An email drip campaign is an excellent online marketing strategy that helps to generate leads that convert less efficiently and expensively. 

An email drip campaign means automatically sending out a set of emails you’ve prepared beforehand to your lead list. They are also known as automated email campaigns or autoresponders. With this method, you don’t have to spend time creating an email and waiting for the appropriate time to send it out because now you’ve got everything automated.

Creating an email drip campaign involves setting your goals, identifying your target audience to create a lead list, crafting your email copy before you proceed with the campaign. After that, you analyze and evaluate your result to see where you can improve to get more conversions. 

In this article, you will get a complete breakdown on how to create a successful email drip campaign, including the best time to use it.

Uses of an email drip campaign

Here are some reasons why you should consider using a drip campaign:

Welcome new subscribers

Make your new website subscribers feel special by customizing a welcome email for them. This email is a forerunner to many emails to come, which will lead your subscriber through a well-curated sales funnel until they make a purchase.

Disperse valuable information

You need to keep your leads interested in your brand so that they won’t resist the urge to purchase your product and services when it is time. You can provide them with valuable information about anything ranging from tutorials to production education, case studies, ebooks, whitepapers, and anything they mind find informative.

Customer onboarding process

Save your prospect the agony of having to navigate your site to find out how to use your products or services after they’ve purchased by crafting a customer onboarding email that works them through the process of using your products and services.

Cart abandonment

Setting up email automation that targets shoppers who have abandoned their carts is a must for anyone running an eCommerce site. With these pre-written emails, you can get shoppers to come and complete their orders.

Email courses

If you are going to put your prospects through a class about your products and services, the best way to ensure they always get their emails on time and with the right comment is by using an email drip campaign.

How to set up a drip-email campaign

Create a lead list

Before you begin an email campaign, you need first to sort out your lead list. This list should target different customers’ persona. For example, if you owned a fashion line store, you’ll want to create a list for people interested in pants, jackets, cotton material, silk, and other aspects of fashion which you have to offer. 

That way, you can craft your email to specifically meet the needs of everyone on your list to drive more engagement with your brand. If you’ve recently launched your website, you should start gathering the emails from your list of subscribers immediately. 

If you are yet to launch your website, not to worry, you can always use a coming soon page to inform prospects about your existence and allow them to subscribe to get updates about your launching and future contents.

Another way you can create an email list is through the use of your customer service team, which could either be a chatbot or a human. You can program a chatbot to ask your prospects if they are interested in signing up to get exclusive emails related to a content they recently viewed. You can also use your various social media platforms to generate leads to include in your drip campaign.

Create contents

The content of the email is what makes the email drip campaign successful. For a prospect to become a customer, you need to provide them with the exact content they need. If you send prospects something that does not resonate with their needs, they will not even bother to get past the headline before closing the email. 

You need to create exclusive content, which is more reason why you need a strong lead list to cater to every of your target audience. And then, you also need to deliver the contents to their inbox regularly to keep their mind focused on your brand.

Test your copy

In an email drip campaign, you have about eight to ten emails to send to establish a rapport with your prospects, identify a problem, and proffer a solution. In this time, you need to monitor the engagement of your audience as well as look for ways to improve the impact of the emails. You have about three months before completing the campaign, so it’s enough time to fine-tune the contents and everything that will lead to a conversion.

Your first email should be about welcoming them to your email list. It’s not a time for marketing even in the subtlest means. Appreciate them for subscribing and promise them excellent contents in the days to come.

After the first mail, subsequent emails should be about providing prospects with valuable information about the contents they prefer. Ensure you keep your email length within 50-125 words because no one likes to read long emails. If you have specific materials you want them to check out, you can easily include a link to take them to the page.

The seventh email should be about identifying a problem which is peculiar to them. This email will only make an impact if you have been providing your audience with the necessary information to engage them. The next email should offer your product or services as a solution to the problem you identified.

While sensing the emails, you need to run some split tests. What this means is that you need to tweak some parts of your emails to see if it will have a different impact from the regular ones you are sending. 

For example, construct a regular email and then a tweaked version of that same email. You can choose to tweak the headline or the call to action and then send it to two different groups of the audience to see which email has the highest conversion rate.