If you’re looking for a high return on your marketing investment, a strategy you can count on is email marketing, with its active participation in the six distinct stages of the sales funnel. Nevertheless, email marketing still needs an automated support system to touch base with potential customers consistently. This is where email drip campaigns emerge as important, given their optimal measures to generate user response and imprint the brand in consumers’ minds. This blog focuses on the various types of drip campaigns and how to craft the most compelling email marketing strategy.
Email Drip Campaigns
When email marketers design a series of pre-written automated emails to regulate different campaigns, the result is an email drip campaign. Simply put, email drip campaigns refer to automated email campaigns, marketing automation emails, product lifecycle campaigns, and autoresponders that act throughout the lead and sales funnel. The driving force behind email drip campaigns is maximizing conversions of potential customers to loyal buyers.
Types of Drip Campaigns
You can choose from the different types of email drip campaigns to suit your business needs. These include:
Welcome Emails
The most common among email drip campaigns, are these invite a new subscriber to the virtual community, showcasing the human aspect of the business. To further heighten introductory interest, you can offer discounted rates for referrals or an extension of subscriptions. This drip campaign is primarily an extension of personalized gratitude for completing a buy. Thoroughly crafted welcome emails increase unique click rates by 196%.
Onboarding Emails
While welcome emails usually don’t have the bandwidth to highlight more information about the company, onboarding emails are a clever strategy to briefly introduce your followers to the entire batch of products or services you offer. It also offers a space to highlight any remarkable update in a product or state features to distinguish yourself from the competition.
List-Building Emails
List-building emails often form the cornerstone of formidable email marketing strategies. It is important to boost your list with highly active contacts of subscribers genuinely interested in your products. This can be easily done by integrating your website with email marketing and prompting visitors to opt-in to receive emails.
Cart Abandonment Emails
In 2021, the average cart abandonment rate was 69.82%. While the reasons are diverse, they all point to customer apprehension about the product or the brand. Regular engagement with shoppers about their cart information exudes a sense of urgency and increases brand-customer cohesiveness to secure a buyer.
Subscription Renewal
As another drip campaign that caters to customer engagement, subscription renewal emails offer value to customers by giving them a choice to opt out or renew their business with the company. The underlying objective is to entice your audience with compelling offers and engaging content.
Benefits of Email Drip Campaigns
Here are some benefits of drip campaigns over normal bulk email campaigns:
- Email drip campaigns are initiated by triggers which means they are timely and relevant
- They are short, and their automation quotient gives you better headspace to formulate more creative email campaigns
- Once automated, they will serve through the entire customer journey
- Their open rates are about 80% higher than single-send emails
- They enhance the sales funnel by producing relevant content systematically at every stage
- Their combined benefits result in an uninterrupted flow of high-potential communication within the marketing funnel
- They help rejuvenate lost contacts by increasing brand awareness
Email Drip Campaigns: Best Practices
Email drip campaigns achieve maximum efficiency when combined with other digital marketing strategies. Some of the best practices in the domain include:
- Sending regular updates so that even if your emails remain unopened, you position your brand in your audience’s mind
- Balancing product emails with personalized messages since the latter determines the success of the campaign
- Enhancing consumer relationships than merely producing moments of sales pitch
- Following users’ online behavior to ensure succinct personalized communication
- Maintaining email list quality by optimizing deleted email IDs and increasing the successful delivery of emails
- Ensuring email automation has a humanistic appeal
- Making drip emails very easy to skim through
How Do You Create an Email Drip Campaign?
Here is a step-by-step guide to creating flexible email drip campaigns:
Identify Market Segments and Their Triggers
Drip campaigns require a thorough understanding of the specific market segments you want to target. Once you identify the target segments, zero in on the triggers that will work for your audiences. Triggers can be action-oriented such as finishing a pending buy, or a welcome email introducing a subscriber to a brand, among others.
Determine Goals for Every Campaign
Ask yourself the following questions to determine fixed SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based) goals for each drip campaign:
- What do you want to achieve through this campaign?
- What is the marketing bandwidth of the campaign?
- What are the best ways to automate and optimize your campaign?
Such questions will also give you realistic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), enabling you to remain focused.
Craft a Remarkable Email
Once you know your goals and target audience, it’s time to craft the most effective email copy. The most important element here is to stay human. Automated emails will get ignored if they fail to use engaging, personalized titles, respect people’s online boundaries, and include a definite Call-to-Action (CTA).
Campaign Planning
Although this step encompasses all the aforementioned stages, campaign planning gets the most attention in this phase of your drip campaign design. At this point, ask yourself the following questions:
- How do you improve the quality of your email lists?
- What is email hygiene, and how can you improve on it?
- What are the email list-building strategies best suited for your business goals?
- How will you decide on an efficient email series for different campaigns?
Automate the Campaign
Perhaps the most crucial step in this entire process is automating email campaigns. To do that, take care of the following step:
- Undertake stringent list segmentation by studying the behavioral information of your consumers and finding topics relevant to your subscribers
- Design a comprehensive series of emails that will systematically achieve your campaign objectives
- Determine the appropriate triggers depending on where your customers lie in the sales funnel
You can also induce more triggers with hard-to-ignore subject lines, compelling preview texts, and storytelling.
Analyze Campaign Results
Email automation software systems often come with effective markers of campaign efficiency. Moreover, there were some KPIs you decided on before starting the email drip campaign. If you’re confused with your choices, here are some SMART KPIs for you:
- How many emails got delivered?
- How many emails were opened?
- How many readers clicked on the desired links to the CTA?
- Is there any social share of your content post your email drip campaigns?
- What is the forwarding rate of your emails?
The Best Free Email Marketing Services In 2023
Your content dropped in the search rankings thanks to a new Google update. Your paid ad costs are skyrocketing, your Facebook ads aren’t generating leads like they used to, and you’re worried Twitter might implode any day now.
No matter what, one thing is clear: when you don’t own the channels where you reach customers, the ground can always shift beneath you. That’s where email marketing shines.
The good news: there’s an entire ecosystem of free email marketing tools available, and they have all the features you’ll need to build out your email marketing (and then some).
Best free email marketing service for growing email marketing programs
Mailchimp
One of the most popular email marketing apps thanks to its friendly branding, Mailchimp is a great place to start your email marketing program if you’re planning to scale it quickly. The app includes a landing page builder, customer journey mapping, list segmentation, retargeting ads, and even A/B testing—all in its free plan.
An approachable editor that includes helpful tips and best practices along the way makes Mailchimp an accessible option for both new and experienced email marketers. For example, when setting up a subject line, a sidebar reminds you about recommended character length, emoji use in subject lines, and more.
Once you’re ready to move beyond what the free plan offers, Mailchimp makes scaling accessible with three different paid tiers. Plus, Mailchimp can handle email programs of any size: if you can afford to let it grow with you, you’ll never have to switch to another app.
Best free email marketing software for segmentation
HubSpot
HubSpot has everything you need under one roof. The email marketing features are well-rounded and offer a lot for free: up to 2,000 emails per month, over 100 lists, and reporting. When you’re ready to scale, you can add additional HubSpot tools for CRM, full marketing automation, customer service, sales, and more.
The email tool throws you into the editor as soon as signup is finished, so you can get moving quickly. For those new to HubSpot or email marketing more broadly, the next stop is the user guide, detailing everything you need to know to build beautiful, effective campaigns in HubSpot.
Included in your 105 lists are 100 static and 5 “active” lists, which include super quick options to segment, say, hard-bouncers or recipients who open but don’t click.
Best free email marketing software for advanced email marketers
MailerLite
MailerLite doesn’t offer pre-made templates for its free newsletter service, but the dynamic, pre-designed content blocks more than make up for the lack of templates. With blocks for highlighting multiple articles, videos, RSS lists, products, apps, events, and more, MailerLite helps experienced email marketers make quick work of building new campaigns and custom templates.
Your emails can include more than just text and images, too. There’s a countdown timer that dynamically shows the time remaining until you launch a product or before a sale is over. You can add product details, embed a video, pull in your most recent blog posts with a dynamically updating RSS block, and more. It’s a great way to send interactive emails instead of just digital letters.
Beyond email content, MailerLite also includes robust automation and audience segmentation features in the free plan. An intuitive builder makes quick work of mapping out automation workflows. You can create both persistent and one-time segments and view aggregate statistics by segment, too.
Best free email marketing tool for eCommerce businesses
Omnisend
Omnisend is the best free email marketing tool I found for eCommerce businesses. The free plan is fairly limited on subscribers and monthly sends, but it includes access to nearly every feature the platform offers—all of which are thoroughly built for eCommerce. Once you connect your online store to Omnisend, the (email marketing) world is your oyster.
The app offers a number of behavioral segmentation dimensions based on store activity and shopping behavior, as well as pre-defined customer segments like high-potential buyers, visitors to a particular product, and more.
Navigate to the automation section to browse a number of pre-built automation workflows organized by type (e.g., welcome series, cart abandonment) or goal (e.g., convert subscribers, cross-sell, build loyalty).
When you’re ready to design emails, head to the drag-and-drop editor, where you can start from a number of eCommerce-focused templates or quickly build your own templates with quick-add blocks for product listing, discounts, product recommendations, and more. Omnisend also supports SMS and push campaigns, in addition to email, with A/B testing features for all of the above.
Best email marketing tool for free email automation
Sendinblue
The more you use your email marketing tool, the more you’ll need to rely on automation. It’s hard to come across truly free marketing automation software, but Sendinblue offers a variety of templated automation flows, based on your goals. You can choose your workflow to improve engagement, increase traffic, grow revenue, or build relationships.
Even with this kind of advanced automation, you can get from account setup to actually editing emails in just a few clicks. Once you’re there, you can build your emails with dozens of pre-made templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Then, either send them as email newsletters or use Sendinblue’s automation workflows to send them on a schedule.
You can’t send as many emails at once as you can from other free email marketing tools, but you can manage more contacts and split them into focused lists. Sendinblue also lets you buy pre-paid credits to send more than your daily email limit.
Best free email marketing software with an affordable upgrade
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns’ free plan isn’t as hyper-generous as it once was, but it’s still a great starting point you can scale from. You get 2,000 contacts, 6,000 sends per month, and 5 users. The free plan also offers robust audience segmentation and features for social and SMS campaigns.
The drag-and-drop editor works how you expect and includes support for dynamic content blocks. You can even personalize dynamic blocks based on your customer segments.
When it comes to automation, you’ll choose from autoresponders (one-email triggered sequences) or fully automated workflows. Both are available to build and map out on the free plan and include several workflow templates to help you build out automations faster. When you create a workflow, you can choose from templates for welcome and onboarding, nurture series, re-engagement, customer retention, eCommerce, and conditional workflows.
When you’re ready to activate automated flows, segment your audience, or grow beyond the subscriber and send limits on the free plan, Zoho offers the most affordable upgrade to a paid plan for as little as $3 per month.
