Specific Strategies to Use in Your Drip Marketing Campaigns

There are a lot of opinions flying around about drip marketing campaigns. Some people love it, some people hate it, and some people don’t know how to use it well.

Doing a simple search for “drip campaigns” and “marketing automation” unsurprisingly brought up a lot of results.

What was surprising was the lack of articles on the first pages of search results talking about tips, pointers, and strategies for doing it right.

Yes, there were articles and checklists about best practices and how-tos, but no stories or practical strategies. Sometimes you just want to know what other people in your shoes are actually doing, not just what they say you should be doing.

In my experience, drip marketing can be a dream-come-true for one person and huge marketing teams alike if you implement it with care and strategy. My hope is that by sharing the practical ways I’ve seen success with drip marketing, I’ll help you be successful with them, too.

Time-Based Messages

Triggering email messages based on events or days isn’t a new concept. If someone becomes a new customer, it’s not uncommon for many digital marketers to add them to a drip campaign welcome or how-to series.

Specific success comes when you can drip messages to your audience on days or at times when it’s most convenient for them to open and read them. Duh, right?

Most of you reading this article understand the best day and time to get the most engagement from email marketing varies between industries and even companies within those industries.

In the drip marketing campaigns we’re running at Orderly, it was fairly straightforward to pinpoint when our emails would send. Since restaurant managers and operators usually close down their businesses on Mondays, they’re more likely taking care of administrative tasks and checking emails. Bingo!

But it can be harder for other B2B companies offering general services to nail down “the perfect time” to send. At another company I worked at, our tests proved that Thursdays between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. ET were when our emails saw the most engagement.

If you can, find that sweet spot for sending your automated emails.

Setting Goals

One of the most valuable tools of my drip marketing campaigns are my goals. What is the purpose of putting this person through an automated stream of my content marketing?

It seems silly writing that out - after all, as marketers we all know we should be measuring what we’re doing. However, sometimes it’s easier said than done and we hit send on our marketing automation without thinking about measuring the end result.

Your goal can be anything from getting your audience to read blog posts, visit your website, download content, or reach out to you for more info.

When you set your goals as an endpoint of the campaign, you can then easily remove any users from the flow who’ve met that goal. In addition, you can see how well your drip campaign performs at a glance by how many people have met the goal you set.

Personalized Fields

No one reading this is shocked that personalization works; it’s been lauded by marketers as the best way to reach our customers today.

What I’m suggesting is taking the time to do it well. No, really. And if you can’t do it well, to refrain from doing it.

For a one-person marketing team, this means I include at most two-personalized fields in my drip marketing email content: first name and company name. These could be different for you depending what your company’s goals are, but more on that in another part coming later on in this series.

Even this small amount of personalization done right makes a big difference in opens and the entire engagement and success of my messaging overall.

Put the Hands-On Back in Automation

By far, the most successful strategy I’ve used in my drip marketing campaigns is adding manual processes.

Every Monday, I analyze the emails that are scheduled to go out. I make sure everyone has moved through the automation appropriately.

Analyzing reports on a daily and weekly basis is essential. Find out who’s opening, clicking, and replying to each email in the series. Don’t just examine the general numbers, but actually look at the email addresses and names of the people who are engaged.

Communicating these results to my sales team is key. Before the next email in the series sends, we collaborate to make sure people who have engaged with them are opted out of the drip.

Automation is good, but it’s not perfect. Take the time to make sure no one slips through the cracks.

What You Write

Of course, to create a highly engaging drip marketing campaign, you need to fill your messages with enticing content.

Stay tuned for the next part in this series where we’ll talk more about the different messages you can send with drip marketing and the ways I’ve found the most success customizing them.