Learn about email and text message drip campaigns and get 10 templates that you can make your own.

With nearly 4 billion smartphone users across the planet and 95% of texts being opened within three minutes, it’s easy to see that text messaging has taken over. And local businesses have picked up on it. But it doesn’t mean email has become outdated. Email remains one of the major communication channels.

But how can you make sure the right customers get the right marketing messages at the right times without increasing the workload for your team? Many small businesses are turning to text and email drip campaigns.

Read on for 10 text message and email drip campaign ideas that you can make your own and how automated messaging can strengthen your customer relationships, increase ROI, and take your business to the next level.

What is a drip campaign?

A drip campaign is a marketing strategy that centers around a time-released set of automated email or text messages. This kind of campaign is cued by specific triggers (like signing up for a newsletter or clicking on a call to action on your site). These campaigns are designed to establish and maintain engagement by sending the right message to the right people at the right time—all without burning out your staff.

You can send these messages via email or text. Text messages are often a better option than email because of their high open rate. If you choose to run an SMS drip campaign, there are many rules to keep in mind.

As a rule of thumb, text messages sent in drip campaigns are usually 160 characters or less and require prior permission from your customers to send. They can include several multimedia elements such as pictures, videos, GIFs, and links, and senders must abide by their country’s rules and regulations.

A key factor in making a text marketing campaign successful is segmentation—grouping your customer records into lists that share an attribute or characteristic (behavioral, demographic, geographic, psychographic, and technographic) that aligns well with specific targeted messages. Even a little segmentation can increase customer loyalty, decrease your opt-out rate, and significantly increase revenue. To start segmenting, check out “Increasing SMS Engagement.”

Collecting opt-ins for your text message marketing campaigns is also critical. How do you turn interactions into opt-ins? The secret is to integrate opt-in entry points at every possible step of your customer journey. There are many touch points where collecting an opt-in is natural, and even expected. If you take advantage of them, your list will build itself. To learn how to collect opt-ins, check out “Growing Your Opt-in List.”

Drip Campaign Benefits

There are many pros to including drip campaigns in your marketing strategies. Here are some of the perks your business can take advantage of.

1. Personalized and Targeted Communication

Unlike mass texts and emails that are sent to everyone in a contact or email list, you can personalize every message you send to your subscribers. Segmentation can make this task easier. You can divide your customers into different groups based on demographics, location, shopping habits, and many other factors.

You can create and schedule drip messages based on your chosen segments. You can also make a drip campaign strategy that is triggered by particular actions like clicking an email link or signing up for free trials.

Personalized communication fosters a sense of connection and relevance, making recipients more likely to engage with the content and take a specific action.

2. Increased Conversion Rates

Some of your contacts may be looking to purchase the products or services that you offer. But, it’s also likely that they are still searching for other companies that offer the same services.

Drip campaigns can give your leads the push they need. You can answer their pressing questions, highlight your service or product’s benefits, and offer valuable information. And more often than not, emails or texts in the drip sequence have a call-to-action that encourages potential customers to finally take action.

When done right, drip campaigns will make it easier to move leads through marketing and sales funnels. As a result, you can get a boost in conversion rate and eventually increase sales.

3. Time and Resource Efficiency

Setting and running a drip campaign typically involves determining who you want to reach, the frequency of sending messages, creating content in advance, setting parameters for timing, and automating the rest of your campaign.

At the outset, drip campaigns will require time and effort. But after getting the content ready, scheduling the messages, and automating the process, all your team needs is to monitor the campaign.

You don’t have to spend your valuable time sending personalized emails manually to every lead or customer. Marketing automation will allow your business to save not just time but also valuable resources. Hence, your team can focus on the bigger picture.

4. Enhanced Customer Engagement and Relationship Building

Effective communication is one of the foundations of a strong relationship, whether personal or business-related. You need to be transparent with customers and responsive to their queries. Sending drip texts and emails to your potential customers will show that you care about them and can be useful when you’re trying to nurture leads early in the customer journey.

Tailoring every campaign to meet the pain points of your target audience will also help boost engagement, which improves customer relationships.

10 Drip Campaign Examples to Make Your Own

Creating an effective text and email marketing campaign for the first time can be challenging. Here are ten text and email drip campaign examples from known brands that you can use for inspiration:

1. Welcome Drip Campaign: Airbnb

You can send welcome emails and text messages to new subscribers after they join your contacts or make a purchase for the first time. The first welcome email you send to your subscribers should include an introduction to your brand and the expectations for future transactions.

You can include discounts or incentives in the next email. On the other hand, welcome messages to new customers often come with a note of gratitude for the purchase.

This campaign from Airbnb is one of the best welcome email drip campaign examples. When you make your place an Airbnb, you can create a short welcome message for new guests. Welcome messages are unique for each guest.

2. Abandoned Cart Recovery Drip Campaign: Nike

Some consumers add products to their carts but never complete the checkout process. They may just have forgotten about it or weren’t ready to make a purchase. Either way, sending abandoned cart emails and text messages can help drive them back to your site.

The best abandoned cart messages don’t feel too sales focused—they simply create a sense of urgency. Including discounts or coupon codes or limited-time offers can also help you get the result you want.

A great example of a cart abandonment email comes from Nike. Their subject line is: “Nike: Forget Something?”, which is straightforward and catchy. In the email, they include a link to the user’s cart, a discount code, free shipping offers. This shopping cart abandonment email is simple but it’s convincing enough to make the customer return to the Nike website.

3. Onboarding Drip Campaign: Slack

An onboarding drip sequence should provide value, engage leads, and encourage them to take action. It often covers welcome emails, but that’s not all. It can also include your product-onboarding emails and text.

The onboarding drip campaign used by Slack is a great example of this type of campaign. Slack is a cloud-based communication and collaboration tool that makes it easier for teams and departments to work together.

In their onboarding process, the company brings new subscribers through several onboarding steps in their browser. It is followed by a sequence of emails with calls to action on inviting other people to the workspace and downloading the Slack app.

If the user leaves the settings of the platform in default but still uses it for communication, they will receive emails about the messages they’ve received on the platform. These follow-up emails are a great way to keep new users engaged.

4. Educational Drip Campaign: Trello

Educational text and email drip campaigns often contain how-to instructions, guides, tips, advice, and videos on how to solve typical problems a certain group of customers face. It can position your brand as an industry expert and eventually help increase conversation.

Trello makes a great educational drip campaign. In the past holiday season, they carried out the campaign during the holiday season entitled Twelve Ways to Trello, which is a take on the twelve days of Christmas. The company sent education-focused emails for 12 days in December. Their emails are holiday-themed but all lead to Trello services.

5. Product Upsell Drip Campaign: Amazon

A drip campaign is often conducted with the hope of converting leads into customers. But you can also use it to offer other services or products to your existing customers or cross-selling and upselling.

Amazon’s product upsell drip campaign is an excellent example of this strategy. The email was sent automatically to customers who downloaded free content on Amazon’s Kindle. The email offered a free one-month Kindle Unlimited subscription and listed down easy-to-follow steps on how to claim this free trial.

6. Event Reminder Drip Campaign: Eventbrite

You can also use drip campaigns when hosting events. You can send messages to introduce your event and remind attendees of anything they must do before the event date, like registration. It’s a great way to build an attendee list and acquire contacts to join or register for the event.

Eventbrite does event reminder drip campaigns well. The platform automatically creates a reminder email on behalf of its clients. The platform has a dedicated page for managing attendees, which includes sending reminder emails. The platform takes care of everything, including generating the content of the email. But it still gives users a choice to edit or delete the email.

7. Re-engagement Drip Campaign: Spotify

It is ideal to run a re-engagement drip campaign if customers or subscribers are showing signs of churn. But before you can run this type of campaign, you have to know the reasons why your once-active customers have lost interest in your messages and business.

If you think you need to run this type of campaign, you can take inspiration from Spotify. To entice unsubscribed customers to return to the platform, Spotify offered a different pricing option to their recipients and discussed the benefits of subscribing to their plan. And like in any other campaign, the email includes a CTA.

8. Free Trial Conversion Drip Campaign: Salesforce

A free trial conversion drip campaign involves sending email or text messages to customers who sign up for a free trial and are already at the end of the trial period. It is a helpful strategy for converting individuals who have already shown interest in your service into paying customers. Your customers will also appreciate getting reminders for the end of their free trial.

Salesforce set up an email sequence to notify their free trial users before the trial period ends. The email is personalized, using the recipient’s first name, and has a friendly and helpful tone.

The first email the company sends goes for the soft sell to get users back into the product, while the following messages adopt a more direct tone.

9. Customer Loyalty Drip Campaign: Starbucks

As a small business, you’ll be competing with many other big brands out there. It could be challenging to have loyal customers. In this case, a customer loyalty drip campaign can help.

One of the companies that implement a successful loyalty program is Starbucks. The company sends a Starbucks Rewards email to customers, and each email is different in terms of layouts and headlines. The content is informative and visually appealing, answering the what, when, and how of their current loyalty programs.

10. Feedback Collection Drip Campaign: Uber

Feedback is crucial, especially for small businesses and startups. Feedback from your satisfied and not-so-satisfied customers will give you valuable data you can use to improve your products or services and customer experience.

Unfortunately, customers don’t always leave feedback after making a purchase. In many cases, customers need incentives to share their thoughts and experiences using your product or services and interacting with your business.

Running a feedback collection campaign is an effective way of getting customer reviews. You can also encourage your recipients to share their reviews on social media.

One of the companies that do feedback collection drip campaigns best is Uber. The company sends out surveys to gather feedback from top customers and drivers after their rides. The data they gather helps them prevent customer churn and improve their service.

Drip Campaign Tips & Best Practices

If you want positive results from drip marketing, you have to do it right. Below is a list of tips and best practices to help your small business make the most of a drip campaign.

1. Define clear goals and segmentation.

Before starting your drip campaign, it is vital to determine your goals for this marketing strategy. It will help you know whether or not the campaign is effective. Make sure that your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

After defining your goals, you can start applying customer segmentation. Segmentation is all about dividing customers into groups based on a shared characteristic. You can segment by demographics, location, purchase history, digital activity, and even income level. Data gathering and analysis are needed to discern who goes into what segment.

Marketing texts and emails need to be targeted to each segment and personalized for customers, especially for drip campaigns. To create the right email content, it’s vital to understand each segment’s unique needs and preferences.

2. Plan a strategic sequence.

The frequency of sending a series of emails is an important factor in drip campaigns. Ideally, you should have between 4 to 10 messages sent between 4 to 14 days apart. The goal is to keep your contacts interested. Do not bombard them with information either. Include only information that is relevant to them.

Sending sequences of emails and text messages to your customers and leads may feel intimidating. But do not worry because most potential customers like to get promotional emails. If you want to learn the best schedule, do not be afraid to experiment. You can do A/B testing with your customer lists to figure out the best time and day to send your emails.

3. Personalize content and call-to-action (CTA).

Statista reports that 60% of customers shopping online would not be loyal to companies that sent canned content. It means one of the keys to achieving drip campaign success is personalization. Ensure the messages you send are tailored to the recipient so your customers won’t feel like you’re spamming their inboxes.

To write personalized content, you have to understand your audience. That is why segmentation is vital. It will help you know what kind of information each email must contain. Personalize your email or text messages with the receiver’s name and any relevant information, like purchase history and past interactions, if applicable.

Also, do not forget to add a call-to-action (CTA). Regardless of your drip campaign’s goal, make sure there is a CTA button at the end of every email. It will let the recipients know what to do after receiving the message and encourage them to take the next step in their customer journey.

4. Monitor, analyze, and optimize.

Drip campaigns need to be continuously monitored and improved to ensure their effectiveness. You may need to experiment and do some testing to find what works best for your company.

Monitor your campaigns and track crucial metrics like open rate, engagement rate, and clickthrough rate. These metrics can help pinpoint which parts of your emails need to be improved.

Get Started with Text Marketing

Email is a common choice when it comes to drip campaigns. But text marketing can also be just as effective, and sometimes even more effective for customer engagement. But using text as your channel of communication can be a bit intimidating at first.

SMS marketing successfully means balancing a lot of moving parts. Local businesses have to configure automation, send responses, and keep up with individual text messaging threads—all while making sure no messages slip through the cracks. But with the right CRM and automation tools and text message marketing software, setting up perfectly crafted text drip campaigns can be a breeze for a team of any size.

Podium’s messaging platform allows you to optimize your opt-in collection, integrate with your existing tech stack, easily segment your campaigns, set up automation, track multiple two-way SMS messaging conversations, measure ROI, and allow customers to answer automated messages with more than letters or numbers–all from one easy-to-use dashboard.

The platform also offers 500 ready-to-use texting templates so you can focus on refining your text marketing strategy instead of creating individual messages.

With text marketing done right, you can send just one text that drives thousands in revenue. Learn how Podium can help you execute the SMS marketing campaigns of your dreams here.

FAQs

What are the types of drip campaigns?

Drip campaigns are a type of marketing strategy that involves sending a series of pre-planned, automated messages designed for lead nurturing and conversion. Common types include onboarding campaigns to welcome new users, educational campaigns to provide valuable content, re-engagement campaigns to revive inactive users, and ecommerce promotional campaigns for new product launches.

What is drip marketing, and an example?

Drip marketing is a strategy that involves sending a series of scheduled email or messages to prospects or customers. The purpose is to nurture relationships, maintain engagement, and guide leads through the sales funnel. For instance, a software company may use drip marketing to send a sequence of educational emails to trial users, highlighting the software’s key features and benefits.

Are drip marketing campaigns worth it?

Drip campaigns can be highly effective in generating and nurturing leads, engaging customers, and driving conversions. By delivering targeted content over time, drip campaigns can help maintain brand presence and build trust and relationships. When done right, drip campaigns can be a great addition to your marketing mix.