Before the starting this amazing guide “A Step by Step Guide to Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign” We should know basic about Email Marketing and Drip Marketing.
Email Marketing is needed if you want to make a relationship with your audience or customers. It is great marketing tool which has good potential at low cost. If you are a beginner in marketing or a beginner blogger and you don’t want to invest money then you can start with MailChimp which give 12000 email per month. Here is a tutorial “How to Manage Your Email List Professionally Using MailChimp“. But you don’t get Drip Email marketing feature at MailChimp free version. If you want to do Drip Email Marketing you should start with another platform.
Let’s start with a definition, what is Drip Marketing?
Before starting the Drip Email Marketing, You must have a website and some pages or a blog because you may be sent e-book, free guide. free magazine, or free tutorial through Drip email marketing campaign and redirect the users. If you do not have a running website right now, You can start a free blog site by WordPress. Here is a guide “How to Start a Blog: Step-by-Step Guide to Start Blogging with Free Hosted Blog“.
Well, I am considering you have a website and I am going to explain step by step through below guide “A Step by Step Guide to Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign”
Step 1 (Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign): Set up Campaign Goal
Be real and specific! Set up one specific goal, use relevant Marketing tool and achieve your goal. Before setting up your Campaign just think about others why they choose Drip Email Marketing Campaign? Here below some points
- According to Lead Nurturing, You can target the prospects via email nurturing campaigns with relevant content based on your audiences.
- You could bring more visits to your blog/website and You may Increase subscription and your website Ranking.
- You can improve your chance to conversation via sending welcome email, free courses, and etc
- You can re-engage with the users who were lost in the purchase. And you could also improve your sells through Recommendations, Abandonment or shopping cart, renewals emails.
Step 2 (Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign): Segmenting Your Target Audience
Your audience is your everything and plans your product and service according to your audience. “Segmenting your Target Audience” means dividing your audience for better communication. So, you have to segment your target audience into four categories: Drip email campaigns or behavioral email campaigns are all about creating segments
- Action/Event (Eg: User filled up the form to download the product brochure or a free guide)
- Attribute (Eg: Age, Gender, Occupation etc based on details submitted by the user)
- Email (Eg: Invite to download the Free Guide sent, follow us on social media email opened or did not open etc)
- Page (Eg: User came to your product page)
Let’s take an example my campaign goal, I am running a drip email marketing campaign and send free Digital marketing study materials and free E-book. And on my website, any individual who fills out the form like Query form, Optin chat, subscribe my newsletter for the free course they can be a marketing professional, a sales individual, an entrepreneur or maybe a student. The main motive of my email marketing is selling service via Affiliate Marketing.
Step 3 (Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign): Create Work Flow Of Action
Any good email marketing campaign has a priority of content and it sends on the basis of work flow model. This work flow of action is a communication strategy with your audience, and it creates a huge engagement. In this step, you get an overview of the work flow of action how to think and understand the user’s behavior and actions.
Some Guidelines:
You can plan your campaign through creating a flow chart of all actions of users. That flow chart structure based on email’s activity like opened/clicked/not opened. Do keep in mind, below points:
- Pre-ready your Email content which you would send to your users
- Understand what kind of information will be required at each stage
- Properly plan your communication time, it does matter. And how much time should take at each stage?
For example Here is a generic flow chart
Step 4 (Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign): Design Your Emails (Content Strategy)
In any marketing campaign, the main factor of success is content. Everyone knows that “Content is King”. So, Write Relevant and effective email content for campaign success. You should take a time to write crisp and amazing content for each action. Don’t bore them! communicate with them point to point and make interest. This communication could the based on your business type and action. Here below some categories of email Communication:
- Top of Mind: Education the user, build trust worthiness to ensure that when they are ready to buy the product they BUY IT FROM YOU!
- Promotional: Entice user with special offers/discounts. Creating an urgency to perform a specific action immediately.
- Training: Does your product requires some knowledge or research work to be done in advance. Provide your user with further explanation, motivating them how the product will help them to achieve desired goals.
- Re-engagement: These can be the cold leads, who have lost interest in your product. Maybe they tried the free version of your product and did not like it. Sending email campaign to re engage with them and melt the ice.
Every Markere/Blogger passionate for high conversion and most of the Marketer/Blogger prefers Email Marketing. Some are using plain text email it is a great content strategy. So You can plan your content like as:
- The call to action button matters most and you have to place at that location where it captures the user attention.
- Headlines are also an another most important that matter for the high open rate of emails.
- Be clear about the types of emails and create content according to your business. You can use normal images or if your company is product based then you can use GIF images.
Step 5 (Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign): Get Started With A Drip Email Marketing Tool
Now your goal has been ready, your flow chart has been chart has ready, and your content has been ready. So get started with a Tool for Drip Email Marketing. I would prefer to Customer.io because it is best for Behavioral Marketing. You can create a free Account.
Step 6 (Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign): Start With Creating Segment
The Segment will be based on your communication what kind action performed by users on your site. So Start creating segments on clicking Segment tab and then “Create Segment”.
You can start with creating the conditions for segmenting. Like I have for My own website in the below image, which is targeting people who visited the home page.
You can create the segments based on:
- Attributes: Form filled by the user
- Event: Action performed by the user. For eg: Submitted a form, started a free trial etc
- Page: Specific Page visited by the user
- Email: For Eg: Specific email been sent/clicked or opened
It’s based on your end objective that you can segment your audience. Also, you can add multiple conditions to create a more personalized communication.
STEP 7 (Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign): SETTING UP EMAIL TRIGGERS
Go to Triggered from the left panel and create triggered and then start by naming your campaign. Just put a simple name to recall easily. This is the major step of creating email triggers for each segment. You can set up a segment driven campaign to the user who will enter a specific segment or on the basis of user action.
Based on the segment you want to send the email, you can create the segment filter.
Start with the setting up the email workflow.
Three major elements of your email are:
- From Name: Use something to which the users can relate and recognize you. Use Code:
- Subject: Depending upon your objective, set your subject line. For a promotional email, using a creative and non-traditional subject line will work. Whereas, for an educational / training email a more clear and simple subject line works.
- Email body: Keep the email body crisp and yet descriptive enough that it clearly states out what you want to communicate to the user. You need to ensure that your emails motivate the users to perform the action desired by you.
You can add multiple emails to the same campaign by clicking on the “Add Button”.
In the Email Marketing, Communication too frequently and not communicating at right time will affect the actions. So You should plan the email sending time. You can modify the email deliverability and set time according to the sales cycle. It’s needed to set initial set of emails on the base of your user understanding and depending upon campaign performance.
It is must to analyze the campaign and understand its effectiveness. You can work up on setting up of Goals on moving forward.
On moving forward, all you need to do is “Review” and “Start Campaign’. Your campaign is live!
Step 8 (Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign): Tweaking And Analysing Your Campaigns
After setting all basic things and make your campaign live then You must check the performance of the campaign. Following some guidelines will help you with analyzing the campaign performance:
- The email content should be catchy and enough that user feels glad and take actions,
- Make the complete and easy process to generate conversions, and
- Review campaign conversion rate and matrix like click rate, open rate, bounce rate etc.
Conclusion
I have touched all the required point through the guide “A Step by Step Guide to Create Drip Email Marketing Campaign“. Email marketing is not title thing but it’s a great marketing tool that has huge potential. You should learn more about Drip Email Marketing and apply it.