Why should I create a drip marketing campaign?

A successful drip marketing campaign will build brand awareness, educate recipients on the brand and products, grow the business-customer relationship, or whatever your goal may be. 

Often times, a drip marketing campaign is begun after a specific trigger or need has been met by the email recipient, a visitor to a site signs up for emails, an application is filled out (ex. loan, degree program), someone reaches a new level (ex. credit score, cruise line membership).  A drip campaign can also be initiated by a marketer to target a specific list of people.  The appeal of a drip campaign is that much of it is an automated process, which allows greater flexibility for the point of entry and a high degree of relevancy because it is based on each recipient’s action or inaction. 

What is my goal and what type of campaign should I use?

Before deciding what type of drip campaign to create, you should first clearly define your goal and how it will be measured.  This is essential because each email in your campaign should have a concise message with a clear call to action (CTA). After defining these, the next step is to make a plan – decide whether you’re going to use a linear or multi-layered campaign.

Linear Campaigns have a straight path from point of entry in to the campaign to point of completion.  The point of completion may be when all emails have been sent, or when a contact has fulfilled your set goal (making a purchase, filling out a profile center after opt-in in to a list, etc.).

Example linear campaign goals:

• Encourage pre-purchases of a new product before official release
• Driving traffic to website to complete a profile center
• Encourage sign-up for an affiliate newsletter

Linear campaigns are straight forward and easier to plan than a multi-layered campaign.  They’re a great way to maintain the relationship with contacts at an individual level since  recipients can enter the campaign at any time.

Multi-Layered Campaign means that if a recipient takes action, like clicking through a link, they deviate from the initial path and will receive a different subsequent email.  They may return to the initial path along the way, it simply depends on the message map that you have created. 

Conditions for your campaign may be implicit (recipient does not use a unique coupon code, you remind them to use it) or explicit (filling out “yes” to a survey directs them down a different path, answering no means they continue on the initial path).  The advantage of using conditions like these is that they enable you to segment and target recipients on an even more granular level either during the drip campaign or in a subsequent campaign. 

Create a Message Map and Content Buckets

When it comes to e-communication, content is king.  Your message, your delivery, and your CTA have to be relevant, easy to understand, and position you as a leader in your industry.  The overall message of your campaign needs to be clear with each subsequent email supporting that original message without being redundant. You want to drip your message to recipients; you don’t want to turn a hose on them.

After setting goals and deciding what type of drip marketing campaign to use, the next step is to create a message map and content buckets. Your message map should clearly define the flow of each email message, the frequency and timing of each message’s deployment, and various paths if using a multi-layer campaign. Each email will need a CTA that corresponds with a defined action that you want the recipient to take. Content buckets will help to clarify what the overarching message is that should be present in all emails, while specifying what the specific message and tone of each individual email will be.

Benchmarking and Reporting

When your campaign is ready for deployment, before launching, you’ll want to create a benchmark report.  This is very important because without one, it will be very difficult to measure the success of the campaign and you will have no comparative reports.  How you measure success will depend on your goals and business model - whether you want to track revenue, cost per email sent, opens, clicks, visitors to a specific page, etc.  Depending on the time period of the campaign, you may want to report on your stats on an on-going basis so that any necessary adjustments may be made along the way.

After the campaign has completed, be sure to look at the results on both a macro and micro level.  Maybe the overall campaign was successful but you would have liked to have seen a high number of pre-purchases for the new product.  Or vise versa, the ROI is high but the engagement rate was lower than expected.  Again, depending on your specific goals, what qualifies a drip campaign as a success will vary.   

Interpreting your results so that you’re able to make suggestions for future improvements is essential.  You may decide that your linear campaign would benefit from adding layers, or that your multi-layered campaign would be more efficient with fewer deviations.  Whatever the result of your campaign, the key is to create an even more successful one from what you have learned.
Though creating a drip campaign may require an initial investment in the beginning, by streamlining and optimizing the process, you’ll maximize efficiency and ROI.  You may even find that your drip campaign is your most effective one because you are able to tweak and improve it at any stage.

Lyris account management team, services and support is here to help you be successful with your email marketing campaigns. We work with you to get the very best results!

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Need some more tips on related topics? Check out our Best Practices on Automation webinar recording presented by our SVP Customer Success, Nello Franco and download the white paper: Improve ROI Without Lifting a Finger 2011.

About the Author

Elyanna Snyder is an Account Manager at Lyris.