What are the key drip campaign best practices? To help you best conduct your drip campaigns effectively, we asked marketing professionals and business leaders this question for their best advice.

From segmenting your target audience to sending emails that add value to the recipient, there are several pieces of advice that should serve as your best practices for conducting successful drip campaigns that bring in more leads.

Drip campaign best practices

Here are 14 drip campaign best practices these leaders follow to increase leads:

1. Segment your target audience
2. Personalize your message and include a clear call to action (CTA)
3. Make use of the yes ladder
4. Send birthday and anniversary emails
5. Keep drip emails short and to the point
6. Test different lengths of time for each message
7. Use an appropriate drip software according to your needs
8. Resend emails to non-openers with a new subject line
9. Determine triggers accurately
10. Stay consistent
11. Time your emails right and make them engaging
12. Know your audience and speak to their experience
13. Write each email short and concise with a clear message
14. Send emails that add value to the recipient

Segment your target audience

You want to personalize your email marketing as much as possible. The best way to do this is in the intake form on your website or a landing page. Ask two or three qualifying questions that will help segment your list.

Don’t ask more than three questions.

Keep it simple. For instance, a business that sells online parenting classes offers a free webinar. In their intake form, they ask how many kids they have and their ages. Obviously, parenting classes for kids under 9 will be different from those for tweens and teens.

Therefore, you can market the right class to a parent and have a better chance of getting a positive response. So, think about your target audiences and how you can segment your list so it makes sense to them. Then you can walk them through their buying journey with an effective drip campaign.

Giselle Aguiar, AZ Social Media Wiz

Personalize your message and include a clear CTA

One of the most important drip campaign best practices is to make sure your campaign has a clear call to action. If people aren’t sure what you want them to do after opening your email, they are likely to not do anything.

This can really hurt the effectiveness of your campaign, so you want to avoid this at all costs. You also want to make sure your drip campaigns are personalized as much as possible. This means using the recipient’s first name and making sure the content is targeted specifically for them.

This will increase opens and click-through rates, which will help improve the overall effectiveness of your campaign.

Curran Van Waarde, CallScaler

Make use of the yes ladder

When using drip campaigns to get a user to take actions like booking a demo, making a purchase, or converting from free to paid, one tactic that can help improve conversions is to make use of the “yes ladder.”

What you’re looking to do is to get your prospect to say “yes” to your end goal/big ask by getting them to say “yes” to much smaller, trivial asks that you’re confident your prospect will say “yes” to. With each “yes” your prospect responds with, the more likely they are to say “yes” when it comes to the big ask.

Essentially, you need to identify your end goal – this is the top of your ladder (and subsequently the last email in your drip sequence).

You then want to work backwards, with each email in your drip campaign having the purpose of building the rungs to your ladder. This is done by making sure there’s some type of ask that will get your prospect to say “yes” to. Because forward inertia is key, it’s critical that you get your first “yes” in your initial drip email.

Josh Brown, Helpjuice

Send birthday and anniversary emails

I found anniversary and birthday emails are some of the best ways when it comes to drip campaign best practices. As they let buyers know that we care for them. Also as per the statistics, birthday emails have a 481% higher transaction rate and 179% higher unique click rates than promotional emails.

I always recommend adding an extra field on your sign-up forms as it helps you acquire this information. Sending birthday or anniversary emails with appealing texts along with a small discount as a present/gift for the next purchase always leaves clients happy and suffice.

Hima Pujara, BugRaptors

Keep drip emails short and to the point

This might be an unpopular viewpoint, but my drip campaign emails are very short.  And the emails look as if they are coming from my personal account.

I treat every email as if I’m writing to a friend (often I am) and I tell them what I’m sending, why I think they will appreciate it and provide a link.

I’ve been following this format for the last year and have seen an increase in click rates from as low as 1% to as high as 5%.

Ivana Taylor, DIYMarketers

Test different lengths of time for each message

One of the more strategic drip campaign best practices is to test different lengths of time for each message. You might find that your subscribers respond better to messages that are sent more frequently, or that they prefer a longer gap between each message.

When you’re testing, be sure to include a control group – a group of subscribers who receive the same number of emails as your test groups, but at regular intervals.

When you’re testing your drip campaign, don’t forget that there are many factors that could affect the results. For example, if your product has been featured in the media recently, it may get more clicks than usual. If one particular person in your company is more active on social media than others, they may be included in every test group and skew the results towards one outcome or another. Make sure you account for these factors when analyzing your results!

Benjamin Basic, Fast Food Menu Prices

Use an appropriate drip software according to your needs

Welcome aboard if you’ve chosen the drip campaign tool you’re going to use if you’re reading this. However, if you are weighing your alternatives, you should choose the one that has all the characteristics you require for your campaigns.

A good email automation tool should offer a number of essential capabilities so that you can build up your email sequence properly. While email customization tools enable you to adjust your emails in accordance with various data, list segmentation makes it simpler to target various demographic groups within your target audience. Setting up a drip campaign involves many different steps, including determining the best time to send emails based on the campaign plan.

Michael Garrico, Total Shape

Resend emails to non-openers with a new subject line

For most drip campaigns, less than half of your recipients open your emails, meaning the majority of your target audience never sees the content in the email itself. Consider re-sending emails to people who didn’t open the first time with a new subject line.

Not only does this increase the overall number of people who see your email content, you’ll also learn what types of subject lines are more likely to result in opens.

Peter Zawistowicz, Pace

Determine triggers accurately

Determining triggers accurately can help implement a successful drip campaign. Triggers serve as a signal for automated emails to start. For instance, ecommerce businesses, like home appliance online stores, utilize abandoned cart emails.

Sending automated abandoned cart emails is triggered when a potential customer adds items to the shopping cart and leaves the website without checking out. This best practice helps reduce abandoned cart rates and boost sales.

Robert Johnson, Coast Appliances

Stay consistent

Staying consistent while not being overbearing is the key to converting customers with a drip campaign. A good practice to implement with a drip campaign is having an automatic email to be sent within 24 hours.

Having a follow up email reminding customers of their abandoned cart within the first day will make sure it stays fresh on their mind.

If the customer isn’t converted with the follow up email, having a third email sent by the end of week with a discount offer could do the trick. Making sure to stay consistent will ensure you are able to have an effective campaign.

Charles Tichenor IV, Disrupter School

Time your emails right and make them engaging 

Decide first how often and at what intervals you want to send emails. Depending on the campaign kind, this will happen. With fresh leads, you need to follow up right away, however, with subscribers, newsletters can be delivered weekly or monthly.

Your email’s content must be pertinent, interesting, and succinct.

Per the email, stick to one subject and avoid overusing links, attachments, and CTAs. Add a few well-selected images to the emails to make them bright and engaging. Not sending too many emails to your list is one of the most important drip campaign best practices to keep in mind.

Generally speaking, it’s preferable to space out for a few days. You must also take into account the best days and times to send, which may depend on the schedules and time zones of your recipients.

Richard Harless, AZ Flat Fee

Know your audience and speak to their experience

Consumers are becoming more and more savvy and know when they are being marketed to. My advice is to incorporate personalisation techniques into your strategy to engage the attention of the reader.

For example, speak to the consumer’s personal experiences with your company, such as past purchases. Educate yourself as to why your customer bought your product. Perhaps it was for a gift? If so, they may be likely to buy your product again at the same time of year in the future.

To do this, segment your email list with this criteria. Then set up a drip campaign addressing them directly and speaking to their past purchase. Schedule the campaign to send at the same time the following year to encourage another purchase.

From my experience, consumers are likely to respond positively to your drip campaign when it is addressing them directly, and speaking to their personal experiences with your company.

Taleisha Barker, Flowers Across Brisbane

Make each email short and concise with a clear message

A drip campaign’s beauty is that you naturally don’t need to cram a lot of information into each email. You may distribute information throughout the email series using the built-in formatting.

Profit from that.

The likelihood that your audience will interact with your content is increased by concise paragraphs, a brief email overall, and a clear message. Your email receivers will lose interest in your message if it has lengthy paragraphs and rambling tales that don’t get to the point.

Amit Biwaal, Amit Biwaal

Send emails that add value to the recipient

When it comes to drip campaigns, one best practice is ensuring that each email in the campaign adds value to the recipient. This could mean providing helpful information, offering a discount or special offer, or simply reminding the recipient of your product or service.

Start with the subject line. It is the first thing that a recipient will see, so it’s important to make it count. Keep it short and to the point, and make sure it’s relevant to the rest of the email. Personalize your message as much as possible. Include the recipient’s name in the subject line and throughout the email.

Providing educational content leads to customer satisfaction. If you can solve a problem that your recipient is facing, they will be more likely to remember your product or service the next time they need it. Whatever the case, each email should provide some value to the reader to encourage them to continue reading and engaging with your brand.

Erik Emanuelli, ErikEmanuelli.com

Closing thoughts on drip campaign best practices

With their relative ease to launch and high return on investment, drip campaigns are fast becoming a must-have for any online venture. But it’s important to avoid firing off messages willy nilly. Hopefully, our list of drip campaign best practices can help you get the most from this powerful strategy.