Bringing your brand into your customers' daily lives
Are you earning $40 back on every $1 you spend? If not, you probably have not started drip marketing — an automated email strategy. Drip marketing runs on autoresponders at very low cost. You set up a series of email campaigns in advance and they go out on their own. It builds your relationship with customers for minimal ongoing effort: with a reliable email service provider behind you, all you need is a plan, and the campaign drips into the market by itself, growing your margin as it goes.
Here is how four organisations used drip marketing to lift both revenue and engagement.
Turning prospects into opportunities
1. Property company — Kurtis and Cindy Squyres (KCS)
KCS’s drip strategy sends 21 autoresponder emails to new customers. New subscribers receive a welcome email and daily emails in the first few days after subscribing, then move to a promotional email every 2–8 days. KCS set two goals and used the autoresponder sequence to hit both.
Building the customer relationship
The first email introduces the history of the business and the services offered, and states clearly what information the subscriber will receive. It then delivers something genuinely useful — a tool a subscriber can use to calculate return on investment, for instance. Through these emails, KCS successfully built a relationship with its customers.
Understanding needs and segmenting
KCS also sent two surveys to subscribers to understand their needs, with three autoresponder emails configured to fire based on the answers. Using those responses, KCS was able to sort subscribers into target segments and send each one relevant messaging.
The result
In the end, 90% of the properties were bought by subscribers. Segmentation also allowed KCS to run workshops and send educational material to specific groups, further increasing loyalty and sales.
Abandoned carts
SC’s drip strategy has three parts: an email immediately after a user views the cart; a discount email 23 hours later; and, if there is still no action, a larger discount after four days.
The first two emails drove an open rate of over 50%, with the first achieving a 28% click rate and the second 16%; the final email achieved 6%. In other words, the drip campaign brought prospects back to SC’s cart.
Membership renewals
- Visual Art Exchange (VAE)
Through automated campaigns, VAE combined triggered emails with an online renewal form to encourage members to renew, and saw both renewals and revenue rise substantially. To lift online renewals it configured autoresponder emails to fire automatically before and after membership expiry. These campaigns drove a 54% open rate and a 15% click rate, and more importantly, renewals rose 20% against previous records.
Beyond the drip strategy, VAE also invested in the email design itself, building a call-to-action button that guides members to the online renewal form. The form contains fewer than 12 questions plus online payment, so the whole renewal can be completed online. VAE used the online form service provided by its email service provider, so all the data lands in one place.
- The North Carolina Board of Examiners of Electrical Contractors (NCBEEC)
NCBEEC also benefited from drip marketing, sending personalised, automated emails two months before membership expiry. That campaign drove a 46% open rate and a 39% click rate, and lifted renewals by 20% against previous records.
NCBEEC also handled bounced emails manually, contacting those users and then running a second campaign. Beyond recovering updated addresses, that campaign drove a 51% open rate and a 47% click rate, with 50% of readers renewing membership by email. Automated drip marketing dramatically reduced the cost of staying in touch with existing members.
These case studies show drip marketing raising revenue effectively at low cost. With the right strategy and the right email technology behind it, drip marketing can cut costs by 33% and lift sales by 50%. Triggered emails can even raise open rates by over 50% and lift conversion by over 350%.