Marketers know how important it is to stay in contact with customers. Even those businesses that have established market share need to keep marketing, even when they do not feel the need to.
Why?
This is sort of a reminder to the customer of your existence and that whenever they need a particular product or service, they can choose you. Through these marketing tactics, the name of the brand stays fresh in the mind of the people.
According to a study by IBM, the chances of a customer buying again are nearly doubled if the marketers regularly send them emails.
This goes to show that people will most likely buy from the brand if they are familiar with it and have knowledge about their products.
Drip campaigns allow you to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. They’re essential for maintaining engagement and converting leads into loyal customers.
– Ryan Deiss, CEO of DigitalMarketer
What Is Drip Marketing?
Marketing a brand through several mediums like messages, calls, emails, or newsletters to inform the customer about the products is called drip marketing. This is like a reminder to people about your business.
It can help enormously the sales team in cultivating leads. Even if the customer is not interested in buying a product at that moment, they will buy from you whenever the need comes up thanks to the knowledge they have of your brand.
The term drip is derived from the agricultural practice of slowly and consistently dropping water on crops so that they get enough moisture to grow without flooding them with too much water.
Drip marketing works in a similar fashion by reminding people and creating just enough awareness to develop interest, but not too much to push the customer away.
It cannot only bring back old customers but also create new customers and inform them of any upcoming ventures or offers.
Drip marketing doesn’t just drive conversions—it drives trust. By consistently showing up in your audience’s inbox with value, you position your brand as helpful, not pushy.
– Jay Baer, Founder of Convince & Convert
Technology and Drip Marketing
Drip marketing has never been as easy as it is now thanks to technology. Many companies use automated phone calls to target customers who have shown interest.
With one click, an email can go to thousands of accounts. One post on social media can be seen by tens of thousands of people.
Technology is also used to measure the performance of drip marketing campaigns. With these analytical tools, marketers can see how well their campaigns have performed.
They can see how many people received theiremails, how many opened emails, and how many clicked through. They can see how many people saw their posts on Facebook.
This data helps them identify what works with whom and understand their customers. Using lead management software, they can track leads – i.e., people who have an interest in the product and may actually buy.
Drip Marketing Tips
- Start by Developing a Funnel
- Collect Relevant Email Contacts
- Bring Targeted Traffic
- Qualify Your Leads
- Tailor the Campaign for Specific Prospects
- Create Your Messages
- Improve Campaign Segmentation
1. Start by Developing a Funnel
Like any other marketing project, drip marketing also requires careful planning and a smart strategy. The planning phase is well-thought-out as to how the campaign will be carried out, what technology will be used and what customers will be targeted.
If you want to use email as a tool to acquire new clients, you need to look past the ‘tool’ label. Drip marketing turns email into a complete system that is capable to capture, quality, and nurture leads all the way to the sale.
Your drip marketing funnel has three main stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
For your campaign to work, you need to know how to align your content with each stage of the buyer’s journey.
It all starts with the Awareness stage. This is where people learn more about your agency and the problem that you can solve for them. When people give you their email credentials, they transform themselves into leads that enter your sales funnel.
As prospects progress through your drip campaign, they enter the Consideration phase, where you need to send them more content and offers in order to acquire more of their data that will help you personalize your end offer.
When you have more data about your leads, you can qualify them and segment them in separate lists. For example, you can qualify leads based on market fit, email open rate, behavior, budget, etc.
If the data about a particular set of leads shows you that they are still not ready to become your agency clients, you need to schedule them for further nurturing in your campaign.
2. Collect Relevant Email Contacts
You can’t start your drip marketing campaign without its most vital component – an email address.
The Awareness stage of your marketing funnel is the place where you need to hunt for relevant email addresses of prospects. One way to collect emails from people that are interested in what your agency offers is to utilize the targeted traffic that your website gets.
To convince people to give you their email address is no longer an easy job. People today are more resilient than ever to spammy offers and want to keep their data as private as possible after the recent Facebook user data affairs.
This means that in order to convince people, you need to be transparent and honest to them. The most effective marketing tactic to collect relevant leads are:
- Develop a Lead Magnet. A big piece of content that will provide a ton of value for your future clients.
- Create a Landing Page. This is where you’ll place the lead magnet along with the opt-in form.
- Direct Traffic to Your Landing Page. Promoting your landing page to get more relevant traffic.
The more targeted your lead magnet is, the easier it is to convince your future clients to give you their email addresses. To develop such content, you need to deeply understand your target customers:
- Do they have specific interests?
- What is their level of education?
- Their income range, can they afford your services?
- Their buying motivation, what will make them buy?
- Can something turn them away from your services?
An excellent source of lead magnet ideas is your existing client base. You can conduct an interview with them to understand how they discovered you and how you helped them to solve their problems. Map out their entire journey and find the patterns at each stage.
3. Bring Targeted Traffic
If you get highly-targeted traffic, you’ll get highly-targeted leads. On the contrary, if prospects open your landing page by accident and even gives you their email addresses, you won’t convert them no matter how much content and emails you send.
Obviously, you need to go for the channels where your target clients are. As an owner of an agency that provides digital services, your clients are probably more present on LinkedIn than on Snapchat.
Think about your experiences with promoting content so far. Consider your budget too. If you want to advertise, paid traffic can be extremely beneficial for your business, but you have to be prepared to invest in LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, and in Google Ads as well.
If you want to use free traffic channels such as social media and SEO optimized content, it’s always a good tactic to let the users learn more about you via articles and social media posts and then send them to your landing page as a content upgrade.
4. Qualify Your Leads
By qualifying your leads you’ll understand which prospects are more eligible to become your clients. A qualified lead – MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is someone that already showed you that is interested in your product/service.
If your target persona is someone that would spend $2,000 per month on your service, a qualified lead would be someone that at least has that budget to spend. A qualified lead should meet, at the very least, the following qualifications:
- Desired Buying Power
- Preferred Role in a Company – Decision Maker
- Fits in the Buying Journey
- His/Her Problem is Solvable With Your Product/Service
5. Tailor the Campaign for Specific Prospects
You need to have campaigns that are specific to each list of segmented prospects. If you’ve managed to gather enough data about the contacts from your email list, you’ll be able to segment your list into smaller lists according to the following factors:
- Psychographic. Target clients that have specific things that they value, their own hobbies and interests.
- Behavior. Target clients that purchased a similar service or product before, and they’re more likely to do it again.
- Decision-Making Level. Target clients that are THE decision maker or someone that just passes on messages and suggests solutions to the real decision maker.
Make sure that each of your drip campaign messages is specifically tailored to each list. It’s much better if you send personalized content to people that really understand it than sending general newsletters to everyone.
6. Create Your Messages
When it comes to drip marketing, the copy is one of the key elements that determines whether a campaign will thrive or not. The following copywriting tips will help you to craft the perfect messages for your drip campaigns.
- One CTA per Message. Including more than one CTA can be confusing for the readers. The decision-making process becomes complicated and that can result in a lower conversion rate for your campaign.
- Your Best Welcome. As soon as you include a contact in your drip campaign, send a welcome message which provides massive value at the start. This is a small win and an excellent way to kick-start the campaign.
- Design for Mobile. More than half of emails today are opened on mobile devices. CTA buttons and the copy should be clearly visible and readable on smartphone screens. Make sure that you keep the message headline under 33-38 characters because that is the maximum headline visibility for most mobile devices.
- Use Sense of Urgency. Have a deadline for your offer and explain why someone needs to buy immediately.
- Leverage the P.S. People always read the P.S. It is the last element of your email message, and you can use it to reinforce your CTA.
- Be a Friend. People hate to be sold to, especially friends. Everyone skips ads, so don’t write your messages like a sales pitch. Instead, write as you would write to your friends. Develop the friendship with your copy and your tone.
- Uniformed Layout. Make it easy for your future clients by having a consistent layout of your messages. With that, you’ll make them feel like you just continue your conversation, instead of starting another topic.
- Clear Subject Line. The more confusing the subject line is, the more people are turned away by it. Have clarity, tell what the message is about, but don’t reveal everything from your subject line.
- Use Names Once. Personalization is excellent, but you shouldn’t overdo it by mentioning someone’s name several times in your email message. It’s pushy, and creepy too.
- Continuous Conversation. Make the campaign a personalized, almost real-like conversation. In every message, look back to the previous email and say what you’ll talk about next.
- The Zeigarnik Effect. This effect refers to unfinished business. And the right clients won’t want to leave something undone, even if that’s a series of email messages.
7. Improve Campaign Segmentation
A non-effective drip campaign can be a result of bad email segmentation. You can even create multiple campaigns, but you must segment them and tailor them by addressing the segment’s concerns, needs, and wants.
With segmentation, you can group together subscribers that have similar or the same traits. For example, you might want to create a segment of subscribers with the same traits or who are all currently subscribed to the same campaign.
Here are 3 criteria that you can use to successfully segment your drip marketing campaigns:
- Warm Leads. The leads that show an increased interest and engagement with your campaigns. These people regularly open your emails, click on your landing pages, and spend a huge amount of time browsing your website. This segmented email list should be the main priority for your drip marketing campaign.
- Regular Leads. You can’t eliminate the rest of your email subscribers. You need to develop a special drip campaign that will continuously nurture them with tips and offers that can push them to the next stage of their customer’s journey.
- Inactive Subscribers. These people subscribed to your list for a reason, but perhaps you couldn’t tailor the right approach so they stopped engaging with your email campaign. To bring them back into the funnel, you need to create a segmented campaign just for them. This campaign will keep reminding them that they still matter to you and invite them to read your content and follow your offers. When you segment, make sure that you create different subscription boxes (popups, landing pages) for each segment to make the job easier for you before you start the campaign.
Benefits of Drip Marketing
- Customer loyalty
- Cost-effectiveness
- Timing
- Increased sales
- Relevance
1. Customer Loyalty
Marketers know that attaining customer loyalty is like hitting a jackpot. This is not an easy task, but one that has tremendous long-term benefits.
Through constant interaction with the customers through calls, emails, or messages, you are there in the mind of the customer.
It initiates a connection and one sale leads to another, eventually earning the loyalty of the customer. It creates a familiarity between the brand and the customer.
2. Cost Effectiveness
Drip marketing is very cost-effective thanks to modern technology. You can include it as part of your regular marketing plans, and it does not need many resources.
3. Timing
Timing is another great benefit of drip marketing campaigns. You can roll your campaigns just in time for a sale season or an upcoming holiday. The message reminds the customer to visit your website during a sale or holiday season.
4. Increased Sales
The ultimate goal of any marketing campaigns is to increase sales. Through various ways, drip marketing helps increase sales in the short term and over the long term. This is why there is a high ROI on these kinds of subtle but effective campaigns.
5. Relevance
Drip marketing differentiates from regular marketing in that it is more relevant. Instead of reaching out to everyone, you reach out to people who have shown interest. These could be one time old customers or people who have signed up to receive emails or newsletters.
Conclusion
Drip marketing can be used by any business, big or small, old or new. It is especially beneficial for businesses that deal directly with their customers.
Marketing professionals all over the world use it and find it to be very effective. It is equally important to focus on your website and make it better because that is where the customer will arrive if your campaign is successful.
Team DevriX
This article is crafted by DevriX's seasoned marketing team, boasting over four decades of collective expertise in crafting sophisticated marketing funnels, devising comprehensive content frameworks and pillars, implementing engaging email campaigns, and creating impactful social media content designed for scalability.
Our marketing experts specialize in the complete spectrum of inbound marketing strategies. As an accredited HubSpot Agency Partner and a Semrush Partner, we engage in meticulous research, blending our extensive experience with the unique insights of our highly skilled team.
We set benchmarks in content creation by incorporating cutting-edge marketing trends, leveraging in-depth industry research, and utilizing state-of-the-art AI tools for data segmentation and captivating content hooks. Our proficiency extends across a diverse range of sectors, including working with SMEs, Fortune 1000 companies, global B2B brands, major publishing entities, WooCommerce platforms, business directories, and affiliate networks.
