The value of drip marketing

What is drip marketing?

Drip marketing is a marketing and communications strategy adopted by businesses in order to send pre-written messages to their customers over a scheduled period. Often, these messages are relayed in the form of email marketing, however other forms of media can be utilised too.

The term drip marketing is seen as a blanket term that can cover many different marketing strategies, but the main purpose is to communicate and engage with prospects in several ways. This can be informational or promotional but will usually require your customers to sign up to your email marketing list on their own.

Why use drip marketing?

Essentially, this form of marketing is designed to reach out and connect your audience with a targeted message at a specific time. One of the great aspects of these is the ability to automate your messages so they can work for your business, allowing you to focus your time on more important matters. These make it easy to connect with the right person and can utilise a wide range of triggerable actions to prompt them. Below are some examples of customer actions where drip marketing can prove most effective:

1. A customer placed a product into their basket but didn’t complete his order, you can set up automated messages to remind them of their interest in your product.
2. Regular newsletters to get information to your subscribers on your latest offers and updates.
3. To recognise important events in a valuable customer's life, an example of this would be personalising birthday messages to users who have set their birthday dates up with their email accounts.
4. First purchase automations – when a customer chooses to use your business for the first time, why not set up an automatic email response to thank them for their custom.
5. Nurture new leads – if a prospect shows engagement with your content, that’s your cue to reach out with relevant and interesting information that links to your products or services.
6. Reach out to unsubscribed emails! If a customer decides they no longer want to receive your newsletters, it might be worth asking them for some feedback as to why. If the same customer, then shows less interest into your services, reach out and ask them why, or use this opportunity to provide an incentive for them to return.

How to get started with drip marketing?

The very first step to getting started with these campaigns is to identify your actionable ‘trigger point.’ This is the action that prompts your emailing system to send out messages. You could also decide on a scheduled message that would offer information and promotions on a fixed rota. Following this, your next point of action is to identify any audience segments you have across your business. You could have certain messages that are triggered when someone makes their first purchase, and a separate one to thank those who spend over a certain amount of money.

Remember, these drip campaigns don’t need to be very long, assuming your message is clear. Based on this, decide on the specific message you want to be conveyed by the triggerable action performed by the customer.

Once you have succeeded in sending your first campaign, it is important to use metrics to measure their performance and using this, you can inform any changes to the content. Monitor the rates at which customers are engaging with content, by utilising metrics such as click rates and conversions.

Once you have all this information, the most important thing is to be consistent and maintain the drip marketing process. Although your copy or message might not be relevant as your services evolve, review these campaigns, and always try to keep them fresh and up to date.

How Zigaflow can help you start using drip marketing for your company

At Zigaflow, we fully understand the effectiveness of drip marketing, which is why we integrated with MailChimp to put your email functionalities at the tip of your fingertips in one succinct, cloud-based business management software. This allows you almost instant access to your email campaigns, so you can always be confident your messages are reaching the correct audience.

If you want to start utilising effective drip marketing, take advantage of our integrations and book a demo with us today.