What is Drip Email Marketing? The Most Comprehensive Guide

Drip email marketing is the process of sending out automated email newsletters to market your products and services.

These email campaigns are used frequently by many industries to establish contact and stay in touch with their prospects.

Drip marketing is a highly efficient way of communicating with large numbers of people on a more personalized basis than standard email newsletter marketing.

What is Drip Email Marketing?

Drip email marketing is a communication strategy for communicating with a pre-written set of email messages.

These are sent to a client at a pre-set period or time-release calendar.

The triggers are based on clients’ behavior or responsiveness to a CTA (Call-to-Action). Drip email marketing is used to ensure your message or brand stays on top of their mind.

Drip email marketing meaning a one-to-one marketing method rather than a one-to-many method of communicating with prospects.

This is often confusing to marketers who don’t understand the difference between a drip email campaign and a newsletter campaign.

What makes a drip email campaign so effective is the fact that it consists of a series of pre-written emails sent out in the timing and sequence you choose.

Every prospect in the list gets a series of emails in the same sequence which is usually based on the date they subscribed. On the other hand, an email newsletter is sent to everyone on the list at the same time.

Both methods of email marketing have their place in the email marketing world.

In fact, 49% of businesses are using some form of email marketing automation. The main advantage of a drip series is that the information presented can be designed to refer to the previous one.

A newsletter, on the other hand, is more difficult to do that, because a user who joined a list today did not get the message sent to the list last week.

You should have a lead management system CRM like Teleduce that can do both.

Let’s have a look at an example which clears up the basic difference between newsletter and drip marketing email.

A season-based message can be sent to everyone like the following:

Hi John,

With the snow melting and Spring coming around, you might be considering putting your home on the market.

With tax refunds going out, many home buyers become motivated to go home shopping this time of year, and if you’re wanting to get your home sold, now is the time to get it done.

I’d love to talk more about it and discuss how much you may be able to get for your home.

Sincerely,

Jack Black.

Or, sequence-based, like this:

Hi John,

Thanks for downloading my free report on Selling Your Home For Top Dollar in Any Market. Let me know if you have any questions at all about how I can help you get the most from your real estate investment.

Tomorrow I’d like to send you a free Checklist For Preparing Your Home For the Market. My clients have found this very helpful.

I’d love to get your home sold at top dollar for you when you’re ready!

Sincerely,

Jack

Pro-tip: If you are new to email marketing, begin with the basics. Check out our complete guide Email Marketing Best Practices before you move ahead.

How Drip Email Marketing Works?

Drip email campaigns are successful only if the appropriate email matches the actions users take.

Beyond this first interaction, your email subscribers should receive ensuing follow-up emails relative to whether they open or ignore your previously sent emails. As for how do they work?

Well, they work on lead scoring and buyers’ journey. Let’s have an in-depth look at it.

Drip email campaigns provide a trove of user behavior data. They provide answers to questions like:

• Which types of subject lines are working best?
• How many people are opening your emails?
• Which buyer persona do they particularly resemble?
• Is more personalization required at each stage of the drip lifecycle?

The system gleans answers to these questions from the success or failure of each mail. Success means the email was opened is determined by binary YES.

On the flip side, email not opened is binary NO. Once you gather this data, you can categorize leads with more precision.

This will also help you better comprehend the prospect’s journey so you engage with them in a better way.

Drip Email Marketing Strategies

Let’s have a look at a few drip email marketing strategies to overcome customer and prospect objections and close more deals.

Don’t Just Sell

People don’t like to be sold to. But what’s the point of contacting prospects if they don’t want to be sold to?

Because, with consistent contact, when your prospect is ready to buy, they’ll come to you.

The messages or information sent through an email drip campaign does not need to be a constant bombardment of hard sale tactics. Use your drip email marketing campaign to keep your name fresh in your prospects mind.

Feel free to offer your prospect a message they would find interesting. Find a bit of information that will be of value to them.

Your email drip campaign might include informative resources, high-interest news stories, fun facts about your company, and of course, less demanding sales messages.

Personalization

Personalizing emails is an effective way to connect to your audience. In fact, 74% of marketers assert targeted personalization increases customer engagement.

At the very least, you should include the prospect’s first name so you can address them properly at the beginning of your email.

Try to include other details also which show that you know your audience.

Optimizing Drip Emails

Every business, audience, and market is different. This is why different aspects of email marketing work better in some cases but not so great in others.

This is why you need to perform A/B testing to optimize your drip email campaigns.

This test means running tests on two or more emails to find which works better.

By changing just a single aspect, you can understand which variations work best in your unique case. Some areas of the test include:

• Subject lines
• Email content (text, images with alt text)
• Send times based on the customer time zone
• Using segments of your prospects to tweak the content.

Grab Attention

With the internet, and social media platforms vying for their attention, consumers really have little tolerance for sales messages, especially messages sent through an email drip campaign.

This is why you must include interesting or valuable information in your email drip campaigns.

It could also be used to remind stagnant users why they once engaged with your business and the benefits you bring to the table.

Email drip campaigns are wonderful for keeping in touch with prospects.

However, if the messages you send in your automated email drip campaigns are always hard sales or include nothing of real value to the prospect, then you probably won’t get the results you desire.

Drip Email Marketing Pros & Cons

Still not convinced whether drip email marketing is a good strategy for you?

Well, here are some pros and cons that you should consider.

Pros:

It is Affordable

Email Marketing whether drip or newsletter is affordable when compared to other marketing options like SMS marketing.

Not to forget, with emails you can reach thousands, even millions of people quickly and at a very low cost.

Controlled Content Exposure

The idea behind drip email marketing is to convert prospects through consistent, long-term marketing efforts. It starts off easy and breaks up the content to be presented in several stages.

It begins with subtle, informative advertisements with more persuasive messages which are reserved for later use.

Easy Tracking

Drip Email marketing is very facilitative in tracking and measurement. You can check how many people opened the emails, how many clicked the links etc.

By comparing this data, you get a better idea about buyers’ persona and will allow you to send relevant content to them.

Cons:

Getting Marked as Spam

Even though you are reaching millions, if you don’t send relevantly or send too frequently, your subscribers may mark you as spam or unsubscribe from your emails altogether.

Time & Commitment

Time commitment is required for the success of a drip email campaign. If you run multiple advertising messages, spacing can become a critical issue.

Your emails may show up too close together, leading target audiences to become overwhelmed with information overload or they may even mark your email as spam.

Limited Creativity

Drip email marketing is not as creative as other marketing tactics like IVR services or landing pages. Creativity is restricted to providing relevant information content.

Drip Email Marketing Campaign Examples

Businesses can use a drip-email campaign as a powerful way to take their prospect, right from the ‘awareness’ stage to becoming a customer.

The drip email campaign sequence begins once a user has signed up to your mailing list.

Day 1: Email 1: Introductory Email– Thank you for joining the mailing list.

Day 4: Email 2: Trust building – Highlight solutions to the customers’ pain points.

Day 7: Email 3: Sale – Send an email that offers a direct solution to their problem.

Day 14: Email 4: Reminder – A gentle reminder of the solution and a special offer.

This is a very generic example of a drip campaign. The content and length of emails, and the space between sending the emails, will depend on your business and your industry best practices.

The tone you use in the email content should be distinguished by the type of drip campaign you’re pursuing.

For example, a warm, welcoming email works for a new prospect in an engagement campaign. However, you require a more personable, direct and transparent format in an educational campaign.

Here, a subject line like “We tried this tactic once and it totally backfired: Here’s why” interprets well to an educational campaign.

Emails that admit weaknesses or expose vulnerabilities are remarkably successful since your leads are probably suffering from those same faults.

Use Teleduce for Drip Email Marketing

Integrated Sales and Marketing CRM like Teleduce help you create a marketing plan.

By using the email drip campaign, you get to plan exactly when you want a marketing message to be emailed, and who you want it sent to.

Teleduce makes it simple for you to change your lists and add or subtract emails from the campaign at any time.

With Teleduce, you can also track the deliverability of your emails. Let the reports generated from the email drip campaign tell you how many prospects opened the email, how many were left unopened, and how many were bounced.

Before sending an email in the email drip campaign, you can also test the emails to make sure your message doesn’t wind up as spam.

Stop working hard trying to get thousands of emails out to customers and prospects.

Let automated email drip campaigns do it all for you.