Drip Email Campaigns: How to Successfully Use Them

Companies are in a constant search of new ways of being in a constant communication with their existing and potential clients, getting in touch with the ones they lost, and by all means – ways to increase their sales and promote their product or service.

Drip campaigns have proven to the answer to the equation of getting new prospects while at the same time keeping the interest of the ones that are already part of your business. According to Pardot (2014) currently drip marketing is the most effective and coveted feature of the automated marketing system. This is the case, since it has proven to be very cost effective – by using the database of leads that the company has already gathered and an in insignificant investment when it comes to sales and marketing.

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

Designing an efficient drip campaign can be imperative, since this 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 amount of 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 go from the introducing the prospect of who you are as a company, to purely straight on selling your product or service. Being transparent with your goals means sending the message clear to the receiving end of the email.

• E-mail content – People respond to value and with e-mails it is essential to give the value face first. It all depends on the content and the quality it distributes. Additionally, long e-mails tend to be skim-read, so being short and clear is a requisite.

• Timing – One of the most significant components of the drip campaign is to know the frequency of when and at what time those e-mails should be ‘dripped’. Depending on the sales cycle, the product or service offered, promotion or urgency of the situation – times might vary. However the most common time between sending the e-mail sequence is from 24 to 48 hours. You do not want to be suffocating to your prospects, or make them feel forgotten.

• Subject line – Highly important but often times forgotten is the subject line of the e-mail. Creating an attention grabbing line that would make the prospect open the e-mail and actually read it, rather than immediately send it to the trash can is what can determine the successfulness of your drip campaign. Furthermore the subject of the e-mail should match the expectations created with the subject line – this is how you can gain their trust.

The secret behind designing a successful drip campaign is to revisit it along the way – which basically means to feed your insights and results into your existing drips and customize them accordingly.

Drip email marketing campaigns over the time have proven to deliver the highest ROI over any other type of a marketing program. The advantage of being cost effective from the one hand, and having the convenience of an automated fast and efficient system sending the ‘drips’ on the other hand 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 on a trust.