Drip Marketing 101: Characteristics, Examples, and Benefits
📖 Learning
Email newsletters and reminders are the best way to reach out to your audience. Most often, email newsletters or reminders are just a massive way to send out the team's latest announcement. But first, they have a serious problem. And that possible major problem is that new subscribers only get to see the new emails and never get the previous or old emails that would be sent out to your list. All they look after is the stuff sent in after signing in.
It is often seen that setting up drip email marketing might seem like a difficult task, as we know what drip campaigns are and when they become effective. It also looks at how it can cultivate and harvest a customer from a no-interest user. Before moving ahead, let's first discuss what drip marketing means.
What is Drip Marketing?
Medium of Drip Marketing
Examples of Drip Marketing
How to Target Customers for Drip Marketing?
Characteristics of Drip Marketing
Benefits of Drip Marketing
Drawbacks of Drip Marketing
What is Drip Marketing?
Drip marketing is a campaign strategy that uses a series of pre-planned and automated messages to engage both existing and prospective clients with the aim of encouraging sales. This multi-channel communication approach may be triggered by time, the recipient's actions, or previous information with foremost correspondence. It interacts with websites and adheres to other predetermined criteria.
Drip marketing is also referred to as drop campaigning, automated email campaigns, life cycle emails, auto-responders, and automated marketing, but the concept remains the same. It consists of a set of marketing emails that are sent out on a predefined schedule using an automated process. For instance, one email may be sent immediately after someone signs up, while another may be sent after two or three days, and the next one the following week. The content of the emails can vary based on triggers, such as the recipient's actions or behaviors, which is why they are also known as behavioral emails.
Drip marketing mostly uses online resources such as emails, social media, and phone calls, while offline channels include postcards, brochures, and printed newsletters. Nowadays, drip marketing is mostly automated, and if prospects see the marketing messages repeatedly, they are likely to respond to them over time. It is, therefore, an effective way to generate leads and convert them into potential customers if the strategy hits the right note with the users.
Medium of Drip Marketing
The following are the prominent mediums of drip marketing:
- Email: The cheapest and most efficient medium of drip marketing is email. It targets a lot of customers at once by sending emails simultaneously to many people. Every company has email lists nowadays, and using drip marketing on those lists may convert those people into customers. Emails are the most common medium for drip marketing.
- Direct mail: This is a more money-oriented process where the content is generally generated in print and sent to people by postal mail. It includes brochures, weekly pamphlets, booklets, etc.
- Social media: This is the new approach to drip marketing. As the methods of drip marketing are applicable here, people nowadays use this mode to spread the content and keep people updated.
Examples of Drip Marketing
It was all about what drip marketing means, but now we will proceed with some examples to make it more understandable.
- Receiving emails from Amazon even when you haven't made a purchase is an example of automated drip marketing.
- Getting emails with course videos, quizzes, and other resources after subscribing to a course is another example of drip marketing.
- Automated drip marketing can be used to welcome new customers to a business or service.
- Drip marketing can be used to promote a blogging workshop by sending out a series of automated emails to interested participants.
- A card abandonment drip email sequence is a type of drip marketing that can help to bring back lost revenue by sending a series of automated emails to customers who abandoned their shopping carts.
- Email drip marketing can be used to promote special offers or discounts to customers and encourage them to make a purchase.
Hanu Agarwal
How to Target Customers for Drip Marketing?
To target customers for drip marketing, it is important to understand their needs and preferences. Conducting surveys or sending out emails to collect customer feedback can be an effective way to gather this information. Once the brand has a better understanding of its target audience, it can create personalized drip marketing campaigns that resonate with its customers.
While some businesses may choose to hire freelancers to conduct market research and analyze the data, others may be able to use existing customer data or industry insights to inform their drip marketing strategies. It is important to consider the unique selling points of your products or services and find ways to differentiate your brand from competitors.
For general products such as clothing or dairy products, it is still important to understand your target audience and tailor your messaging accordingly. Unique strategies such as personalized recommendations or targeted promotions can help brands stand out in a crowded market.
Overall, targeting customers for drip marketing requires a thoughtful and data-driven approach that is tailored to the specific needs of the business and its customers.
Characteristics of Drip Marketing
Now, let's understand the key characteristics of how drip marketing or campaigning works. They are:
- Automated Campaign
- Lead Nurturing
- Timely Information
- Efficiency
- Non-Intrusive
Now let’s discuss them one by one.
Automated Campaign
Drip marketing allows you to create an automated campaign with a series of sequential messages that are sent out to your audience on a predetermined schedule. This saves you time and ensures that your customers stay in touch with your brand, helping you to avoid missed sales opportunities.
Lead Nurturing
Drip marketing campaigns are designed to nurture leads by sending them relevant and personalized content. For example, if a prospective client opens an email about your software and clicks through to your website, the next drip email can thank them for their visit and encourage them to try a free trial.
Timely Information
Drip marketing ensures that you always send your audience up-to-date and relevant information. You can easily edit your chain of emails to update information and make sure that your audience receives the information they need.
Efficiency
Drip marketing allows you to automate your marketing funnel, freeing up time for your team to focus on other tasks such as visualizing other funnels, planning new campaigns, and engaging with prospects.
Non-Intrusive
Drip campaigns are designed to be non-intrusive and avoid annoying prospects. They are personalized and relevant to your audience, making them more likely to engage with your brand.
Muskaan Kapoor
Benefits of Drip Marketing
Here are the various benefits of drip marketing:
- Drip Campaigns Don't Overwhelm the Audience: If a newsletter or blog post has too much information about something, it may be difficult for the audience to identify the most important points, but in drip campaigns, this is done in phases so it becomes very easy for your audience to grasp everything. This way, the people who will be genuinely interested in your campaign might get converted into customers.
- Automated: You can schedule emails, posts, etc. on a repeat basis, which reduces the headache of continuously creating the emails. It may be possible that if you don't automate the process, you'll miss sending it or posting it some time, but because of automation or scheduling, it becomes much easier.
- Relevant: Drip marketing targets potential customers only. There is a very strong possibility that the targeted customer will buy the product. It is because the customer is targeted according to the data.
- Saves Time: As the whole process is automated, one doesn't have to consume more than a few hours to do drip marketing. This saves a lot of time and helps the business stay productive. If you do all the tasks manually without making them automatic, it will take a lot of time.
- Fewer Efforts: You don't have to write emails again and again. All that has to be done is to create an email and automate it to send them. There can be specific emails generated for specific products only. It increases the conversion rate of the website. The more you stay in touch with your potential customer, the higher your conversion rate will be.
- Constant Information About the Product Delivery: Drip campaigns don't just spread information about their product; they also provide tracking information for the products that have been ordered by the viewers. This makes it easy for the customers to keep track of their orders and to know about their shipments.
- Increases the growth prospects of business: Once you've established a good relationship and trust in your customer’s minds, they will see you as an expert in your industry. It may take time, but it will be totally worth it as people will start recommending your business in their circles.
Drawbacks of Drip Marketing
But after all these, it's a fact we know that everything has its advantages and disadvantages. This too applies to the concept and application of drip campaigning. They are:
- Drip marketing requires a significant investment of time and effort to plan and execute properly.
- Setting up the drip campaign timeline can be challenging and may require some experimentation to get right.
- Drip marketing campaigns can sometimes be seen as spam by consumers, which can lead to lower open rates and customer engagement.
Conclusion
Drip marketing is all about people's psychology. Actually, the whole business industry revolves around psychology. You have to figure out the ways in which you can persuade your customers to buy your product. Drip marketing will not work unless you know a thing or two about email marketing.
Hence, before starting a drip marketing campaign, you need to do research on all the possible factors and areas that can be relevant to your business. Or just hire someone or take service from another company, as they will be much more experienced in this industry.
It will be a good investment for your business. Drip marketing has been used for a long time, but new ways and innovations are still being introduced, so keep looking for new methods and improving your strategies.
FAQs
What is drip marketing?
Drip marketing is a campaign strategy that uses a series of pre-planned and automated messages to engage both existing and prospective clients with the aim of encouraging sales.
What are the mediums of drip marketing?
The prominent mediums of drip marketing include email, direct mail, and social media.
What are the characteristics of drip marketing?
Characteristics of drip marketing are automated campaigns, lead nurturing, timely information, efficiency, and non-intrusiveness.
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