A drip campaign is a preset series of messages delivered via automated email that is designed to move someone through the sales cycle. The messages are often triggered by someone downloading an eBook or attending a webinar.
A key piece of the sales process is catching a user’s interest and convincing them to hire you. Since a drip campaign is designed to help this process, your emails should not be straight sales. In fact you don’t even want to mention sales until you’ve started to build a relationship with a user and earned their trust.
So what the heck are you supposed to talk about?
I’ll walk you through an example of a drip campaign I use when people download Social Light’s cheat sheet, 10 Reasons You are Not Ranking on Google.
Email #1 –Delivery & Download
As soon as people enter a valid email they receive an email thanking them for their interest and providing the downloadable file.
Email #2 – More info
The next day we send out an email that provides even more info on SEO and offers another download. This time we offer up tips to format blogs for SEO optimization.
We’re doing a couple of things with this email:
- Honing in on their interest in SEO.
- Establishing ourselves as a trusted advisor – we’re providing more free information without any attempt to sell.
- Because the email is sent the next day, we’re staying top of mind and fixing ourselves more firmly in their mind.
Email #3 – Tools for the user
Two days later we send out an email referencing page speed as one of the factors we talked about in our SEO checklist. We provide a link to a free tool for people to test their own website and ask them to let us know how they did.
Here’s the logic on this one:
- We’re continuing to provide free resources while expanding their knowledge on the topic of interest.
- We’re offering up a specific way they can test their site, and potentially highlighting a pain point. If their site turns out to be slow and they’re not sure what to do, that creates an opportunity to provide a service.
- We’ve invited them to share the results with us. This has the potential to start a conversation without any pressure on sales.
Email #4 – Third Party Validation
Four days later we send out another email that includes a link to a list of 200 different factors that impact SEO. In this case, it’s not a Social Light link we’re proving but goes to someone else’s website. Here’s why:
- On the list, the user will see several of items we’ve already talked about, thus having a third party source confirm our information. That helps build trust.
- We are still providing lots of free information, but this particular resource points out how complex SEO really is. This may start to create doubt that someone can DIY SEO, and make them more open to SEO support.
Email #5 – Sales
After letting the user sit on this info for a couple days, the next email arrives, in which we say how much we’d like to work with them. We provide a a little bit about past performance and invite the user to set up a free consultation.
- This is a pretty soft sell as we’re offering to chat, not pushing specific products.
- This is going to be the point where you see most people drop off. We’ve switched from providing free information to talking about services, thus we’re weeding out the people that are simply seeking information.
Email #6 – Last ditch effort
Our main goal is to steer prospects into a consultation, but if they haven’t taken any action in a month, we give it one more try and offer a discount on one of our SEO packages.
This is more of a hard sell as we are asking the user to make a purchase.
At this point, if they don’t take any action but remain subscribed to our list, we move them over to our general newsletter. If they’ve stayed with you after two sales emails, chances are they are interested in your services, but the timing just isn’t right for them. Moving them over to your regular newsletter list lets you stay connected without being pushy, and keeps you from wasting time on a prospect that just won’t pull the trigger.