tools, segmentation tools, social media connectors, CRM integration tools, and lead gen apps. So, to make your email drip campaign more accessible and effective, you'd need to pick the right tools and use them effectively and carefully.

For one, MailChimp runs an email automation tool that you can use to easily create and track trigger-based emails that automatically send themselves based on user action. Yesware's Mail Merge feature is another excellent tool for creating and monitoring personalised emails that can be sent to up to 200 recipients. Beyond MailChimp and Yesware, here's a list of other great tools that you can use to manage your leads, track what they do while on your website, get them to subscribe, and send them new drips:
 

• HubSpot

• AgileCRM

• ConvertKit

• Infusionsoft

• Campaign Monitor

• Aweber

• GetResponse

• OptinMonster

• Marketo

• Constant Contact

• Mad Mimi

• Active Campaign
   

There are a bunch of email marketing tools out there. Just do your research to find out what makes the most sense to you.

CONCLUSION

An email drip campaign is an excellent technique for nurturing leads, converting them into paying customers and keeping your brand active in front of the right people. If you haven't been running email drip campaigns, you can give it a try. And you don't need any special training to do this; take the information we've shared above and get to work.

If you need help with other digital marketing tools, feel free to check out our colossal library of hugely valuable tools, including our email address finder, which allows you to find email addresses on any website in a matter of seconds.