What Is Drip Marketing

eCommerce continues to innovate.

This presents multiple challenges in the form of understanding new tech, and stronger competition, but it also presents new opportunities. The ability to leverage new technology quickly and keenly can cause a boom in conversion rate.

In this article, we’ll be looking at a tool that can help you give your visitors exactly what they want with expert timing and minimal effort.

Let’s explore drip marketing, how it’s done, and what its benefits are.  

What is Drip Marketing?

Drip marketing is a modern marketing strategy that involves sending targeted email messages directly to potential customers over a period of time. 

This approach differs from traditional advertising in that it focuses on building relationships with individual consumers instead of simply blasting a universal message out to a general audience.

The “slow” nature of the practice is where it gets its name. You are “drip” feeding messages to leads in order to grow your relationship with them.

By using data from customer interactions to inform their targeting decisions, companies using drip marketing can create campaigns that are highly relevant and engaging for each individual recipient.

Essentially, the drip campaign strategy allows businesses to build trust and loyalty with potential customers over time by providing information that is tailored specifically for them.

As a result, drip marketing has become an increasingly popular tool for businesses looking to connect with their target audiences in meaningful ways. 

How Drip Marketing is Used

There are two main ways to approach drip marketing.

You can either set a drip campaign to begin in response to the actions of users, or you can set campaigns to go off on time-based triggers. 

Action-based

If you choose to base your drip marketing campaign on the actions of users, you will need to segment your audience based on their interactions with your brand. 

For example, you might create a separate drip campaign for people who have visited your website, people who have downloaded a white paper, and people who have signed up for a free trial. 

This segmentation ensures that each group receives relevant information.

This is one way to start taking a marketing lead down a sales funnel. More than it is the beginning of a funnel, drip campaigns can act as other parts of it too

For example, they can be used for upselling hot leads.

Some actions that you can set campaign triggers for: 

• Signing up for a service

Follow up with a survey or add-on offerings.

• Buying an item

Politely ask a buyer to review the item or post about their experience on social media

• Abandoning cart

Send a user a nudge to check out, or offer a down-sell to try and win their interest. This can be done through the integration of shopping cart software.

• Reaching out to customer service

Follow up with a service agent survey to find out whether the user is satisfied.

Time-based

Alternatively, you can set up time-based triggers for your automated drip campaign.

This means that user actions do not dictate when they receive communications from you; instead, they are sent automatically at predefined intervals. 

For example, you might send an email every Monday morning, or once a week for three weeks after someone subscribes to your newsletter. 

Or, you could send users special offers on their birthday, or on holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas. 

You can also set time-based triggers based on inactivity. If a customer doesn’t buy anything for the amount of time you set, you can send a message to remind them of your brand.

Overall, time-based drip email campaigns are an effective way to stay top of mind with your audience, even if they are not actively engaging with your brand.

Benefits of Drip Marketing

Drip marketing is beneficial in two main ways, which are based on its main attributes:

The fact that it’s automated, and targeted.

Automation

In any system, automation saves you time and money, because you don’t have to dedicate effort to doing everything yourself.

In turn, it will give you more time and money to focus on other aspects of your business.

Automation also means efficiency.

Once you have everything in place, you don’t have to worry about executing tasks to the minute, your system will take care of it.

Targeted 

Because email drip campaigns are targeted, it gives users information immediately relevant to them.

This “trims the fat” so to speak. This means you’re more likely to get users to engage because everything is based on things they’ve done, or are otherwise timely.

Moreover, there’s less risk of important information getting lost under a wave of other materials the user has no interest in, causing them to become bored with your brand and mentally filter it out.

How to Set Up a Drip Campaign

There are a few key steps to setting up a successful drip campaign. 

The first step is to choose an email automation service that allows you to easily set up these sorts of automated drip campaigns. Some popular options include MailChimp, Constant Contact, and AWeber.

Because these campaigns are pretty tech-heavy, you can’t simply go at it with a Gmail account and fierce determination. You need the tools these services provide. Top solutions, like MailChimp, widely regarded as the best, even facilitate campaigns directly with contact segmentation and drip-specific automation.

Once you have chosen an email automation platform, and you’re familiar with it, the next step is to select a trigger or criteria that will activate the drip campaign. This can be any one of the triggers we’ve discussed above or even one you figure out that’s specific to your business.

Then it’s time to choose the segment you’ll target with your drip emailing campaign. Consider the data surrounding the segment, and the general demographic you’ll be talking to. 

Finally, craft your message. You can speed this up through the use of an AI writer.

Keep your copy brief and to the point.

Once all of this is done, you can set your campaign to run, but don’t forget about it. It’s worthwhile to keep an eye on how it’s performing and update it to maximize open rates.

Most email automation software will show you how your campaigns are performing with detailed analytics.

Conclusion

Now you can confidently say you know what is drip marketing. It’s a long game form of personalized marketing that works to grow relationships with leads and customers. 

Of course, the above is just the beginning.

There is a multitude of strategies and tools out there that can add to your strategy at large. It’s all about finding them and experimenting.

If you’re looking for a more quick-fire marketing tool that can be combined with drip marketing, consider checking out landing pages.