EMBiz: How Drip Campaigns Work in Marketing

How Drip Campaign Work in Marketing

Laurel Mintz

Hi, everyone. Laurel Mintz here, founder and CEO of Elevate My Brand. And this is EMBiz. Today we're going to talk about drip campaigns. I feel like it's been a really long time since we've addressed this. And, I'm bringing it to your attention because we like to walk our own talk. And I just reviewed our internal drip campaign with our team to make sure that it was still having the impact that we wanted it to. 

What is a Drip Campaign?

Now, drip campaigns are a fantastic way to kind of set it and forget it, meaning you can create a kind of bigger piece of content and then break it into little chunks that automatically get sent to your core customer or audience without you having to think about it. Now, we always want to make sure that this is evergreen content, because there's nothing worse than creating a piece of content, having it continually sent. And then, something happens in the economy or in your industry that completely negates the content that you created. So make sure that it's not generic, but a bit more general with kind of bits and bytes, tips and tricks, best practices or statistics if you're going to update them frequently. Now, what a drip campaign is, at its core is a series of automated emails. These get sent to your potential customer over a set period of time, usually one a week, maybe multiple times throughout a week, depending on who, hopefully what you've tested in terms of the cadence that works best for your brand. And really what they're designed to do is to gradually nurture their interest in your products or services. 

To Translate it from Marketing-lish

So it's just like going to the mall, right? Like, does anyone actually do that anymore? I certainly don't. I'm an E-commerce girlie. But if you stay in the mall longer, the more touch points, the more stores you go into, the more likely it is that you're going to buy something. It's the same thing with brand touch points. So if you can create 5, 7, even 10 automated touch points, that means that someone is going to know, like and trust your brand faster and without as much effort on your behalf. So automation is everything. And there's some great examples that we like to do. Obviously, at Elevate, we've got, I believe it's the nine easy steps to marketing. We maybe have changed it to seven. I've got to go back and look. This is why we're reviewing our own content. And every little chunk is a bit and byte that is actionable for you to make sure that you can move your marketing forward. It provides value in exchange for your information. Because let's Face it, consumers are smarter than ever before and we know and they know that if you are asking them for their email address, you got to give them something of real value in exchange or in return. 

It’s Really Not that Complicated.

So, some other examples other than the one I just gave are kind of welcome email, so, an automated welcome email when someone signs up. Abandoned cart emails. Event emails. Sales emails. Cancellations. Thank-you gifts. There's a whole bunch of different ones. But I think it's really important to create your initial baseline email automations. And a drip campaign in my mind is multiple touchpoints. So the automation piece could be the welcome or the abandoned cart, but the drip campaign is really a bigger piece of content that provides more value. There are also really great integration tools, again, to make sure that you can track a sale or prospect from these email drip campaigns to close the business or to whatever that next actionable step is that you want that consumer or customer to take. A couple of these, obviously on the email system side, Mailchimp. Then you can use things like Zapier to connect your Mailchimp to other automations. Activecampaign is one that we use and Klaviyo has a lot of this already kind of built into the holistic system. So it really depends on how sophisticated you are. But I want you to come away from this conversation understanding: it's not that complicated. It's about creating a piece of content that provides value, breaking it up into digestible pieces to create a longer touch point series with your client or customer to build and nurture that relationship. Because as we always say, unfortunately, clients don't just close when you want them to close. They have to be ready and in the moment. And the best way for you to be the person or the purchase they make is by staying top of mind. And that's really what a great drip campaign does.