Picture this: You sign up for your favorite creator’s webinar. Two days later, you receive a personalized thank you note plus a special discount code for their course. A few days after that, you get a reminder to use the discount code plus an opportunity for a one-on-one chat with the creator.
What you’ve experienced is drip marketing. It’s a smart way for creators to stay top-of-mind with their audience and drive sales for their digital products. In this article, you’ll learn how to set up a successful drip marketing campaign that wins you new clients and revenue.
Skip ahead:
- What is drip marketing?
- Benefits of drip marketing campaigns
- Elements of drip marketing campaigns
- How to set up a drip marketing campaign
- Drip campaign best practices
- Drip marketing frequently asked questions (FAQs)
What is drip marketing?
Drip marketing means sending automated email sequences to a target audience as part of a marketing campaign over a period of time. That’s a pretty high-level definition, so let’s break it down further.
A drip marketing sequence has a primary trigger — an action potential customers complete that adds them to an email list. It could be signing up for a webinar or downloading a lead magnet like an ebook or white paper.
Once on the list, the audience receives a series of pre-scheduled emails relevant to the marketing campaign’s goal. Say you’re pre-selling a course: the drip emails could share discount codes to encourage subscribers to pre-order your course.
You can further customize the sequence based on the subscribers’ actions. For example, you can share a poll with different pain points and ask subscribers to choose the one that affects them most — then send them hyper-specific emails based on their choice.
Related: How to sell courses with email marketing
Benefits of drip marketing campaigns
Creators who implement drip marketing enjoy many benefits including:
Top-of-mind awareness
Top-of-mind awareness means you’re the first creator that comes to your audience’s mind when they think about the product or services in your niche. It makes it easier for you to attract and convert clients.
Drip marketing earns you top-of-mind awareness by continuously putting your brand in front of your target audience. Your audience learns more about your products or services with each email. They can even reach out to have one-on-one conversations to address their objections.
By the end of the email sequence, your audience will have a solid idea of the problem your product or service solves. Armed with this information, they can make a purchase or recommend your brand to people in their network looking for the solutions you offer.
Reduced lead decay
If you got a penny for every time you visited a website to buy a product but got distracted and forgot all about it, how rich would you be? For us, pretty rich!
No thanks to the internet’s many distractions, potential clients are always dropping off the buyer journey — meaning you’re repeatedly missing out on opportunities to earn money. However, with drip marketing, you can reconnect with lost leads and get them back into your client pipeline.
Drip marketing platforms let you track metrics like the number of subscribers who click the links in your emails. Say fifty subscribers click the purchase link but only twenty buy your product; you can track and send follow-up emails to those who didn’t complete the action.
Personalized marketing
People spend 38 percent more money when a brand delivers personalized customer experiences. Drip marketing helps you customize customer experience through hyper-specific segmentation.
You can categorize email subscribers into segments based on demographic information, behaviors, interests, and the like. This segmentation allows for highly targeted and personalized messaging, making the emails more relevant and valuable to each recipient.
You can also request additional data from your subscribers to further customize your messaging. For example, you can ask for their occupation or income level and send custom product offers that suit these characteristics.
Elements of drip marketing campaigns
A successful drip marketing campaign is made up of the following components:
Lead magnet
The lead magnet is the trigger that adds the target audience to the drip marketing sequence. It could be something like a webinar, an ebook, or a newsletter sign-up.
The target audience provides their email addresses to access the lead magnet. Completing this action automatically adds them to the drip marketing sequence.
Email sequences
An email sequence is a series of pre-scheduled messages sent to a specific audience over a specific period of time. It forms the core of your drip marketing campaign.
Say you’re planning a drip marketing campaign for your ebook; your email sequence might look like this:
Welcome email ➡️ Educational email related to the ebook ➡️ Second educational email ➡️ Preorder email with discount code ➡️ Second email with the same preorder code ➡️ free one-on-one session to resolve audience objections ➡️ Final email with discount code
Segmentation
Segmentation means categorizing people on your email list into sub-groups based on specific criteria like demographic information, interests, occupation, and actions.
o do segmentation right you need the right data . You can collect tis info by adding segmentation criteria directly to your lead collection form. So if occupation is one of your segmentation criteria, justask people to input their occupation when filling out the form.
With these pieces of data, you can automatically organize subscribers into specific segments in your drip marketing campaign tool and send personalized messages to match their pain points, needs, and expectations.
Automation
Imagine that you had 50,000 people on your email list and had to manually send emails to each one three times a day. That’s a literal nightmare! Thankfully, you don’t have to.
A drip marketing sequence is powered by automation. Once you’ve set up the campaign, the emails will go out to the right audience segments based on a predetermined schedule.
You can also use automations to guide the audience’s journey throughout the sequence. For example, you can set up behavior-based triggers based on subscriber actions. Say someone clicks on a specific link in an email; the action can then trigger a follow-up email with relevant content.
Related: How does marketing automation work?
Metrics
Tracking the right metrics allows you to know how well your drip marketing campaign is achieving its goals. Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and overall engagement provide valuable insights.
The metrics you track should add up to your overall marketing objective. Say your overarching marketing goal is to increase ebook purchases by 50 percent; one of your metrics can be click-through rate. You’ll use this to measure how many subscribers are clicking on the purchase link in your email to order the ebook.
Learn more: The ultimate guide to conversion rate optimization
How to set up a drip marketing campaign
Now that you know what drip marketing is and its benefits, let’s explain how to set up a successful drip marketing campaign as a creator.
Set your marketing goal
Your marketing goal will define the scope and overall direction of your drip campaign. It acts as your campaign’s north star — without which everything will go awry.
Say your goal is to increase pre-orders for your digital product; your sequence will be salesy and include direct promotions like discount codes. On the other hand, if your goal is to drive traffic to your blog, your sequence will have high-value educational content and direct links to relevant blog posts.
Whatever your goal is, it must pass the SMART test. This means it should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.
- Specific: The goal should be clear and leave no room for ambiguity, vagueness or misinterpretation. For example, don’t say, “I want to sell more digital products.” Say, “I want to sell fifty ebooks each month through email marketing.”
- Measurable: Add concrete criteria for measuring progress and determining when you have achieved the goal. For example, don’t say, “I want to increase sales.” Say, “I want to increase sales by 30 percent from 100 books per month to 130 books per month.”
- Achievable: Set a challenging but attainable goal — without that you’ll end up frustrated. Say you only sold 50 books per month in the past; your goal might be to sell 75 ebooks monthly — not 1000!
- Relevant: Your goal should tie to your overall business objectives. Say your priority is increasing mindshare; your drip campaign goal should then be to drive top-of-mind awareness, not sales.
- Time-bound: Set a specific timeframe for achieving your goal — like a month or quarter. This creates a sense of urgency and helps you stay focused on achieving the goal within a reasonable period.
Once you’ve set your goal, choose drip campaign metrics that add up to it. For example, if your goal is to sell 50 ebooks per month, click through and conversion rates can be your email marketing metrics.
Choose your drip marketing campaign platform
Your drip marketing campaign platform is where you’ll set up your sequence, track delivery and measure results at the end of your campaign, o you need to get it right — mistakes in the set up can easily ruin your sequence and compromise your results.
There are three big things to consider when choosing a drip marketing platform: ease of use, support for segmentation, and personalization and integrations. Let’s discuss them further.
Ease of use
Choose a drip campaign tool that you can set up independently with little or no coding requirements. At the very least, you should be able to implement basic automations in the tool without technical help.
As a creator, the last thing you want is to get stuck in the middle of a campaign because you need some complex HTML to create a simple customization sequence in your email software.
Support for segmentation and personalization
Choose a drip marketing software that lets you set up hyper-specific segmentations for your email list. For example, you should be able to create customized sequences based on demographic information.
With better segmentation, you can deliver personalized messages to your audience, build stronger engagement, and increase their chances of buying your digital product or taking some other desired action.
Integrations
Your drip marketing software should easily integrate with the other tools you use for your business — so it’s easier to move data around. For example, it should sync with your customer relationship management software (CRM) and e-learning platform so you can share subscribers’ data to and from these tools.
Thinkific, for example, integrates with top drip marketing software on the market including ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit to make it easier for you to manage clients’ information from a central platform.
Categorize your target audience into segments
Drip marketing is about sending personalized messages relevant to specific audience segments. The easiest way to segment your audience is through demographic information.
Add demographic information fields to your lead collection form and save the data to your drip marketing software. Next, set up personalized messages for each segment. Let’s say location is one of your segmentation criteria: you can send a parity pricing discount code to subscribers in a specific location.
Beyond demographic data, you can segment your audience based on their actions on your website or how they are added to the marketing sequence. For example, you can separate previous clients from people who are interacting with your brand for the first time.
Learn more: What is customer segmentation and how to do it right
Create your drip marketing content
Create compelling content that convinces the audience to take the desired action at different stages of your marketing sequence. There are three types of content you should prioritize for your drip marketing campaign:
Lead magnet
The lead magnet is a valuable resource your audience is willing to exchange their email for. It can be anything: from ebooks and white papers to webinars and exclusive podcasts with industry leaders.
When creating your lead magnet, remember only one rule: no fluff. If the audience discovers that your lead magnet is filled with irrelevant, generic information, they will unsubscribe from your email list — or worse — spread word to people in their network about their subpar experience with your brand.
Learn more: How to create a converting lead magnet
Subject lines and body copy
Your subject line is the first thing subscribers see when they receive your email. To a large extent, it determines whether they’ll open your email or condemn it to oblivion.
A good subject line is concise, unique and relevant to the email content. Generally, your subject line should have five to seven words or about 40 characters. It should be interesting enough to pique the reader’s interest and contain information that the main copy will expand on.
Consider the following example from Thinkific:
The subject is straight to the point and promises interesting information that prompts the reader to click the email.
The body copy should live up to the subject line’s promise — that is to explain the main point the subject highlights. Get personal here and lose the industry jargon. Write like you’re chatting with a friend in a coffee shop. But don’t get lost in lengthy dialogue — keep your copy between 50–125 words.
If you go over the recommended word count (it happens), break up your text with interesting visuals like images, illustrations and GIFs.
Call-to-action (CTA)
The CTA is the part of the email that encourages recipients to take a specific action, such as clicking on a link or buying your course.
An effective CTA is clear, creates a sense of urgency and stands out from the rest of your text. Here’s an example from Thinkific:
Notice how the CTA button has a different color from the rest of the text and there’s no other text around it? That’s how obvious your CTA should be.
For lengthy emails, place your call to action towards the beginning of your mail and also at the end of the body copy. That way, you’ll capture people who do not read the email to the end and the ones who do but may have forgotten the action you want them to take.
Learn more:15 call-to-action examples that convert
Create your drip marketing flowchart
A drip marketing flowchart is a visual representation of your drip marketing sequence. It shows the different triggers and customizations for your audience segments and how they move through the sequence until they complete the final action.
Visualizing your sequence lets you discover any loopholes or inconsistencies in your drip campaign. For example, you might find out that you need to add a new trigger to segment your audience further and customize your messaging better.
Creating a drip marketing flowchart has the potential to get overly complicated — soto keep things simple, follow these steps:
- Define your initial trigger; that is, what brings the audience into your sequence.
- Choose the primary channel for hosting your lead magnet. This can be your website or social media channels.
- List your audience segments. For example, segmentation by location or segmentation by gender
- Identify the triggers that will activate subsequent messages. Triggers can be time-based (e.g. every three days) or action-based (e.g. user clicks a link).
- Define the ultimate goal of the drip campaign, whether it’s to convert leads into customers, increase engagement, or achieve some other specific objective.
Say you’re creating a flowchart for pre-selling your ebook; it might look like this:
This flowchart becomes the blueprint for your drip marketing campaign. You’ll use it to set up your drip marketing sequence in your email software.
Drip campaign best practices
To ensure the success of your drip marketing campaign, you must stick to certain best practices before, during and after setting up your campaign.
First, ensure that your email list consists of engaged subscribers as this increases the chances that they will interact with your content. Only add people who interacted with your brand and opt in to receive emails from you. Don’t buy a random email list and expect subscribers to engage with your content.
Next, conduct A/B tests to optimize your marketing sequence and drive better results. Test different email copy, subject lines and CTAs across multiple audience segments to find the most effective options for your drip campaign.
Finally, track and measure relevant email marketing metrics. Analyze your conversion rates, click through rates, open rates and other similar data to to know how well your campaign is working, identify any weak points and fix them on time.
Want to learn more about email drip campaigns? Check out our article on how to use email marketing to sell your online courses!
Drip marketing frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Find answers to common drip marketing questions.
What is the difference between drip marketing and traditional email marketing?
The major difference between drip marketing and traditional email marketing is scheduling. Drip marketing involves sending a series of automated emails based on a pre-determined schedule.
On the other hand, traditional email marketing mostly entails sending one-time emails to customers. The emails aren’t part of a sequence and are sent randomly,
What are some examples of email drip campaigns for creators?
Examples of email drip campaigns include lead nurturing emails, onboarding emails and welcome email sequences. For example, you can set up a drip sequence for people who sign up for your course or join your online community.
Why is it called drip marketing?
Drip marketing is named after the concept of “dripping” information or content to recipients over time, similar to how water droplets fall at a steady pace. This approach involves sending a series of marketing messages or content pieces to potential customers in a scheduled and gradual manner, aiming to keep them engaged and informed without overwhelming them.
