Drip Marketing

Businesses use drip marketing to keep in touch with an audience—in a personalized and targeted way—following important actions or dates.

For example, a drip marketing campaign might be based on someone:

• Placing an order
• Attending an event at your store
• Signing up for a webcast
• Registering for educational content, such as a report or white paper
• Abandoning a shopping cart
• Engaging with customer service
• Not placing an order for a while (perfect scenario for reactivation emails)

A few characteristics make drip marketing powerful and distinct. The email content is usually:

• Prewritten and automated
• Sent on a preset schedule in response to audience action or another strategic automation plan
• “Mapped” to, or keyed off, important engagement points in your sales cycle

The “drip” part of drip marketing refers to sending a slow and steady series of email sequences. It might be 2, or 5, or whatever you decide is the best number of emails to keep in touch on a given topic without over-communicating. For each campaign—such as an abandoned cart campaign—you write the entire email series once, and then automate the personalized emails. Once they’re set up, your drip marketing campaigns happen automatically.

Why use drip campaigns?

Drip marketing can help you boost sales by turning visitors into buyers, increasing repeat purchases from loyal customers, and reengaging a dormant audience. By communicating your company’s value, you build a relationship with your target audience and demonstrate that you’re a great resource for their needs.

A study of 2,000 people found that half of us are engaged in “a never-ending search for products, services, and content to support behavior changing.” A drip campaign can support this behavior.

Drip campaigns can also be effective because they’re targeted, meaning they’re based on specific user actions and can be personalized, which typically results in lower bounce rates.

Drip campaigns are designed to reach out with a targeted message to your target audience at the right time. Since they're automated marketing emails like welcome messages, birthday emails, and order notifications, they work for your business while you focus on other things.

Automated drip campaigns make it easy to connect with the right person at the right moment without doing the work every time. Whether they're triggered by dates or user actions, there are many examples of drip campaigns that could work for your business.

Drip emails can accompany prospective customers and loyal customers through your sales cycle. From welcome drips, onboarding email sequences, lead nurturing campaigns, and abandoned shopping carts (cart campaign) to new product recommendations or reactivation emails.

Date-based automations, such as monthly emails or weekly emails, make it possible to communicate with your email list on the days that matter to them. You can use these automations on many kinds of occasions, like:

• Subscription renewal or reordering prompts. If your business has products on a subscription or membership basis such as a gym, yoga studio, paid newsletter, farm delivery service, or regular delivery of staples like toothpaste or shaving cream, a drip email sequence is a great way to notify your audience when their subscription is up for renewal. Remind them of the value you provide and how they've benefited from your services. If possible, entice them with new offerings or additional educational content.
• Birthdays, anniversaries, and other events. While you may not turn these into an entire campaign, personalized birthday emails or separate event-triggered emails—such as celebrating the anniversary of their first purchase—can reinforce your brand value and prompt a purchase.

Communicate based on a user's behaviors

Many drip campaigns can be triggered by user actions someone in your target audience takes (or doesn't take). Here are a few drip campaign examples:

Welcome emails. When someone new joins your email list, it's a key moment to make a good impression. With welcome drips, you can share important educational content, like company insights or popular blog posts, that a newcomer needs to know. You can also use welcome emails to follow up with someone you met in person, like at an event you hosted—for example, a trunk show, wine tasting, or sale. A drip email sequence can effectively keep new prospective customers informed about upcoming events, sales, or other activities, and make them feel like you share their values.

First purchase automations. When someone makes their first purchase, it's a great opportunity to thank them for their business, remind them of the product features and quality, give them tips on how to get the most from their purchase, suggest complementary items often bought by other shoppers, and reinforce that they made a good decision. Saying thank you at this early stage helps convert buyers into loyal customers.

Product recommendations. After someone makes a purchase, a great way to boost sales and reduce bounce rates is to suggest related items in your personalized emails. These recommendations can be part of an order confirmation or shipment notification. For example, if someone buys a dress, you might suggest accessories recommended by your in-house experts. Alternatively, you might follow up with separate monthly emails or timed email sequences recommending complementary products or refills, keeping your audience engaged throughout the sales cycle.

Follow-up emails to educate and onboard your audience. If someone engages with your customer service or sales team—for example, to inquire about order status, shipping timing, or some other concern—a drip campaign can prompt them to do more. For example, if they call about a missing invoice or payment, a drip campaign might encourage them to sign up for emailed invoices or online or automatic payment. Likewise, if they started but didn’t complete a tutorial video on using your product or a product registration, a drip campaign can encourage them to finish—and better tie them to your business.

Abandoned shopping carts. Online shoppers often put something in their cart, then remove it before purchase—or abandon the purchase altogether. A well-executed abandoned cart email can encourage them to reassess the purchase. Be careful, though, not to be too “big brother”-ish—you don’t want to appear overly intrusive. For example, if the shopper abandoned a particular skirt, you might send an email promoting your whole spring line, or a line from that designer, without mentioning the specific item they selected.

Lead nurture. Active interest from prospects is particularly well suited to drip campaigns. If someone registers for a webinar or a content element like a white paper or interactive tool, that’s your cue to reach out to them with relevant content. For example, if you provide lawn care, and a prospect signs up for your guide to winter-proofing their yard, you can send them emails with additional tips and include promotions of your yard care products and services. Lead Nurturing can take many forms, like giving them more details about product features, or what they will learn from your online course, or educating them on your service. Either way, a lead nurturing campaign can not only increase your sales but the purchase value as well.

Unsubscribe emails. If someone unsubscribes from your e-newsletter, you might follow up with an email asking them for feedback. If they unsubscribe from your subscription service (such as a gym), in addition to asking for feedback, you might provide a special “we want you back” offer or incentive. You can also follow up with them 3 or 6 months later, when their situation may have changed, to woo them back.

Drip marketing is an always-on marketing workhorse that maintains the marketing, nurturing, and selling essential to your success. Follow these 5 steps to set up and manage your drip campaign:

1. Choose your trigger. What specific action or date will your drip campaign be based on?
2. Identify your audience(s). For example, will your “first purchase” drip campaign go to all new audience members, or only those whose purchase is over, say, $100?
3. Craft your message for each email. Your drip campaign emails don’t need to be long, but they definitely need to be consistent with your brand.
4. Measure and adjust based on performance. The right measurement for your campaign will be based on the type of email you send, its audience, and other factors. Monitor how your various emails are working, their click rates and conversion rates, and be prepared to make tweaks based on what you learn.
5. Maintain your drip emails. The copy you use may go out of date as your offerings evolve; review all your drip campaigns periodically to be sure they don’t go stale.

Start using drip campaigns for your company

With all that you have to do, use drip marketing to help with company promotion efforts! While it’s sending the right message, at the right time, to just the right audience, you can be focused on other business priorities. You can use Mailchimp marketing automation software to set up an effective drip campaign. See how Mailchimp's free marketing automation tools compare to the competition.

Frequently asked questions

What should a drip campaign include?

Drip campaigns can include any number of different emails, and the best email campaigns target customers based on recent actions they’ve taken on your website through audience segmentation. Drip campaign emails can include:

• Welcome emails: Welcome new subscribers and typically offer them a coupon code or discount to use for their next purchase.
• Onboarding emails: Introduce your company and its products to customers.
• Abandoned cart emails: Remind customers of items they’ve left in their cart to increase sales.
• Product recommendations: Recommend products to customers based on their past purchases.

Do drip campaigns work?

Drip campaigns are an effective marketing tactic to generate leads, build customer relationships, and increase engagement over time. These campaigns are highly targeted, allowing you to choose which customers or leads get which types of emails. With drip campaigns, you can personalize every email to effectively target different audience segments based on where they are in the customer journey.

How can I create a successful drip campaign?

Setting up a drip campaign requires the use of email marketing software. Mailchimp makes it easy for you to build highly targeted drip campaigns to give customers a nudge when they’re stuck in the buyer’s journey. By moving customers through a funnel, you can start to build better relationships and provide customers with ongoing communication. To create a successful drip campaign:

1. Identify audiences: You can have many different audience segments depending on your business. However, to make your drip email campaign effective, you must define the different audiences and which triggers you’ll use. For example, you can send someone an email after they sign up for your newsletter.
2. Set goals: All digital marketing campaigns need goals to help you determine their effectiveness. When defining your goals, be specific to ensure you have something to measure against.
3. Write and design: Once you have your audiences segmented and triggers set up, you can start to develop your emails based on where customers are in their journeys.
4. Plan: Before publishing your email campaign, plan out how it will work, including how many emails to send, the order of emails, and the right triggers.
5. Test: Once your campaign has been launched, check the analytics regularly and test different aspects of the email. For example, you can use A/B testing to figure out the best time to send an email.

How do I set up a drip campaign in Mailchimp?

Email drip campaigns are easy with Mailchimp’s marketing automation tools. To set up your drip campaign, sign up for Mailchimp and begin building out your customer list. If you don’t have an active list, you can create a form with Mailchimp to collect customer information on your website. From there, you can begin segmenting your audience by setting email criteria, also known as triggers, and using our free campaign templates to build out your emails.