Companies are in constant search of new ways to communicate with their existing and potential clients, reach out to the ones they have lost, and, above all, increase their sales and promote their products or services.

Drip campaigns have proven to be the answer to the equation of acquiring new prospects while at the same time keeping the interest of those already part of your business. According to Pardot (2014), drip marketing is currently the most effective and coveted feature of automated marketing systems. This is the case because it has proven to be very cost effective, using the database of leads the company has already gathered and requiring an insignificant investment in sales and marketing.

At its core, a drip campaign is a strategy that sends, or ‘drips,’ a series of pre-written messages to potential clients and prospects. Usually it is a series of several e-mails, each one corresponding to the previous one. The reason behind the success and effectiveness of this kind of campaign lies in its being an excellent way to achieve consistent growth and to automate time-consuming, demanding, or delicate manual tasks that could otherwise lead to mistakes.

Designing an efficient drip campaign can be imperative, since it can make or break the whole process. The goal is to keep the prospect interested and engaged with the right amount of information at exactly the right time, rather than spamming the prospect and ending up in the trash can.

Here are some guidelines and concepts that can guarantee success:

  • Be sure of your objective – it is important to know what you want to achieve with the drip campaign. This may range from introducing the prospect to who you are as a company to straightforward selling of your product or service. Being transparent about your goals means sending a clear message to the recipient of the email.
  • E-mail content – People respond to value, and with e-mails it is essential to deliver value upfront. It all depends on the content and the quality it delivers. Additionally, long e-mails tend to be skim-read, so being short and clear is a requirement.
  • Timing – One of the most significant components of the drip campaign is knowing the frequency of when and at what time those e-mails should be ‘dripped.’ Depending on the sales cycle, the product or service offered, promotions, or the urgency of the situation, timing may vary. However, the most common interval between e-mails in a sequence is 24 to 48 hours. You do not want to suffocate your prospects or make them feel forgotten.
  • Subject line – Highly important but often forgotten is the subject line of the e-mail. Creating an attention-grabbing line that makes the prospect open the e-mail and actually read it, rather than immediately sending it to the trash can, is what can determine the success of your drip campaign. Furthermore, the subject of the e-mail should match the expectations created by the subject line; this is how you gain their trust.

The secret to designing a successful drip campaign is to revisit it along the way, which basically means feeding your insights and results into your existing drips and customizing them accordingly.

Drip email marketing campaigns have, over time, proven to deliver the highest ROI of any type of marketing program. The advantage of being cost effective on the one hand, and having the convenience of an automated, fast, and efficient system sending the ‘drips’ on the other, makes this system very desirable and highly popular among many companies. As previously mentioned, designing the winning combination of e-mail sequences can result in strong outcomes, and many new potential prospects build trust.