What is a Drip Campaign? Definition, Types, Examples

Automated email marketing (drip campaigns) have influenced the online marketing spectrum over the years. But in recent years marketers have begun to doubt its prowess due to biased claims that it doesn’t drive conversion.

Well, automated campaigns without the right email marketing and sales prospecting wouldn’t yield results. So if you’re experiencing low sign-up with automated email campaigns, you might want to check your sales funnel and ensure your inbound and outbound marketing strategies are in sync.

Drip campaigns haven’t lost their effectiveness in the online marketing spectrum. Instead, they are creating seamless horizons for skilled marketers to thrive. To better explain, let’s look at what drip campaign entails.

What is a Drip Campaign?

Drip campaigns are time-based emails sent to email subscribers at a specified time or over a period of time. It could be a specific consecutive amount of emails (once, twice or thrice) or it could be over a period of time (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly).

Do you know what makes Drip campaign an amazing marketing tool? They are automated. So, you don’t have to always painstakingly create new email content and manually send out daily. And the timing has to be accurate.

Keeping up with this process can be overwhelming at some point. Therefore, drip campaigns offer an approach of creating content for a specific campaign, setting a “send” time, and letting automation do the rest.

Drip campaign doesn’t only apply to emails, you can link your drip campaigns to your social media and website ads. It serves a huge purpose: to automatically reach your audience with the right content and at the right time. Source

How Beneficial Is a Drip Campaign?

Every internet-based entrepreneur directly benefits from drip campaigns in at least two ways:

Firstly, time is crucial to every entrepreneur. Thus, they stand to gain from the automation that drip campaigns provide. How? Automation offers the chance for sellers to create new attractive content. This saves time, instead of dwelling on creating multitudes of identical content, you can simply create one to fit all.

Secondly, with drip campaign concepts, you can reach your audience with the right content at the right time.

Acing a drip campaign will attract huge ROIs for your business. Before you create drip campaigns, it’s ideal to understand its different types. This will help you understand what best fit each purpose of your campaign.

Types of Drip Campaigns (With Examples)

From logging onto your website to making a final purchase, there’s a need to always communicate with your customers. 

Unbroken strings of communication reveal the amount of value you’re willing to offer your leads by helping them fulfill their needs.

Welcome Campaign

There’s a welcome party whenever a new member subscribes to your emails and notifications. Therefore, a welcome email should be sent immediately to embrace them. This serves as the first step in onboarding your prospective customers and gives you the chance to talk about your business, what you offer and what makes you a standout from your competitors. Keep it all crisp and direct, and ensure to provide links to relevant landing pages to drive traffic to your website.

Truth is, your prospective client highly expects these emails. So, falter sending it will portray your business as clueless or careless, which is a huge turnoff for new customers. Welcome emails receive 4 times the open rate and five times more conversion rate than other promotional emails. One of the reasons is because welcome emails contain enticing offers like discount offers, a free trial period, and educative information giving insights about the business and its policies.

This welcome email by Winc wine ticks most of all the qualities of a good welcome email: A simple “welcome to Winc”, brief information that customers need to know about it, how to navigate their service, and a good discount offer.

Retargeting Campaign

Have you browsed a site and later seen ads about that web’s products? Chances are you’ve been retargeted.

Retargeting is a highly effective way to convert leads to customers based on their online activity on your website. Retargeting allows you to send customized emails to your site visitors. It doesn’t have to solely focus on cart abandonment (there’s a drip campaign for that), it could also focus on customers who left your site without completing signup or those who didn’t make a purchase or simply visited your website.

In short, retargeting campaigns should focus on customers who you feel deserve a follow-up based on their online actions.

In this example, Forever 21 talks about spicing up your last haul with something new, showcasing products similar to the ones consumers purchased or previously previewed. 

Retargeting helps win back your customers who might have gotten carried away and not complete actions on your website.

Abandoned Cart Campaign

Ecommerce is plagued with a lot of downsides, one of them is cart abandonments. Customers browse your site, pick suitable items, and then go AWOL without checking-out their carts. 

Well, this gives you the chance to run a drip on these customers using incentives to lure them back to their abandoned carts.

Send out follow-up emails whenever customers pick items into carts but don’t checkout. Remind them of the benefits of your products, why they should complete the purchase. You can also offer enticing incentives like discounts or free shipping. Anything to lure them back to complete checkout.

In this example, they offer free shipping, receive installment payments, and have a 365 warranty for each product.  Awesome, right?

Post-Purchase Campaign

Every stage of your customer’s online journey is vital. Even after the checkout. The purpose of a drip campaign isn’t only to increase sales and engagement but to also keep a healthy business relationship with your existing customers. 

How you follow up your customer who just made a purchase determines if they return.

The post-purchase campaign is a great way to continually engage with your customers and increase the chances that they’ll return to make new purchases.

The main factor that retains customers is brand loyalty and the main way to build loyalty is through consistent communication. When you send out post-purchase emails, you become trustworthy and customers don’t see you as just another salesman after their money.

In your emails, you could offer sweet deals on repeated purchases. You also get the chance to showcase new related products in a form of cross-selling. For instance, you could offer cool discounts on phone cases to a customer who recently purchased a phone.

Above all, don’t forget to ask your customers for reviews and feedback on the products and services. It makes them feel relevant and that you care about their opinions. The customer is always right. 

This example from Food52 provides package tracking links, referral credits as well as all their social media links.

Unsubscribe Campaign

We get it, no matter how much you refine and revamp your drip or marketing campaigns won’t appease some customers. It isn’t your fault. Some customers might not be interested in your products and services anymore and want to declutter their inboxes. This might not be the only reason though.

No hard feelings.

There’s a drip campaign format for this purpose — an unsubscribe campaign. It reveals the reason why a customer wants out, and what you probably weren’t doing right.

Running analytics on your drip campaigns reveals open and conversion rates. This reveals whether your target audience constantly engaged with your emails. Taking a hint like this unsubscribe email example portrays reveals who you should check up on.

Ready for Your First Drip Campaign?

Drip marketing is a great way to automate your marketing efforts and focus on the people most likely to respond. It’s less creepy than it sounds and great for converting more leads. 

But, like anything new, implementing a successful drip campaign requires preparation. Before you dive head deep into the world of email automation, ensure you have a skilled copywriter, a proficient graphic designer and an email marketing software that’s worth its salt by your side. Good luck!