How to Create a Successful Drip Campaign

If you are looking for a new strategy to help boost the efficacy of your text message marketing program, then consider a drip campaign. This type of marketing campaign is a popular way to engage the interest of your subscribers and maintain a connection over a period of time. It also helps to nurture leads into customers by maintaining a strong pipeline that continually moves your customers through the sales cycle.

Drip campaigns work by sending a set of planned, typically connected messages at particular scheduled points. You can use them to reach your entire subscriber list or a targeted group, depending on your goals. Your options for a drip campaign are endless, and the following tips will help you ensure that your campaign succeeds.

Know Your Goal

Will your campaign re-engage customers or educate them about your products?

As with any marketing campaign, before you start you must know your goal. Drip campaigns can be used to re-engage customers, educate them about products, offer discounts, train clients or customers in a particular aspect of your company, or just boost your sales. Use your goal to guide your campaign. Although you may ultimately have several goals in mind, it is best to focus on just one per campaign for the best results.

Set Up Your Time Frame

Once you have an idea of the goal of your campaign, it is time to start planning. The most important aspect of a drip campaign is the time frame, including the frequency at which you will send text messages. Some campaigns last just a week or two, while others may last for months or longer. It is to your benefit to first determine how many messages you plan to send, how often, and for how long. This helps you to better plan the content of each message, because you will have an understanding of what you want each message to achieve, as well as what a future message will state.

Keep in mind that your message frequency and timing does not have to remain consistent over the life of your campaign. You can initially hit your audience with frequent messages that slowly die down over time. However, you do not want to send too many messages, even in the beginning, as this will alienate your customers. It’s also important to ensure customers know from the beginning how many texts to expect.

Pick What Customers Receive the Messages

For a more effective campaign, target a particular group of customers.

Mass texting is an opt-in service, so you cannot use it to cold-message potential customers. However, it is a highly effective medium, especially as you typically target individuals who already have some sort of relationship with your company and thereby are more receptive to your messages. To help your drip campaign succeed even more, you should choose a particular target audience to message.

For example, you could use your data to find subscribers who have not visited your business lately. You can work towards re-engaging them through your campaign, with the end goal of getting them back to returning customer status. Knowing the demographics and habits of your subscribers helps you to develop relevant and valuable content for a better chance of success.

Develop the Content

Your team should ensure the content flows from one message to the next.

Once you have an idea of the audience, goal, and time frame, it is time to develop your messages. A drip campaign is not about continually contacting a customer with repetitive information; it is about using a carefully choreographed system to increase engagement to achieve a desired result. This means that message content is related, and your campaign has a beginning and an end. Remember that with text messaging you are limited to 160 characters. Therefore, every message needs to be concise. Because you plan to have several messages, it is helpful to concentrate on one general aspect of your overall campaign per message, which helps you keep things short.

By taking the time to build a solid foundation at the beginning, you increase your chances of a successful campaign. Drip campaigns take a little more planning since they include more than one message. However, they ultimately save you time in the long run because once you have scheduled the messages, all you have left to do is wait to see the results.

Unsure of what your audience may want to receive via text from your company? Read this Group Texting blog post to learn ways that you can better cater to your customers.

Categories: Marketing Reports