This article will cover a unique type of campaign, which is usually more extensive than the previously discussed campaigns and includes a larger number of steps. It is sometimes confused with customer journey as a whole, but in fact, is only a part of it.
Email communication is a great way to start, maintain and modify your relationships with customers as needed. Of course, its effectiveness depends on many factors, such as the quality of the content, the frequency of sending or the time of day when the messages are sent. It has many advantages, but also some shortcomings, the basic of which is the fact that a new user of your site or a new recipient of your newsletter often receives the material that is current at the time of joining and which is usually a continuation of previous messages and thus may expose the prospect to a lack of understanding, caused by lack of knowledge from previously sent content. In such cases, the drip campaign comes to the rescue, i.e. a method of sending a series of messages for a specified period of time, at specified intervals, to nurture prospects or leads through the marketing funnel and then hopefully into sales funnel and pipeline. Every recipient of such a campaign receives its entire content because it always starts from the beginning. We will discuss the drip campaign on the example of an email campaign, although you can also run it using even traditional mail or various types of social media.
Of course, organizing this type of campaign and sending the emails manually is not an option, because it would require the full involvement of a whole group of employees and would probably be completely unprofitable. Marketing automation tools, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Pardot, come to the rescue. Thanks to them, there is the possibility of virtually any configuration of a repetitive email campaign that will be programmed according to your idea, with the content of your authorship, with the time intervals you wish and all of it organized exactly with the path you plan. It all happens quite simply. Thanks to the visualization on the “map” you can arrange exactly the campaign plan that you come up with. Thanks to the graphical way of creating, you can easily imagine what each step looks like and what step or steps may follow it. As a rule, the next step depends on the previous step, i.e. trigger/action, which is somehow activated by the mailing participant. Individual emails consist of pre-written content that is created in advance and only its shipping is programmed. The triggers include, for example, subscribing to the newsletter, downloading your white paper, clicking a specific button or making a purchase. In other words – these are the actions that the recipient takes.
What are drip campaigns made for?
The main function of the drip campaign is lead generation and qualification process. These goals can be achieved precisely by consolidating in the prospect’s mind all the desirable and appropriate information about your company and your offer. The idea is to create as many familiarities with the prospects as possible and lead to a situation in which, with their consent, you will be able to contact them a few more times and provide new information encouraging them to take further actions. The goal is their involvement in the sales process that finally leads them to purchase your product.
It all sounds like a very obvious and simple process, right? And here we can finally discuss the crux of the matter, i.e. modern marketing automation. Thanks to it, your lead will not only receive a series of messages on a topic that is in his area of interest. Thanks to intelligent and high-level usability tools for creating such campaigns, he will always receive relevant content tailored to his needs. How will it happen? It’s all about data which you will have access to thanks to other intelligent marketing tools operating within marketing automation. Leads will receive messages from you in time intervals. We will discuss this issue in a separate article, but it is such an important aspect of planning email campaigns and at the same time it is such an extensive subject that choosing the right shipping time can almost be called art. No wonder – it has such a huge impact on the opening and engagement rates.
Types of drip campaigns
The variety of drip campaigns is a very interesting topic. Here, we want to show you the difference between a customer journey as a whole and a drip campaign, which is only a part of the customer journey. It can be said that a drip campaign is a miniature customer journey, which is part of a larger whole and is, for example, in between the welcome campaign and the upselling campaign. When planning the entire customer journey, you have many tools to choose from to create it, but also many ways to get to the lead with the information you have chosen. You can apply methods such as:
- Competitive drip campaign – it is a campaign that is designed to show the advantages of your product compared to competing products, as well as to show all benefits that the prospect might lose when not using this product. Of course, you should have good taste in creating such a campaign and not go towards slandering your competitors’ products but show an advantage over them in an elegant way.
- Promotional drip campaign – as the name suggests, it is a method based on offering a promotion or special discount, which at the right time (close to the bottom of the funnel) can be very beneficial and effective. Thanks to marketing automation and artificial intelligence, you can create campaigns that will also take into account the preferences of leads and send them tailored offers.
- Industry-expertise drip campaign – is a campaign that aims to strengthen leads in the belief that choosing your company is the right choice. It’s a kind of an ultimate encouragement that is supposed to help your prospects make decisions. It involves, press releases, white papers or industry reports, which clearly show who is leading the market. The function of this campaign is to demonstrate the authority and dominance of your company. It’s in good taste to cite independent sources that indicate your business as a good choice.
The above drip types are just examples to illustrate what a drip campaign is all about. Of course, all these methods can be very effective, but marketing automation requires a lot of knowledge, experience, and skills to create attractive content and only having them on your side gives a high probability of success. If you don’t have these attributes in your company, remember that there are companies like CRM Designer that can help you. Cooperation can take place in the form that is most suitable for you, both in terms of time, level of commitment, intensity, and distribution of work in time. If you have a good marketing team in your company, but they are not yet very experienced when it comes to handling tools such as Pardot from Salesforce and marketing automation is not yet a daily routine for your people, cooperation with our External Marketing Automation Team can be a smart way to solve the problem. Just hire our experienced marketing automation experts in such a time frame and with such objectives as are best for you.