Wouldn’t it be nice to have the tedious process of nurturing leads to a sales-ready state automated for you? Your emails to leads would always be relevant, your sales pipeline would have fewer leaks, and you would have more time to focus on projects that matter. Sounds pretty good right? Well drip marketing campaigns do all of that and more for marketing and sales teams everyday.
Drip campaigns are automated processes that send a set of messages or content to sales leads at the right moment to move them through the sales cycle. Drip campaigns allow you to consistently “touch” leads with relevant information based on time intervals, actions taken by prospects on your website, or other parameters, freeing up valuable marketing and sales resources without neglecting your prospects
Want a deeper look at drip marketing? We’ve put together the infographic below to showcase just a piece of what you can do with drip campaigns. Review several popular types of drip campaigns, hone your skills with best practices, and see for yourself what a drip campaign can do with an illustrated example. Take a look!
Infographic Text Version
The Basics of Drip Campaigns
Benefits, Examples, and Best Practices for Nurturing Your Leads
Drip nurturing is the process of automatically “dripping” relevant information, usually via email, to sales leads over a period of time, based either on user action or a predefined time interval.
Benefits of Drip Campaigns
Timely Information
Be relevant: deliver the right information, exactly when your users need it. The content delivered through drip programs is triggered by how a user is interacting with your brand and where they are in the sales cycle.
Lead Nurturing
Create leads: drip marketing nurtures early stage leads until they are sales ready. Drip campaigns can provide your sales team with a continuous supply of leads that are ready to close, maximizing marketing and sales effectiveness.
Easy Automation
Work smarter: automate the most tedious part of the sales process by allowing drip campaigns to educate and nurture your leads for you. Spend less time pitching your product and more time closing deals.
Types of Drip Campaigns
Top-of-Mind Drips
Top-of-Mind drips help keep your leads engaged with your company throughout the sales process.
Educational Drips
Educational drips provide relevant product information to prospects to prepare them for purchase.
Re-engagement Drips
Re-engagement drips are designed to win back the interest of your colder leads.
Competitive Drips
Competitive drips target your competitor’s customers with the benefits of switching to your product.
Promotional Drips
Promotional drips entice prospects with limited-run promotions and special pricing offers.
Training Drips
Training drips can be used for new clients or internally used to move readers through a training program.
Drip programs can be customized and tailored to an infinite number of different uses. Marketers are only limited by their creativity.
Example Drip Campaign
Drip campaigns can be employed to nurture prospects to a sales ready state automatically, with no involvement from a marketing or sales team. Below is an example of how this nurturing process could work.
Whitepaper: If opened, send e-book. If not opened, send Video.
E-book: if opened, send product demo. Once a prospect shows significant interest, you can schedule a personal call if meeting. If not opened, send a video overview. Provide lighter more engaging content to keep prospects interested in your product.
Video: if opened, send e-book: provide content for a deeper analysis of the product and its benefits. If not opened, end the drip. Remove unengaged prospects or add them to re-engagement campaigns to reach out later.
There are many different types of drip campaigns. The ex maple above merely illustrates one way in which drip campaigns can be used to nurture prospects. Drip campaigns can be easily customized for any purpose.
Best Practices
Target Your Campaigns
Tailor your campaigns so that they target each segment of your prospect list with precise, personal messages. The deeper your segmentation, the more personal your messages can be.
Design For Your Audience
Make it easy and painless for your prospects to express their preferences regarding frequency of messages, type of content they would like, and how they would like to receive that content.
Test, Test, and Test Again
Test your campaigns’ effectiveness and continually evaluate which aspects are working best. Review campaign goals, KPIs, and metrics like opens, click-throughs, and bounces.
Utilize Your Tools
Marketing automation tools also provide segmentation tools, social media connectors, analytics, and CRM integration that make using drip marketing campaigns even easier.
For more information about drip marketing, visit Pardot.com
Download this infographic.
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Excellent article. A drip campaign with quality content and relevant, interesting information will always be successful. Readers don’t mind getting emails from a trusted source.
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Thank you so much for your comment Steven. Sounds like you’ve had some success of your own with drip campaigns!
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Hey Matt, thanks for the article.
We are in the middle of planning out our drips. What are some suggestions for companies that don’t have a lot of content, and don’t want to be pushy with the sales and promotion emails.
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Great question Lori! If you don’t have a lot of original content, you can curate relevant content from other sources. Just pointing prospects in the direction of helpful content, even if it’s not yours, can help establish you as a thought leader!
Pardot also allows you to control the number of emails your prospects can receive in a given time period so you never come off as pushy.
If you are looking for some help with your drip campaigns, you can also attend one of our free training webinars. There is a great session on drip campaigns next Tuesday! You can sign up here: https://www.pardot.com/training
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Hey Matt,
I’ve taken that training course, and it’s great for the technical on how to do it, I’m not worried about that – Pardot makes that easy.
I’m looking more on the “strategy” of the drips – when to send which type of email to a specific person (visitor, prospect, prospect who has already spoken to a sales rep, closed lost prospect etc.)
I saw the webinar “Guide to Killer Drips”, and this was really good, do you recommend anything else along this same line?
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Lori,
I’m so glad you found the webinar useful! “Guide to Killer Drips” is certainly one of the best strategy resources we have out there.
Your client advocate here at Pardot is also a tremendous resource for putting a strategy into place. They’re here to help in any way they can.
We also have some more content coming soon that is focused on the strategy behind drips so I’ll keep you posted!
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Hi Matt,
Anything else been put together on strategy yet? I agree with Lori, this would be most helpful 🙂
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Thanks for the comment Senya! The “Guide to Killer Drips” is still a favorite in terms of strategy. We also ran a webinar recently title “The Very Versatile Drip” which received some great feedback and could be helpful. We also published a case study on Monday that is worth a look!
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Hey Matt, what’s the difference between a DRIP and a TRIGGERED campaign, particularly in regards to using PARDOT? These terms seem to be interchanged all over the Internet. What gives? Thanks! Colleen
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Great question Colleen. This is just my understanding so I could be wrong, but I believe triggered campaigns are usually just one email. For example, you could have a triggered email that is sent on a customer’s birthday or when renewal time comes around.
Drip campaigns are comprised of multiple emails triggered by time or user action. So you could have a renewal drip that reminds a customer every week to renew, and stops reminding them or suggests an upgrade when they DO renew. Pretty cool right? 🙂