You’ve probably read a lot of case studies about people increasing subscribers and sign ups using email marketing. If you’ve tried to copy their tactics and failed, don’t feel dispirited. In most cases that success you read about in a 1,000-word blog post didn’t happen overnight.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Most marketers put years of work into learning the trade. That’s because there’s a lot to learn. But, the basics of email marketing are remarkably simple.
Today I’m going to run you through some of the most important things I’ve learned about increasing your subscribers with an email drip campaign and how to generate sales using email sequences.
Here’s a quick overview of what I’ll be covering in this article:
- Why run email drip campaigns
- How to create a drip email campaign
- How many emails should be in an email drip campaign
- 5 email drip campaign examples
I suggest you bookmark this guide. You’ll want to refer to these email sequences in the last section on a regular basis.
What is an email drip campaign?
An email drip campaign, sometimes called an autoresponder cycle, is a sequence of emails that are sent to a potential subscriber over a period of days. These email sequences are automated ‘set and forget’ campaigns. Common examples of automated email drip campaigns include the welcome email sequence and the cart abandonment sequence. Here are over 30 other ways you can use email automation.
An email drip campaign can be as complex or as simple as you want to make it. A classic email welcome campaign, for example, would have three emails. These emails are sent one after the other on consecutive days.
It would look a bit like this.
Email drip campaigns can be a lot more complicated. They often include action-based tracking – so you send people different messages depending on what they do. For example, someone who doesn’t open an email might be sent a different series of messages to a person who did.
Below is a template example of an email campaign for a webinar on GetResponse.
You can see there are a lot more stages to this sequence.
Marketers use email drip campaigns because multiple messages are more effective at generating a result than sending a single email. A good example of this is a cart abandonment email. A study found that people who send three cart abandonment emails generate 69% more orders than those who don’t.
That’s a lot of extra sales…
It’s not just the frequency of the messages that gets such results, though. A good email drip campaign is effective because the person creating the campaign thought through all of the reasons why a person should click on a link. They then dealt with those issues one at a time through the campaign. – Read more
