Drip campaigns are effective and powerful. The reason they work so well is that they’re a soft-selling approach. An email to your subscribers every few days with resources and helpful tips means they can buy when they’re ready. And you’re able to build trust with them in the process. 

But what if your drip campaigns are falling short? What if your conversions are dwindling and you’re not seeing much return? It typically means there’s an issue somewhere, but with so many email sequences and different stages of the customer journey, it can be hard to uncover where the problem resides. 

To ensure your email drip campaigns get the results you’re aiming for, make sure they have these four important things: 

4 Important Elements for Conversion-Focused Drip Campaigns

1. Value Offer

When creating your drip campaigns, don’t go for the sale immediately. Modern buyers tune out creepy marketing tactics focused on just getting the sale. Instead, start by providing your subscribers with value.

To do this, you must learn about your target audience and what matters to them. This includes identifying audience pain points and what they’re looking to find out. Once you identify these, your first contact should not be formal. Draft a friendly email that addresses their top concerns, illustrating how your brand can deliver what they are looking for.  

Examples of value you can provide are blog posts that answer common questions, eBooks with in-depth, valuable information, and whitepapers. By providing this sort of helpful insight to your clients and prospects, you can earn their trust and make them more likely to continue engaging with your brand.

If they find value in the content you initially send them, they’ll look forward to the content you send them in your following emails, which can increase engagement and conversions down the line.  

2. Credibility

People are more likely to take your brand seriously and follow your call to action if they trust you and think you are credible.

How do you establish credibility? Use social proof!

If your prospects can get verifiable proof that others have trusted your brand and gotten promised results, they will be more likely to do the same. According to Bizrate, consumers say they prefer basing buying decisions on ratings instead of being wooed by other add-ons.

You can add social proof to your drip campaigns in the following ways.

• Including short testimonials
• Sharing influencer/big brand endorsements
• Showcasing your customer base
• Displaying badges and certifications

3. Creative and Effective Copy

Besides delivering value and establishing credibility, your drip campaign’s success depends on your subscribers reading your emails. The content of your emails must be creative and compelling.

Start with the subject lines. Are the email subject lines of your drip campaigns powerful enough to push your subscribers to open and read? Is the content creative? Is it snappy and succinct, or is it too long?

Right from the headline is where you should pique the interest of your subscribers. Keep it brief and introduce the value the email content will be delivering. Next, ensure the content of the email delivers the exact value promised in the headline: this cements trust.

Your content should be concise and straight to the point. Avoid trying to fit too many things into one email. Since this is a drip campaign, use other emails in the series to address other important things you’d like to share.

4. Clear Call-To-Action (CTA)

There must be a purpose for your drip campaign before starting. The purpose would inform the CTA you’ll include at the end of your drip campaign email.

Once you have the attention of your subscribers, direct them to the action you’d like them to take. The CTA should be bold, clear, and placed where the subscribers can easily see it.

You can make it easy for your subscribers to take action by using a clear CTA that’s free of ambiguities and easy to execute. Avoid confusing your prospects by using multiple CTAs in your emails and drip campaigns.

5. Knowledge of the Buyer’s Journey

This is an important one. You have to know the journey your audience is taking to find your site; then you have to know the various journey possibilities they can take once on your site. Ask yourself the following kinds of questions:

• What are site visitors looking for?
• What action do we want site visitors to take when they’re on our site? 
• What problems does our product or service solve?
• What are the common questions our audience has about our product or service?
• What are common misunderstandings within our industry?

By answering these questions, you can carve out customer journeys and design your drip campaigns around them. For example, let’s say you own a nutrition brand, and someone downloads your guide to healthy cooking. This tells you that this person enjoys cooking but needs some assistance making healthy choices in the kitchen. The next email you send (after the guide) could be one that offers a list of safe cookware brands and supplies or a quick, healthy lunch recipe. After that, you can send them an offer to purchase a seat in a live cooking class you’re hosting or your healthy meal delivery service.

By knowing what the customer is looking for up-front, you’re able to guide them in their journey towards making the right purchase. 

How Email Marketing Software Can Help

Since drip campaigns are used to reach out to contacts with specific messages at specific times, you need the help of email marketing software to automate your emails for maximum effectiveness.

With email marketing software like Benchmark Email, you can create date-based and behavior-based automated campaigns and follow-up emails, as well as sell products with our various features, like our eCommerce Blocks and Shopify Integration. 

You can also measure and adjust each campaign based on results and data collected from past campaigns. Make sure that you keep an eye on your open and conversion rates, and use these to tweak your future campaigns for greater success.

Get started with your automated email series today by signing up for our free plan!