How Can Drip Email Campaigns Help to Re-Engage Users?

Did you know that on average, a customer will lose interest in a topic in only 8.25 seconds? This number has decreased from the 12 seconds of interest that customers experienced more than 20 years ago in 2000. Because the attention span of customers only seems to be getting shorter as the internet gets faster and faster, you will need to act fast yourself, otherwise, you might end up losing a customer forever.

One of the best things you can do to reengage customers is to run drip email campaigns. You might have heard of ordinary email campaigns before, but what are "drip" email campaigns? It all has to do with sending emails automatically to your potential customers.

This might sound like spam to you, but if you do drip email marketing and email sequences right, you will find that your customers will slowly come crawling back and might even start making purchases again. However, before you get too excited and try running a drip marketing campaign right away, you need to learn all about what it is and how it works, otherwise, it could be a disaster.

What Are Drip Email Campaigns

Drip email campaigns differ from normal email campaigns in one major way: their frequency. With normal email campaigns, you decide when an email should be sent out to your customers at a particular time. This is more or less the same with drip emails, but with ordinary emails, you will schedule your emails at a much less frequent rate.

Your email campaign might involve sending out an email for a customer's birthday, Christmas, or other events. While doing this is fine and while it can increase your sales to a certain extent, your customers can still forget about you and your brand very easily. After all, if you get an email from a company only once a month or even less frequently, you are not likely to remember that company for long.

On the other hand, if you increase the frequency of your email marketing to a so-called "drip," you may find that you'll have better luck with sales. Instead of sending emails to your audience once every month, try once every week instead. In some cases, you might even try sending out an email once every few days.

You might be wondering if customers might start to hate this kind of marketing. Won't it come off as spammy if you keep sending a bunch of emails to your customers? Won't your customers eventually get tired of all those emails and start deleting them before even reading them first?

The trick to drip email marketing is to only target certain customers. After all, some customers will naturally be more interested in your brand than others. If you send drip emails to customers who are not all that interested, they may delete your emails and that would be a waste.

Keep Your Audience in Mind for Email Drip Campaigns

On the other hand, you would likely see an increase in sales as long as you target those who are already interested. However, you won't have a great idea of who is interested in your brand and who is not if you don't analyze your audience first. This is one of the first and most important steps for drip email marketing.

To start, you should take a closer look at your subscriber list. This will narrow down the pool to those who are already at least somewhat interested in what your brand has to offer. Customers who are not yet on your subscriber or email list are not quite interested enough in your brand to target, so you shouldn't worry too much about them.

By analyzing your subscriber list, you already know that all of these potential customers have something in common: your brand. But you shouldn't stop there because that would be a vast simplification of your audience. By oversimplifying your audience and sending general emails out to them, you might end up being more of a nuisance without a chance of increasing your sales.

The trick is to break down your subscriber list into groups based on their interests or actions. Customer behavior is one of the most important factors you can analyze in drip email marketing. For example, you might be able to see that a customer has added something to his cart and then removed it only to add the same thing back to the cart at a later date.

Obviously, this customer wants a particular item but something is making him hesitate. By sending out a few automated emails with this customer in mind, you will be able to remind the customer about his desired product and you might even offer him a percentage off.

How Do Drip Email Campaigns Work

Your goal when you run drip email campaigns is to get your customers to start thinking about your brand again. If you know that some of your customers are interested in some of your items but are not buying them, drip emails may be just the thing you need to tip the scales. You can easily utilize the power of suggestion through drip emails.

For example, if you see that someone has left an item in their cart for a long time but has not bought it, you could send out a few emails reminding your customer about it. If the first email doesn't do anything, send out another after a certain period of time. If that one doesn't work, switch up the email and send out another to see what happens.

If a customer really doesn't want to spend money, you might be out of luck. On the other hand, if a customer is on the fence, a few emails might be the thing that motivates the customer to buy the item sitting in their cart. You might be thinking that all this sounds like a bit too much effort.

However, you should keep in mind that all emails in your drip email campaign will be automated and most likely prewritten. For that reason, you won't have to go out of your way to individually write a bunch of emails for everyone on your subscriber list. However, that doesn't mean you get to sit back while technology does all the heavy lifting.

You will still need to pull a lot of the strings behind the scenes such as scheduling your drip emails. You will not only need to schedule the timing of the emails but also a trigger in which to start sending the emails.

When to Start Sending Out Drip Emails to Customers and Reel Them Back In

A trigger is a certain customer behavior that warrants the sending out of drip emails to a particular customer. As mentioned before, a customer leaving an item in a cart for a long time may be considered a trigger. You might be wondering why you should bother having a trigger for your email campaign in the first place.

Think about it: a customer might not be very happy if you start sending them emails for no reason about your products and services. That customer might not even know enough about your brand yet to start spending money. More than that, your emails will likely be too general if they don't have a trigger.

For example, when a customer has an item in his shopping cart, you will be able to send emails that are specifically about that item in that customer's shopping cart. Being more specific in your drip emails is often more beneficial than being general. This way, the customer will remember your brand and specifically that item in the shopping cart.

On the other hand, if you send out a general "come buy my stuff" email to your customers, you're not likely to get an increase in sales. There are also many other drip email campaign examples that go far beyond customers leaving and forgetting about items in their carts. For example, another trigger might be when a customer renews his subscription with your brand.

This would be a clear indication that the customer is still interested in your brand and products, so why not send out a few emails to pique the customer's interest even more? You could send out emails when a customer's subscription is about to expire. If your customer was on the fence about renewing, a few emails might coax him into subscribing.

Don’t Forget to Fine-Tune Your Emails

As mentioned before, automated email marketing can do a lot of its own work. But don't sit around and think that you can twiddle your thumbs all day and get a big increase in sales. Before you even get your drip email campaign up and running, you need to make sure that the emails that are going to be sent out are well-crafted.

There's nothing worse than sending out a bunch of prewritten, automated emails only to find that there are typos in some of them. If your drip emails are not high quality, your customers are not going to take them seriously. That's why you seriously need to review them before you send any out.

But more than avoiding typos, you will also need to make sure that the emails target a certain customer behavior. You've already seen some examples of email triggers, but what should an email look like once it's sent out to a customer? Your email should have some kind of information or incentive so your customer will learn something new or be motivated to take some kind of action after reading it.

If your emails don't have some kind of motivating factor, they're a waste of time and money. Don't think that you have to write an essay in your emails either. Usually, short paragraphs and sentences do the trick much better than long blocks of text.

You can even design some of your emails to make them more fun. For example, you could send out a survey in one of your emails. This survey might help you gather more information about the interests of your customers.

But beyond that, you might offer a special discount once a customer completes such a survey that motivates them to buy something.

Analyze the Success of Your Campaign

The point of a drip email campaign is to rekindle the interest of your potential customers in your business and to maintain interest. If you find that, according to your analytics, your email campaign isn't doing what it's supposed to, you might be doing something wrong. For that reason, you will need to keep a close eye on the metrics of your drip email campaign.

You need to see if the money you are making from your campaign is worth the money you are using to pay for the campaign itself. Otherwise, the campaign might not be worth it and you will start losing money. The conversion rate is something you should always be aware of.

The conversion rate, also known as the click-through rate, measures how often your customers are interacting with your drip emails. Are your customers clicking on the links in your emails or are they skimming over and deleting them? If you see that your conversion rate is low, you may need to redesign your drip emails so they are more interesting and motivating for your customers.

You may be able to measure other metrics. For example, you can measure how many people not only clicked on your email but also bought something once they arrived at your site. By analyzing these metrics, you can see what aspects are working the best in your campaign.

You can also see what triggers work better than others. By doing this, you can eventually start to narrow in on your email campaign and streamline it.

This way, you can make your drip emails as efficient and effective as possible. But doing all this might take some time, so don't forget to be patient as you wait for the data to roll in.

Create an Outline for Your Email Campaign to Re-engage Your Customers

Every kind of marketing campaign needs an outline or funnel, and drip email campaigns are no exception. Your entire outline should be directed towards a common goal. Most often, the most important goal is to increase sales, but you may have a different goal such as increasing your brand awareness or gaining more people on your subscriber list.

Whatever the case, a goal at the end of your outline will help to keep your outline as a whole organized and purposeful. Without a clear goal, it will be easy for your outline to wander and not be as effective as it needs to be. Besides having a goal, another very important part of an email campaign outline is the data.

You will want to know how many emails you want to send out in response to a certain customer trigger. Once you send out the first email, you will want to think about how much time should pass before you send out the next one and the one after that. You will also want to think about what each of those emails should say so one won't be too similar to the next.

Outlining this information is crucial to your campaign. This is because if you don't do it right, you could easily come off as spammy to your customers which you really don't want if you are trying to make a profit. The key is to send out a limited number of emails after a certain period of time.

By doing this, you won't exhaust your customers with an endless onslaught of emails. Instead, you might entice them to buy some of your products or services or perhaps join your subscription list. But you do have to keep your audience in mind when you put this information together.

How Many Emails Should You Send Out and How Often

More often than not, you will want to send between 3 and 15 emails, depending on your customers. This may sound like a lot of emails, but it isn't as many as you think, especially if you pull off your email campaign correctly. Many drip email campaigns send out 3 emails in a short period of time.

3 is a good number because you might be able to get away with sending them out between 1 and 2 days. You are able to do with by separating the emails by a certain number of hours instead of days or weeks. This kind of frequency is best if you can see that a customer is close to making a decision but is still on the fence, such as keeping an item in the shopping cart.

On the other hand, if you want to send more emails, even as many as 15, you will want to spread out your emails. This is important because if you send all 15 emails to a customer on the same day, there will be a much shorter period between each email. Since your customer will be getting emails from you so frequently, the customer might start to find your emails exhausting and start deleting them.

For more than 3 emails, you will want to send them out over the week or even over several weeks. This way, you can make sure that your customer continues to think about your brand but you won't exhaust them with emails either. The sweet spot for spreading out your emails is between 1 and 14 days.

Any shorter than this will be too frequent and any longer, your customers might start to forget about you. As long as you stay in the middle, you should see some improvement.

The Benefits of Drip Email Marketing

You have already seen some of the benefits of drip email marketing, but not all of them. One of the biggest benefits of this type of email marketing is that you can save a lot of time, both in the short and long term. Without the automation of drip email marketing, you would have to write an email by yourself in response to every customer trigger.

More than that, you would have to be writing emails to your customers almost constantly. This is because you would need to create follow-up emails after the first drip email. Can you imagine writing 3 to 15 emails for several customers every day, throughout the week?

This is not to mention that you will also need to keep in mind the interests and behavior of your customers. This is perhaps an impossible task for one person which is why email automation exists. The automation behind drip email marketing allows you to focus on other marketing aspects such as the design of the emails themselves.

Another benefit of drip email marketing is that it allows you to, in a way, start a conversation with your customers. You are able to stay in contact with them for a prolonged period of time through drip emails. Since you have several emails to convey your message, you can casually mention your brand rather than seeming desperate or pushy.

By keeping your customers interested in a natural way and by including interesting information in your emails, you can be sure that your customers will keep your brand in mind. By doing this, you can reduce the chances that your potential customers will only be one-time customers. Instead, drip emails can help you obtain repeat and long-time customers who can help your brand in the long run.

What Are Email Sequences

You have seen the term "email sequences" before, but you still may not know what they are. Email sequences are very similar to drip emails, although they contain a few unique details. An email sequence is exactly as the name suggests: a sequence of emails meant to be sent to a certain customer.

Email sequences are automated much like drip emails. And, like drip emails, they are sent out only after a certain period of time and after a certain trigger. So far, email sequences sound more or less identical to drip emails, so what's the big difference?

In reality, they can both be used in the same ways and for the same purposes, but emails sequences may involve different kinds of emails compared to drip emails. For example, drip emails tend to be more on the sales side of things. On the other hand, email sequences (while they can certainly target sales) can also target other things related to your brand.

For example, if you have an eBook that you want to promote, it would be easy to create a series of emails to tell your customers about that eBook. Each email is focused on a particular niche that you want to address. Drip emails are a bit different in that each email may be a little bit different from the last, although they may still work towards a common goal.

Another difference is that there may not be a limit on an email sequence. This is unlike drip emails which should usually not go over 15 emails. Depending on what kind of customer you are trying to target and what you are trying to accomplish, you may be able to send out email sequences for as long as you want as long as you do it well.

Types of Drip Emails You Should Know About

There are many types of drip emails to choose from and by choosing the right ones for your audience, you can end up with a very successful email campaign. On the other hand, if you choose certain types of drip emails that don't resonate well with your audience, you may have to change up your campaign in order to see any progress. However, there is one type of drip email that works for everyone, regardless of your audience: welcome emails.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that you only need one welcome email once a customer signs up for a subscription or joins your email list. However, this belief is not correct at all. Customers like to feel welcomed and at home once they embrace and become a part of your brand.

With one welcome email, you can introduce your customers to what your brand has to offer on the surface. However, by breaking up your welcome email into several emails that you send throughout the week, you can include even more information and unique discounts. And by making these welcome emails feel personal, you are more likely to have higher conversion rates right away.

Throughout your welcome emails, you may offer your customers exclusive information such as blog posts that haven't been published on your site yet. Or, you may give them a sneak-peak of your eBook or other projects. Of course, you should never forget to introduce yourself and your brand so that your customers have a better connection with your company.

You should make sure that your welcome emails are some of the most well-crafted emails you can manage. This is because most people tend to read welcome emails more than any other kind of drip email, so be sure to create a good impression.

Onboarding Emails

You can think of onboarding emails as an upgrade from welcome emails. After all, welcome emails will only get you so far. It wouldn't make sense to keep sending out welcome emails once your customers have already been familiar with your brand for a week or two.

So, after your welcome emails have run out, you can start sending out onboarding emails. This email type is great because it can keep the hype of welcome emails going and it will prevent your customers from forgetting about you. Onboarding emails are different than welcome emails in that they start to offer your customers more in-depth information and better deals.

For example, if someone has joined your subscription list, you will want to tell them everything they can do with their subscription. Explain how being a subscriber is so much better and offers so much more compared to those who are not yet subscribed to your brand. This will motivate your potential customers to explore their options on your site.

Onboarding emails can also give your customers a better idea of where to get started. This is especially true if you have a large website. Your customers might not know where to start exploring and onboarding emails can act as a guide.

Re-engagement Emails

At a certain point, there may be a gap between your drip emails. And within this gap, there will be the chance that some of your customers will forget about your brand. You may notice that a certain chunk of your audience is no longer buying your products or services or even visiting your website.

To fix this problem, you can try re-engagement emails. Re-engagement emails have to be powerful enough to reignite the spark of interest that your customers initially had for your brand. A great way to do this is to offer a big discount in your re-engagement emails.

But a big discount alone might not do the trick. Your follow-up re-engagement email might remind your customers that the discount is only for a limited time. By enticing your customers in various ways, you can almost always get through to them with enough time and persistence.

You can even use re-engagement emails even if your customers are still interested in your brand. After all, these emails can only increase customer interest.

Everything You Need to Know About Drip Email Campaigns

If you are unsure how to re-engage your customers, drip email campaigns are what you need. They can keep your customers interested and they can reel them back in if they have lost interest. Ultimately, they can make sure that your customers are always interested.

To learn more, contact us here.