Top 5 email drip campaigns for 2018

Leveraging email drip campaigns empowers you to send the right message to customers and prospects at just the right time. With free marketing automation solutions available, automating your email drip campaign is easier and more cost-effective than ever before. There are many ways to utilise email drip marketing automation to increase engagement, retain customers, and close deals with new prospects. Here, we cover some email drip campaign examples to help you get started.

Additionally URL shorteners in email drip campaigns condense lengthy links, making them visually appealing and easier to include in the email content, enhancing readability and reducing clutter. URL shortener provide valuable analytics, allowing you to track click-through rates and measure user engagement throughout your email drip campaign. This data helps you understand which links are performing well and make informed adjustments to optimize the campaign.

1. Welcome Series for Prospects

When someone opts into your email list or subscribes to your newsletter or blog, that’s your chance to make your best first impression. They are not yet customers, but this is your chance to start them on the path to becoming one. We suggest including these three emails, in this order:

Email 1: The initial welcome note: This shouldn’t be overloaded with information, but rather just a cordial greeting, welcoming them on board. You can also use this opportunity to offer them a discount, coupon, or another offer. But don’t try to sell them anything yet.

Email 2: Where to look for information: Let them know where to connect with you—on social media, by email, telephone, or any other contact method you offer. Encourage them to reach out and assure them that you’ll always be available to help.

Email 3: Getting to know them: Here, you can ask them to tell you about themselves so you can better serve them. Ask for some information that’s helpful in your email marketing segmentation. This will help you start to gain insight into their likes and interests so you can better market to them in the future.

2. Onboarding Drip
   

When someone becomes a customer, you can plan a series of emails to ensure they are successful using your product, and stay satisfied. Here is an email drip campaign template for an onboarding drip:

Email 1: Encourage them to finish setting up their account: This assumes that you have some online community that they can engage with. If not, use this email to simply welcome them to new customers and ask them to reach out with any questions.

Email 2: Offer training and user guides: Point them towards any online training videos you offer, user guides, your knowledge base, FAQs, or any other information that’s helpful to new customers.

Email 3: Point them to your blog, best practices, or eBooks: Or, really, any other content that is designed to educate them on industry trends. This shows them that you are invested in their success.  

3. Customer Retention Drip

You can trigger this drip when someone displays behaviours that indicate a potential to leave, such as when a customer goes silent and does not respond to your outreach, or unsubscribes from your email list. We recommend sending just one or two emails for this drip, as you don’t want to hassle a potentially unhappy customer. What’s in those emails depends on the action taken and your unique business model. A few suggestions are:

• Offering a discount, promotion, or some type of freebie
• Asking them to complete a survey to let you know where you can improve to better serve them

4. Renewal Drip
   

If your business is subscription-based, it helps to have an email drip campaign to increase renewals. This one is fairly straightforward; the goal here is simply to remind existing customers to renew their subscriptions. You can leverage the following emails for this drip:

Email 1: Initial Reminder: Send this one out at least a few weeks before their renewal date. Make it friendly—you’re writing to make sure they don’t miss their renewal because you’d hate for them to have their service interrupted.

Email 2: Two- or Three-Day Reminder: You can adopt a slightly more urgent tone here because you’ll send it when there are just two or three days left before their subscription expires. You can also take the opportunity here to remind them why your product or service is so great.

Email 3: Overdue Notice: It’s a good idea not to immediately cancel a customer’s subscription the minute it expires. Rather, build in a grace period of a week, or just a few days. You can let them know about this as well, by telling them that you didn’t want to cut off their service so you gave them a few days in case they had missed the deadline accidentally. Send this one, two or three days after expiration and give them a few additional days to take action after the email is sent.

5. Lead Nurturing Drip

Most business should be leveraging drip marketing for lead nurturing campaigns. You can kick off a nurturing campaign to all of your existing leads, and use system automation to drop newly generated leads at the start as they come in. You want to tell a story with this campaign, starting with content that’s not product-specific and working your way to that point as you move along. Here is a basic lead nurturing drip campaign example:

Email 1: Demonstrate a problem and a solution: Educate leads about a problem they didn’t realize they had, then propose a solution to that problem—the solution being the kind of product you sell, but not naming yours specifically. This creates awareness around your brand. Blogs or infographics work well as calls-to-action (CTAs) here.

Email 2: Generate interest in the perceived benefits of your brand: Here you want to pique leads’ interest a little more, to the point that they want to research further on their own. A good tactic is to present how your brand can solve that problem form email 1—without specifically mentioning the first email. Webinars and your website content are good CTAs for this.

Email 3: Demonstrate your brand personality: Establish an emotional connection between the lead and your brand. Move lead from being interested in it, to wanting it. White papers and eBooks are effective CTAs.

Email 4: Persuade buyer to interact with your company one-on-one: Here you can focus on relaying the ROI of your product to help in their evaluation of competitors. Offer demos, customer testimonial pages, or newsletter opt-ins as CTAs.

Conclusion

If you’re not currently leveraging marketing automation for email drip campaigns, now is the time to start. With so many free solutions on the market, your competitors almost certainly are. The drip marketing campaign examples here should be used only to give you ideas—it’s important to devise your own campaigns with your customers’ needs in mind. If you are already using Agile CRM, learn more about drip marketing.