The latest trend in email marketing is the use to drip content to your subscribers. Digital marketing is moving away from manual email blasts and automating these tasks.

Drip campaigns are a series of automated messages sent to your email list. Many different tools exist to send drip campaigns, but at brandiD we use MailChimp. The same techniques will work in other providers. If you don’t already have an account on MailChimp, follow this tutorial on MailChimp.com. NOTE: You need a paid account on MailChimp to use the functions.

Choosing Goals and Triggers

Every marketing campaign needs to have goals and automated ones are no different. Goals for a drip campaign:

• Lead Nurturing
• Education
• Increase Engagement
• Onboard Customers
• Welcome Users
• Confirmations
• Abandoned Shopping Carts

Each of the goals have a unique set of messages that go out based on the users’ information. MailChimp splits their triggers into action based and date based. Action based would be a user clicking a link or navigating to a specific page on your site. Date based is for subscribe date or last opened campaign.

Segmentation

Separating your list into related groups is crucial to engagement in your drip campaign. Keeping track of user interactions helps to keep the content relevant to subscribers. Segmentation gives drip campaigns their boost in user engagement.

To create a segment in MailChimp, select your list and click the segment button on the top left. From here, select the conditions to add a subscriber to your segment. Multiple conditions can exist to either include or exclude particular subscribers.

Examples of good segments:

• Subscribed from a particular landing page.
• Is/Is not a paying customer.
• Picked a specific option on your sign-up form.

When segmenting your list, remember that subscribers can be in many segments. This means the messages that are sent to the segment audience not the subscriber.

In the next post, we will set up the workflow for the segments we just created. Don’t want to wait? Contact us to increase your email marketing engagement.