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As a contractor, are you looking for a way to keep in touch with your clients? Maybe you're looking for a way to stay top of mind and increase referrals. 

Email drip campaigns can be an excellent way for contractors to nurture leads and close more deals. But how do you create a relevant and engaging email drip campaign for your target audience? 

In this post, we've compiled ten email drip campaign examples to help you use drip marketing to gain new clients and boost your sales!

What is a Drip Campaign?

Drip campaigns or drip marketing is a series of automated emails sent to your contacts that perform a specific action. With a drip campaign, you can schedule the number of emails and the rate at which to send them. You can also personalize these drip marketing campaigns on a large scale based on the action you want the receiver to take.

Drip campaigns aim to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. This creates a highly efficient system of personalized, high-converting communication. A drip marketing campaign may be based on someone placing an order, signing up for a webinar, or abandoning a shopping cart - all signs of someone being interested in your company and what you have to offer

The reason why it's called a "drip" campaign is that it sends a slow and steady series of emails that “drip” into the receiver's inbox over time. You might set as many pre-scheduled emails as you’d like, but never send too many unnecessary or invaluable emails to avoid over-communicating and annoying the receiver.

Why Use Drip Campaigns?

Drip campaigns can help your business boost sales by turning email subscribers into customers, increasing repeat purchases, and re-engaging a dormant audience. According to research, companies have seen a 20% increase in sales after using drip campaigns to nurture leads.

Effective drip email campaigns will help you communicate the value you bring to your prospects, build relationships and demonstrate you're a great resource to solve their needs.

Although a drip campaign is a reliable and cost-effective way to communicate with your audience, many contractors use different social media ads to promote their business, such as pay-per-click advertising. Check out our page, “PPC for Contractors,” to learn more.

What Makes a Drip Campaign Successful?

You must address your customer pain points to have an effective email drip campaign. Maybe they think your buying process is complicated or lack knowledge of your services. You can set up the correct email drip campaign to solve these problems.

Successful drip campaigns depend on your campaign goals, customer journey, timing, personalization, and more. In the next section, you'll learn how to set up your very own drip campaign.

How Do You Create an Email Drip Campaign?

You learned that drip campaigns are a great addition to your business’ marketing, so here are six steps you need to follow to create one.

Step 1: Choose a Drip Campaign Software

To set up a drip email campaign, you'll need a marketing tool to schedule the emails in advance and target different customer segments. The software you select should allow you to personalize your drip campaign to each contact.

Choose the one that fits the needs of your sales team and integrates easily with your customer relationship management software. This way, you'll get real-time performance metrics to adjust your drip campaigns when needed.

There are several email marketing tools to choose from, such as Active Campaign. It’s not just an email marketing platform; they have marketing automation and customer relationship management tools to create incredible customer experiences. With ActiveCampaign, you can automate your email follow-up, find your most engaged contacts and easily integrate other applications. 

You can learn more about Active Campaign here.

Step 2: Determine Your Goal

Defining your email marketing goal for your campaign makes it easier to plan all the essential elements needed to keep things on track. Decide what action you want your prospects to take at the end of the drip campaign and work backwards from there.

Here are different drip campaign examples:

• Promote a new service

• Generate leads

• Gather customer feedback

• Grow sales

• Increase engagement

Step 3: Identify Your Target Audience

Drip emails aim to deliver the right message to the right audience. Are you trying to reengage a dormant audience or cross-sell to existing customers? Segmenting your audience will allow you to create personalized drip campaigns that will target the needs and motivations of your customers.

Here are different customer segments you can target:

• First-time customers

• Blog readers

• Lead magnet downloaders

• Recurring customers

Step 4: Set a Trigger

Drip email campaigns rely on triggers. User actions or a pre-scheduled date can trigger the email automation sequence. Below are common drip campaign triggers:

• Newsletter sign up

• Contract renewal

• Consultation booking

• Purchase confirmation

• Ebook or whitepaper download

Step 5: Write Your Drip Marketing Campaign

Once you've set your triggers, it's time to craft your emails. You'll want to create an automated drip campaign that people want to read. This is accomplished by creating irresistible subject lines, a clear call-to-action (CTA), and excellent copy.

Keep your subject lines short, as long ones are not visible on mobile - where 50%+ of the receivers will read your emails. You can personalize each subject line by adding the names of your email contacts. You could also create a funny subject line, like this example from Groupon: "Deals That Makes Us Proud (Unlike Our Nephew, Steve)." 

Finally, add a CTA in your emails to get a potential customer to take action. Persuasive copy is an excellent way to get a prospect to take action. Check out our previous blog post, "Copywriting: Finding Your Big Idea," to learn how to write better emails. 

Step 6: A/B Test Your Email Drip Campaigns

Analyze your emails' performance, click-through and conversion rates, and be prepared to make adjustments based on what you learned.

A/B testing your email drip campaigns can help you optimize your results. Testing your automated drip campaign consists of experimenting with email variations, workflow variations, and frequency of follow-up emails. You can test the subject line, preview text, images, copy and CTAs to see what works best.

10 Examples of Automated Drip Campaigns

Now that you know what a drip campaign is and how to set one up, here are ten drip campaign examples you can pull inspiration from!

Example 1: Birthdays, Anniversaries and Other Events

Emails sent on special dates such as birthdays and anniversaries will not turn into a drip sequence, but it is a great way to remind your customers of the value you bring and your appreciation. 

If you're new to email marketing automation, these types of emails are a great way to start. They pleasantly surprise your audience, improve loyalty and retention and may encourage a purchase when you include a coupon or special offer.

Here’s a great example from Pizza Hut. They created a long graphic enticing people to scroll down to see their birthday offer. Getting something free with an order is a great way to encourage customers to purchase something on their special day. 

Example 2: Contract Renewal

Contract renewal emails simply remind customers to renew their business relationship with you. This mainly applies to lawn maintenance and garden care companies with yearly contracts. You can remind former customers of the value you provide and entice them with new offerings.

Informing your customer about their contract status will help them make the right decision even if they end their services with you. As a business, it's better to have happy former customers than current ones that are upset.

YouTube reminds its customers that their premium subscription is almost over. They encourage their customers to renew their membership by highlighting two main benefits they'll miss if they don’t renew the subscription.

Example 3: Welcome Emails

Welcome emails allow you to make an excellent first impression on a new email recipient. These emails could include a video, special offers, a signup form, or a friendly hello. A nice message for customers will encourage them to interact with your service and lead to improved customer retention. 

Sending onboarding emails to new email contacts is a great way to build relationships. Nowadays, most people expect a welcome email, and on average, they generate up to 320% more revenue than other promotional emails.

A welcome email as a drip campaign works well because it allows your business to reach out immediately, thanking your new customer and welcoming them to your brand. This is a window of opportunity where you can cement yourself in the mind of new subscribers, and using marketing automation software for your emails can guarantee you never miss it.

You also want to send welcome emails to first-time paying customers. The last thing you want is for new customers to purchase once and never return. You can thank new customers for their purchases, provide tips to make the most out of your services, and keep them posted about upcoming sales or events.

Here's a great welcome email from Cozy Earth. The email includes a discount code for your first purchase with a CTA button that will link you to their website. As you scroll down the email, the brand displays different bestselling shopping categories. 

Example 4: Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Lead nurturing is a personalized and automated email campaign that takes users on a journey that may influence their buying behaviour. You can customize these emails based on data, analytics and user behaviour research. This customization will allow you to create engaging campaigns and encourage high-quality leads to take the next step through the sales funnel.

Here you can trigger an email drip campaign to nurture a potential customer until they're ready to buy. This requires some work, but it is worth it because nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.

Airbnb sends a company anniversary email that highlights different travel destinations. The email doesn't ask for much and displays a CTA button for their subscribers to learn more information.

Example 5: Engagement

An engagement email aims to measure how much your contacts interact with your email campaigns. You can monitor your email engagement by looking at specific metrics such as the open rate, CTR, unsubscribe rate, etc. 

An engagement email is the best way to keep a loyal customer. Staying engaged with customers who make big purchases, buy frequently or are heavily engaged with your brand will strengthen your relationship. 

Your emails are not just about promoting your services; customers want to know you care about them. According to research, 68% of customers leave because they feel the brand doesn't care about them. 

Postable sends a great engagement email reminding customers to update their addresses before the holidays. All they have to do is hit a button. It's a quick ask to measure engagement.

Example 6: Educational

Educational drip campaigns inform your audience about your services and build authority for your brand. The best way to provide value is to educate your audience on important aspects of your services, industry or company. You could deliver this through online courses or workshops.

If your company can deliver consistent educational emails and identify what your customers are most interested in, you can position your business as a source of information and establish thought leadership within your industry. 

An existing customer will appreciate a technical or complex topic presented simply and straightforwardly. Work with your team to brainstorm email drip campaign ideas to inform and build trust with your audience rather than sell.

As you brainstorm, consider topics that current and future customers will want to know. What topics are they likely to search for, or are their current concerns or interests in your industry that need answering?

Framebridge educates its subscribers by including helpful information for issues their customers need help with.

The email shows three steps to help their customers hang their art, but it also includes a CTA button called "educate me" that will send them to an in-depth guide.

Example 7: Abandoned Cart

Abandoned cart emails are sent to re-engage shoppers who left items in their cart without completing their purchase. As a contractor, you can apply this to your business when a prospect visits your contact page without filling out their information or booking a consultation. 

Sending reminder emails to customers that left your contact page will encourage them to complete the desired action. You can include a coupon code or a CTA button to return them to the page they abandoned. 

Casper created a clever and simple abandoned cart email to encourage customers to complete their purchases. The email has two CTA buttons: one to return to check out and one to product reviews for people still unsure about making the purchase.

Example 8: Re-engagement 

A re-engagement email is sent to people who have stopped interacting with the brand (i.e., no longer open emails or make purchases) to regain their interest. Your subscribers receive many emails in their inboxes daily, so a percentage of your audience will inevitably stop engaging with you. 

Once a contact hasn't engaged for a set period, your drip campaign will be triggered to drive action from this audience, or you’ll identify which contacts on your email list are truly inactive so you can remove them from your mailing list. This is important because if your overall engagement level drops significantly, your email provider will likely consider you a low-quality sender, potentially worsening your engagement problems.

To combat this, here's a re-engagement drip campaign example from Netflix. The brand has experienced customers unsubscribing from their services. As a result, they launched a successful drip campaign to win back their customers and boost engagement.

Netflix's win-back campaign started the automated drip by acknowledging the customer's cancellation, adding a red CTA button to resubscribe and providing customer service contact information. Over the next three months, the brand sends emails that include new movies and TV shows the former customer is missing. To complete the series, Netflix finally delivers an email to rejoin their services and focuses on their value. 

Example 9: Event Series

Event series emails are used for pre-event and post-event follow-up communications. You can use email marketing automation to build an email list for upcoming events.

Adding a signup form on your website will encourage your visitors to gain access to exclusive and early-bird access to your future events. Once you are ready to promote your event, you have a list of people to which you can automatically send your drip sequence.

Events can be anything from a webinar to a weekend-long trade show. Creating an effective drip campaign will boost sales and leverage FOMO (fear of missing out) from your audience. Ensure to send a reminder email about the upcoming event and provide highlights once completed so that you can promote your services or a future event.

Here's a drip campaign example from Salesforce. They invited their email contacts to sign up for an interactive networking event series. Once people registered, they received reminder emails about the upcoming event.

Example 10: Cross-sell and Up-sell Products

Cross-selling emails recommend related or complementary products or services to a customer based on previous purchases. Upselling emails include additional products or services that could benefit the customer.

You want to create drip campaigns to cross-sell and up-sell clients because it's easier to generate more revenue from existing customers you have already built a relationship with rather than a new prospect who hasn’t made a purchase yet.

Once your customer has made their first purchase, you can trigger a drip campaign that offers complementary products or services to upgrade their experience. These emails should be informational and explain the benefits of the services or items.

The Dollar Shave Club implemented a successful drip campaign strategy to cross-sell products to their audience. The email shows the customer's order, displays product information and underneath displays additional items to complement their order.

9 KPI Metrics to Track Your Drip Campaign Emails

You learned that you could use drip campaigns to generate more sales, increase engagement and build stronger relationships. But it doesn't matter how well-written your marketing campaigns are if you can't see the results of your efforts and whether the drip email is helping you hit your goals.

Below are nine common metrics you should use to measure your email marketing campaigns

Metric 1: Cost per Lead

Cost per lead (CPL) helps you understand how much money you must spend to acquire a new lead. CPL is calculated by dividing your total marketing spend by the total number of new leads.

Once you clearly understand the value and costs of your drip emails, you can focus your efforts on the drip campaigns that are performing the best and deserve the most traffic.

Metric 2: Click-through Rate

The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people that click on one or more links within the email. The click-through rate can be calculated by the total clicks or unique clicks divided by the number of delivered emails multiplied by 100.

For example: (400 total clicks/10,000 emails delivered)*100 = 4% click-through rate.

CTR determines how many people on your email list engage with your content and are interested in learning about your offer. You'll need to dig deeper for each drip email campaign and find out which links they're interested in and where they're located. Someone clicking on the unsubscribe button is not something you want to track for this metric. 

Metric 3: Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of people who click on a link within the email and complete the desired action (i.e., purchasing a product or service). The conversion rate can be calculated by the number of people who completed the desired action divided by the number of total emails delivered, multiplied by 100.

For example: (500 people who completed desired action/10,000 emails delivered)*100= 5% conversion rate.

This is the KPI metric that matters the most. It is directly tied to your automated email’s CTA, and your CTA is connected to the overall goal of your email marketing campaign. This metric will tell you whether you're achieving your email drip campaign goals.

Metric 4: Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribe from your send list after opening a given email. It is calculated by the total number of unsubscribes divided by the total number of emails delivered.

For example: (1,000 unsubscribes/10,000 emails delivered)=  0.1% unsubscribe rate.

This metric can often be misinterpreted in email marketing. Many people won't go through the formal unsubscribe process if they're tired of receiving your emails. They will simply stop opening, reading or clicking on your emails. 

However, if the number of people who unsubscribe suddenly increases, you'll want to reevaluate your communication strategy regarding your drip campaigns.

Metric 5: Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of your total emails that could not be successfully delivered to your contacts' inboxes. It is calculated by the total number of bounced emails divided by the emails sent, multiplied by 100. There are two kinds of bounces to measure: "hard" bounces and "soft" bounces.

For example: (85 bounced emails/10,000 total emails sent)*100 = 0.85% bounce rate.

Hard bounces are typically caused by an invalid email address. This is commonly caused by someone deleting or entering their email address incorrectly. A hard bounce address should be removed from your email list immediately because it could affect your email sender's reputation.

Soft bounces are temporary and could be caused by a full inbox or a problem with the recipient's server. The recipient's server may deliver the email once the issue is resolved, or you can try resending your emails to soft bounces.

Metric 6: Open Rate

The open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open your emails. It is calculated by the total unique opens divided by the total recipients multiplied by 100. Note that if a recipient opened the same email twice or more, they only count as one unique open.

For example: (500 unique opens/10,000 recipients)*100= 5% open rate.

This metric is a little tricky to measure and could sometimes be misleading. Using this metric to compare the open rates from the emails you sent the previous week or compare it to your industry average to benchmark your expectations is best. Some industries, such as finance, will typically have higher open rates, but people are more likely to open an email from their bank more frequently - so don’t compare your open rate to a broad standard. 

Metric 7: Forwarding Rate

The forwarding rate is the percentage of email recipients that click the "share this" button to a social network and/or click the "forward to a friend" button. It is calculated by the number of clicks on a share and/or forward button divided by the number of total emails delivered, multiplied by 100.

For example: (150 clicks on a share and/or forward button/10,000 total emails delivered)*100= 1.5% forwarding rate.

This metric may not seem significant, but it's important because this is how you can generate new contacts via your drip campaigns. This gives you insight into the level of engagement and the share-worthy quality of your drip campaign emails.

While converting your current contacts is important, it doesn't help you attract new clients. Start encouraging your contacts to share your emails with a friend or colleague and track how many people you can add to your database with this strategy.

Metric 8: List Growth Rate

The list growth rate measures the rate at which your email list grows. It is calculated by the number of new contacts - the number of unsubscribes plus email/spam complaints divided by the total number of email addresses on your list, multiplied by 100.

For example: (1,000 new contacts - 100 unsubscribes and email/spam complaints)/10,000 email addresses on your list *100 = 9% growth rate.

You want to keep track of your email list growth and loss because, over time, you will naturally lose people on your list. So, it is essential to pay attention to growing your list and keeping it at a healthy size over time.

Metric 9: Return on Investment (ROI)

This is the overall return on investment for your email drip campaigns (i.e., total revenue divided by the total spend). It is calculated by the additional sales made subtracted by the amount invested in the campaign divided by the amount invested, multiplied by 100.

For example: ($1,500 additional sales - $150 invested in the campaign/ $150 invested)*100 = 900% ROI.

This is a basic formula to calculate ROI, but there are several different ways to calculate it depending on your business. This metric is valuable because you can determine which leads are generating revenue through your drip campaigns and how it contributes to the overall sales of your business.

Next Steps

If you’re not using drip campaigns, now is the time to start. They can help turn email subscribers into customers, increase repeat purchases, and re-engage a dormant audience.

With the email drip campaign examples above, you should be able to develop a campaign that fits with your brand and resonates with your audience.

Don’t worry if you don’t know how to sell your brand. Our previous blog post, "Building a Brand Story," will teach you everything you need to know to create authentic drip emails tailored to your brand. 

If you have any questions about email drip campaigns or want to start a digital marketing campaign, schedule a free consultation with us through the button below!

Who We Are.

Noetic Marketer is a full-service digital marketing agency with roots in both Ottawa and the GTA. We specialize in creating and optimizing digital marketing campaigns for higher education, e-commerce, professional services, and contractors. As digital marketers, we strive to find solutions to every company’s lead generation challenges, creating personalized marketing strategies that suit the specific needs of our clients.

About The Author

Krystal Wiltshire first got into the digital marketing world when she interned at a small agency in Montreal, Quebec, where she discovered her knack for blog writing.

Since then, she has continuously improved her skills, working closely with small business owners and marketing teams in larger-scale businesses.

As a Content Marketing Specialist at Noetic Marketer, Krystal strives to create content that positions our client’s brand or company in a positive light and uplifts them to become an industry leader.

When she’s not working, Krystal loves to break into spontaneous dance sessions, look up new recipes to cook and watch her favourite crime shows on Netflix.