Drip campaigns are an excellent way to send specific information and special offers to targeted users without needing to monitor those communications 24/7. An email drip campaign is a series of automated email campaigns that are sent in a specific order when triggered by a specific user action as they progress through the customer funnel.

These types of campaigns are built to nurture “leads”, or prospects, over a long period of time and in a way that’s natural to the consumer. The content sent to subscribers is pre-planned and hyper-relevant to their specific needs, so the chances of conversions are much higher than a regular email campaign. In fact, automated drip campaigns have an 80 percent higher open rate than single send emails, and a 300 percent higher click-through-rate.

If you want to set up a successful drip campaign, here are five tips to help you get the process started.

1. Establish user behavior

Drip campaigns rely on predicting user behavior to create emails that move consumers through the stages of your sales process. If you don’t know how your audience will behave or can’t make that prediction, it’ll be impossible to create a high-performing campaign that will deliver much results, because it won’t be targeted to your specific audience. It’s a good thing that no one knows your audience and customers better than YOU.

To understand how your users behave, track and monitor your analytics. This will show you different patterns and how your visitors move down the funnel using your website. This includes metrics such as unique visitors, regular visitors, who signed up for your email list, who opted in but didn’t revisit your website, abandoned cart rates, and much more.

Brands will do whatever it takes to hold onto their subscribers, so they’ll set up a drip campaign that reaches out whenever a user takes a new action.

2. Understand the different funnels

To create a successful drip campaign, you have to understand the conversion funnel and how to get your audience all the way through it. The further down they are, the closer they are to purchasing a product or service.

A sales funnel can be split into four stages: awareness, interest, desire, and finally, action.

Image source

Those at the very top of the funnel are just becoming aware of your brand. At this stage, offering educational information about your business is the best way to get a user’s attention. This includes blog posts, webinars, videos, and other content on social media or through your website.

During the next stage, your audience develops an interest in your brand and its offerings. They’re starting to learn more. This is a good time to present more free content to them that you believe they’ll find useful.

Then they’re hit with desire where they’ve done their research and are more inclined to opt in to your email list.

Finally, they decide to take action and make a purchase. They have made their way down the funnel and are officially paying customers.

3. Map out the different drips

Now it’s time to map out some different drips within your campaign so the right content goes to the right targeted customers. The entire point of a drip campaign is that your emails get sent based on a calculation of what users want the most, so it’s crucial that this step is done correctly. This should be easy if you’ve correctly determined user behavior so you have a good idea of how they’ll act on your site.

There are several directions you can take your drip campaign in. Let’s dive into the different user behaviors and what type of campaigns are appropriate for that action.

New subscribers

People new to your email list deserve to be welcomed into your community. This is a popular method of familiarizing users with your brand and making them feel embraced as new subscribers.

Image source

Frequent visitors

Every blog or website has visitors that visit frequently and love consuming the content, yet haven’t purchased anything. You can nudge them in the right direction by sending out an email as part of your drip campaign giving them an offer they can’t refuse, such as a discount code or free trial.

Image source

Infrequent/one-time visitors

You’ll get users who sign up for your email list and then disappear. Sometimes all it takes is a reminder email to show subscribers they don’t want to miss out on your content offers.

Image source

Abandoned cart shoppers

We’ve all loaded our online carts with stuff only to exit out at the last moment, changing our minds about the purchase. When this happens, businesses have the opportunity to reach out and see if there’s any chance they can save that sale.

Image source

Unsubscribers

You have one shot at winning back users who have unsubscribed from your newsletter. Sending one last email to try to change their mind may end up working in your favor if crafted properly. Many brands use emotions like loneliness to play on the user’s feelings and reconsider unsubscribing.

Image source

4. Run A/B tests

To get the best results, you need to run regular A/B split tests on your drip campaigns. This is when you compare two different components at once to see which one brings in more conversions. It’s essential to test your emails’ subject lines, click-through rates, engagement levels, and open rates among other metrics. Something as simple as the wording of your CTA can affect how well your conversions rates perform.

Image source

It’s important to split test only one component of your campaign at a time. That way you’re sure of what’s causing more or fewer conversions and interactions so you can optimize your strategy accordingly. OptinMonster is a great tool that lets you split test your drip campaigns and boost your traffic.

5. Monitor your campaign’s analytics

As previously mentioned, it’s essential to track your email campaign’s analytics so you know exactly how your drip campaign is performing with subscribers. It’ll tell you how much more you need to optimize your email marketing strategy so that you end up with higher conversion rates and increased email subscribers.

Be sure to track these important metrics of your drip campaign:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• New subscribers
• Unsubscribers
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate

Understanding your campaign’s analytics will help you understand how people interact with your site so you can create a drip campaign that gives you the most ROI.

Your turn

Setting up a proper drip campaign might be one of the most beneficial things you do for your business. Not only that, it’ll save you time from having to organize how emails from your business get sent and to whom. They’re designed to target different yet specific audiences who that content will cater to so the chances of conversions are high. How will you create an effective drip campaign?

The post New to Drip Campaigns? 5 Proven Tips You Need to Know appeared first on Constant Contact Blogs.