One of the big challenges in running any kind of business is to be able to find your customer at the exact moment they are looking to buy. There are some avenues to do that - Google Search, or listing yourself on popular marketplaces like Amazon.

However, in most cases, your marketing campaigns may not reach your target customer at the “moment of purchase”.

This is why it is very important to build a Top-of-the-Funnel (TOFU). TOFU refers to a marketing strategy where the objective is to identify and capture your target customer profile based on demographic or behavioral aspects. Once their details are captured, you nurture them over a certain period of time until the moment of purchase arrives and they transact with your business.

Drip marketing is one of the most effective ways to nurture and grow your customer base. 

What is drip marketing anyway? 

As the name suggests, drip marketing refers to a marketing technique that involves a series of automated messages that are aimed at nurturing your prospects until they convert into a paying customer. 

Drip marketing is generally email-based although there do exist other forms of drip marketing campaigns over text messages, WhatsApp, or even direct mail. 

Drip marketing is very effective for two reasons. Firstly, since you reach your target customers several times over a certain length of time, it helps build brand recognition and recall - these are factors that are very vital in building a loyal customer base. 

Secondly, since your marketing campaign is spread out over several days, you do not have to time the ‘moment of purchase’ anymore. A drip campaign could yield a conversion anywhere from the moment of first contact to an outreach several weeks later.

Setting up a drip campaign for an eCommerce store

Launching a drip campaign is pretty straightforward at the outset. Draft out a series of messages, schedule them through the next several days, and wait for conversion. 

In reality, that is not how things pan out. Here is a step by step guide on launching a successful campaign.

Define the drip campaign period

When you launch a drip marketing campaign, the first thing to plan is how long you are going to be nurturing them. This may seem like an open-ended question, but there is a scientific way to go about it. 

To do this, look at the purchase frequency. Let’s take the example of a store selling dog food. The average customer buys the regular 10 kg pack every two to three weeks. 

If you capture such a customer’s lead through a TOFU campaign, you can be absolutely sure that they will be looking to buy your product anytime between now and three weeks. Adding some buffer to this purchase cycle, your drip campaign could be set over a period of 4-5 weeks.

Identifying the touchpoint frequency

Touchpoint frequency is the number of times the customer interacts with your marketing assets during the purchase cycle. When it comes to a drip marketing campaign, the touchpoint frequency is generally the number of marketing messages you send to your customer through the campaign.

For a 5 week campaign, it is generally a good idea to schedule a message once a week. However, if you are just starting out, you may not be sure what day of the week or time of the day you should be sending your messages. 

To answer this, it is a good idea to schedule one message every 5 days. This way, you can identify the best performing days to send your messages. Also, try experimenting with different blocks of time (like early morning, pre-noon, after-noon, evening, etc.) to see how this affects open rates.

Content strategy

This is perhaps the most important part of your drip marketing campaign. A big difference between a drip marketing campaign and a regular email marketing campaign is the objective. 

With a drip campaign, your objective is to nurture the customer one step at a time. One effective way to do this is by educating your customers on your product. 

To start with, build a list of problems that your product solves. Going back to the example of a store selling dog food, some problems your products solve could be that your food is packed with extra proteins that your dog needs. From market research, you may have also found that customers prefer your product because it can stay out longer than competing products that can get soggy or unpalatable for the dog. 

Knowing these strengths, promote or educate your customer about each of these aspects in your drip campaign. It’s a good idea to stick with just one idea for every outreach.

If there is more than one way to communicate the same point, consider testing different variants of your email. Modern email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and GetResponse come with built-in tools for A/B testing emails. 

Tracking performance

As with every marketing campaign, drip marketing requires a lot of testing before you can get the process right. For this reason, it is important to dissect your campaign at each stage.

First, look at your subscription triggers. Are you offering the right lead magnet? Lead magnet is the initial promise you offer your website visitors to try and get them to subscribe. It could be a downloadable document, a promise to share industry tips, or a free-to-use tool.

A poor lead magnet can not only affect the subscription rate, but could also bring in the wrong kind of subscribers to your business. This can further affect the overall conversion rate of your drip campaign.

Email is a two-way communication medium. Consider deploying email surveys to get feedback on your drip messages. A poor feedback should be a wake-up call to set things right - either in terms of optimizing your messages or overhauling the process by targeting a different cohort of subscribers.

You may also consider shuffling the order of your drip messages. In some cases, you may find that sending a discount coupon right after subscription could help with higher conversions. In other cases, you may find that you will need to nurture the customer a lot longer before you send a conversion-focused discount campaign.

Ultimately, it is about testing and finding the right pattern for your business.

Wrapping up

Drip marketing is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to convert a top of the funnel audience into loyal customers. This journey is not an easy one and requires an obsessive testing of each step of the process. However, with data-driven insights readily available with modern drip marketing tools, monitoring performance is seamless and efficient.