New Best Practices in Drip Campaigns

Drip campaigns – or “nurture campaigns” as they are often called – have been part of the marketer’s essential tool belt for some time now. And while they are not new, the way in which they’re implemented has been changing as customers become more discerning and technology advances. The old stand-bys that encourage “lead them down the funnel,” “offer useful assets,” “have a clear call-to-action” and “don’t email too often” still hold merit, but the bar is definitely being raised in an era of behavioural data and real-time personalization.

Some of the new best practices for drip campaigns include:

• Data-Driven Segmentation – Better targeting based on actual data of a buyer’s journey (what websites they have visited, which assets they have downloaded, etc.).
• Personalization – Communications and assets that are individualized.
• Predictive Send – Emails triggered not only on action, but delivered based on email activity.
• Cross-Channel Nurturing – Drip campaigns are more than just timed emails; cross-channel nurturing describes real-time personalization of websites and ads based on known prospects’ behaviour.

Drip campaigns are a great way to give customers and contacts the right information at the right time, but it’s essential to find a platform or app for your efforts. Drip email apps are available in many forms, running the gamut from tools that merely send emails to fully-loaded marketing automation platforms that feature powerful drip email features; there are even ways to send drip campaigns from your favorite email newsletter tool, in addition to tricks for creating your own drip automation with just an email sending service.

The best drip campaign tools incorporate the new best practices and make maintaining customer relationships and nurturing prospects to close sales easy. Segmentation based on full marketing attribution – before and after the visitors anonymity has been removed – gives the complete picture of engagement. This data in turn drives the personalized campaigns that deliver content based on the user’s activity windows and across channel’s they use most often.

The right marketing automation platform makes it easy through a myriad of tools to nurture your leads based on real-time activity and profile details. What does that mean to you as a marketer? Customizing drip emails and other campaign activities with user data and events-triggering emails just got massively easier.

Here’s the deal: Within three years, every successful online business will use some form of marketing automation. Stay ahead of the curve by considering personalized drip campaigns as offered through a leading marketing automation provider.