From recovering abandoned carts to winning back inactive high-value shoppers, when it comes to persuading consumers, drip campaigns are a must-have. A drip campaign is a series of automated marketing emails sent on a predefined schedule to email subscribers. The aim of a drip campaign is to get recipients to make a purchase.
Drip campaigns generate better results than sending a single email. For instance, customers that receive abandoned basket emails shop 2.4x more compared to ones that don’t. However, creating a winning drip email campaign can be daunting. So in this article, we drop four tips to help you write better email drips.
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Have a Solid Framework
You can’t just slap a couple of emails together and expect high conversion rates from your drip campaign. You need a solid framework to get great results. Below are some foundational tips to help you get started.
Message Goal: Identify your message goal, including what you want to achieve, what you want to communicate, and the specific action you want subscribers to take after receiving your email. Being clear with your goal and purpose will help you develop a strong message and create a clear, powerful call to action.
Frequency: Send too little emails and customers might miss a sale. Send too many and risk being tagged as spam. Determine the right sending frequency for your emails by using complaint data and rigorously mapping your customer journey. Also, set up an email preference center to inform your sending strategy, vary frequency by subscriber to improve the relevance of your emails, and test different frequencies against your segments.
Choose Triggers: When building a drip campaign, you need an email trigger. A trigger is an action carried out by your subscribers that leads to another act. For example: If a subscriber joins your email list, this event could trigger a welcome email.
To increase conversions, choose high-value triggers using quality and intent as a yardstick. For instance, an abandoned cart is a high-value trigger because it’s an event that happens all the time and is likely to lead to a purchase. On the other hand, a birthday email is a low-value trigger as it’s a yearly event.
Nail Your Content
The foundation of your drip campaign is your content, and how it’s presented can determine failure or success. Here are some things to keep in mind when creating content for your drip campaign:
Establish Relevance: Ensure your content builds up in a way that fits into the natural progression of your drip email and aligns with where customers are in their journey. Arrange your emails in a way that prioritizes important calls to action, create a coherent story and use language that meets customers where they are in the buyer’s journey like Bonobos.
This email acknowledges the subscriber’s reduced engagement with some emotionally playful copy and includes a CTA that matches the message.
Use Dynamic Content:Use dynamic content to send campaigns to targeted groups of customers based on their interests and preferences. You can present content based on data about your customers such as demographics, preference, or email data-clicks, opens and views. Online catalog retailer UncommonGood sends personalized emails to customers based on their preferences.
To nail this strategy, make sure you have accurate customer personas and that subscriber profiles are up to date, define elements that will be dynamic, map out your customer journey, and consider combining dynamic content with interactive content.
Use Segmentation
As with clothing, when it comes to email: one size doesn’t fit all. Segmentation is important to help you build targeted content and provide a more personalized experience for your subscribers. The open rate of segmented emails is 14% higher than that of non-segmented campaigns. Below are some tips to help you get #winningresults with segmentation:
Determine Your Important Segments: Determine key segments for your email program and create personalized emails that solve one or more of their problems. While your segments should consist of cart abandoners, new customers, and inactive high-value customers, prioritize segments according to their value. Consider segmenting your VIP or highly engaged email recipients so that you can send them more aggressive promotions and incentives.
Select Behaviors That Define Your Segment: Splitting segments based on behaviors allows you to predict future behavior and be more effective with your communications. Some examples of behaviors that you can use to create segments include:
- Filling a shopping cart but not completing a purchase
- Browsing products but then leaving the site
- Completing first purchase
Articulate your business goals and create segments that will prove meaningful in this context. You can track behaviors using email activity, payment integration, or video analytics and route them into the right segment.
Leverage Data: Email addresses aren’t enough data to segment customers by. Leverage data from various touchpoints including your automation systems, website, social media, and CRM to understand consumer behavior and create a more detailed picture of your audience’s interactions and interests.
Remember Copywriting 101
Whether you’re hiring a copywriter to handle your email campaigns or doing it yourself, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Use tried and trusted copywriting techniques in writing your drip emails. Below are three copywriting techniques to cross-check off your list:
Leverage Emotions: Include “feelings” into your drip campaign to connect with consumers and get them to take action after reading your email. You can choose from feelings of belonging, hope, greed, lust, vanity, lust and guilt. Cosmetics retailer Lush’s welcome email evokes feelings of belonging.
Whichever emotion you go with, make sure it’s woven into other design aspects of your email and aligned with your campaign goals.
Use Customer Language: Ditch the corporate jargon and speak like your customers when writing your email. Personalize your messaging by using words and phrases consistent with the language of your audience and conversational words like “you” and “your”. Be sure to carry the voice and personality of your brand into your messages.
Use P.S.: P.S. remains a popular direct mail marketing tactic that has made its way to email copy. Use P.S. in your email drip campaign to tease the next email you’ll send, create urgency, or introduce an offer. For example:
“P.S. Don’t forget to claim this offer before time runs out! Offer is valid until XYZ.”
If your branding tone includes wittiness, consider using P.S. to inject some humor into your campaign.
Done correctly, drip campaigns can be the magic wand that increases your sales and ROI. Avoid a ‘set it and forget it’ mindset when it comes to drip campaigns. A/B test your campaigns, measure segment or subscriber activity over time to get a clearer view, and establish a maintenance schedule for your emails.