Unlocking Success with Drip Campaigns: An InfoLobby Guide
Email marketing is a powerful tool in the modern business world. It allows you to reach your audience directly, delivering tailored content and promotions to their inbox. However, sending random, sporadic emails won’t yield the best results. Scheduling drip campaigns is a strategic approach to email marketing and is where InfoLobby can help you harness success.
Understanding Drip Campaigns
A drip campaign is a series of automated, targeted emails sent to a specific group of contacts over a period. The goal is to nurture leads, guide subscribers through a sales funnel, and keep your audience engaged with valuable content. Drip campaigns “drip” relevant information or offers to recipients in a well-timed manner.
Install Package
InfoLobby provides a process for managing email templates and scheduling campaigns. With our ready-made App Pack, you can effortlessly create visually stunning emails using HTML. Use Automation and the specific field to schedule emails at optimal times for audience engagement. Whether you’re an experienced marketer or just starting out, InfoLobby has the tools to optimize your email campaigns..
Connect your Contacts
Within the package, you’ll find a “Mailing List” table that stores email-related data however the process can use any “Contacts” table. Some important fields to consider required for automation:
The Campaign Selection field offers options for “Drip Titles” and should always match your Template table.
The Mailing List Selection field categorizes contacts as “Subscribed,” “Unsubscribed,” or “Duplicate”.
The Last Follow-Up Date field automatically updates when a scheduled email sends from the Actions table.
Create Templates
Design your email templates in the Template table. Configure the “From Address,” “Email Subject,” and “Email Body.” You can even personalize your emails using custom merge tags. In the package we use {{first_name}} within the email body and during automation, we use str_replace() insert each contact’s First Name.
Specify the sequence number and the number of days since the last email. Typically, the first email has a sequence of 1 and 0 days since the last email, but you can adjust this to calculate from the contact’s last follow-up date. The second email would have a sequence of 2 and, for example, 2 days since the last email, but you can customize this based on your needs.
Additionally, templates include a field that allows you to define the time for sending your emails. The Input Mask & Regex feature of the Text field ensures using the 24h format for automation calculations. This allows you to schedule campaign emails during your peak engagement times.
Start Drip Campaign
To kick off your drip campaign, simply update the “Start Drip” field to “START”. This triggers the "Start Drip" Automation. If the template you’re using is the first one in the sequence (designated as “1”), it will automatically trigger the creation of the first drip actions. If not, you will unset the “Start Drip” selection, and the system will prompt you to go to the first template in your sequence.
We have scheduled actions to start on the next weekday, giving you time to make any necessary adjustments. The outgoing reference field also allows for easy access to communication records from Contacts and Templates when using a Tab Group.
If you need to halt your campaign and prevent any upcoming actions from being sent, update the “Start Drip” field to “STOP”. This stops the campaign from sending and sets any related scheduled actions "Status" to “Abandoned”.
It’s essential to ensure that starting a drip campaign can only happen with the first template in the sequence. Automation is setup to prevent errors by checking if the “Start Drip” field has changed on the wrong Template in the sequence. If the “Sequence in Drip” is not equal to one (1), then the template’s “Start Drip” field is unset, and the user notified of the error.
Sending Scheduled Emails
We set email actions in the App Pack to send every hour. InfoLobby offers a daily automation that can be set to every hour *:25. This allows us to send emails at different hours in the day. For this example, the hourly automation triggers at 25 minutes after each hour, and checks the Action table for any emails scheduled for that hour.
When it’s time to send your emails, Automation checks if the “Mailing List” contact is “Subscribed”. If not, the scheduled email is “Abandoned”. If they are, it inserts the dynamic content into the email template body, such as the recipient’s first name and send the email. Thus also updating the Action “Status” to “Sent”, and recording the “Last Follow-up” date. Be sure to set your SMTP Integration in the Email action.
Once the Email sends, it triggers the Set Next Action Automation. This calculates the next step in your drip campaign and schedules the subsequent email based on the templates sequence settings. This ensures that your email sequences remain on track and continue to engage your audience effectively.
Contact Management
To ensure that you don’t send duplicate emails to the same contact, a Prevent Duplicates automation exists. The automation counts how many records exist for the email address of the new Mailing List contact. If more than 1 record exists, the “Mailing List” field updates to “Duplicate”, avoiding any redundancy in your email lists.
If you ever need to include a new contact in a drip campaign after its initial start, the process is straightforward. First, make sure that the contact’s subscription “Status” is “Subscribed”. Then, update the “Add to Campaign” selection with the desired “Drip Title”. Be sure to only add one selection at a time. This update will trigger Automation to verify if the corresponding template has the “Start Drip” field set to “START”. This action effectively adds the contact to the ongoing drip campaign, and they will seamlessly begin receiving the sequence of emails.
In conclusion, effective email marketing is all about delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time. The InfoLobby Drip Campaign package provides a strategic approach to achieving this goal. By understanding how to connect your contacts, create personalized templates, and manage your email sequences efficiently, you can optimize your email marketing efforts for engagement and success.
