Drip campaigns involve sending marketing communication to the guests continuously over a specific period of time in order to nurture engagement and drive higher conversions.
In this article we will cover:
This campaign feature is available for Marketing PRO accounts and allows you to set up a series of pre-created marketing campaigns that will be sent out on a predefined schedule based on user engagement. Drip campaigns can be as simple as two emails and depending on your messaging, and goals can grow exponentially from there. Following best practices Revinate recommends sending not more than 3 emails in a drip campaign.
Benefits of drip campaigns:
- More revenue through series of engagement based promotions.
- Less effort in increasing guest engagement
- Create an ongoing conversation to keep you top of mind
Campaign Types allowing Drip Campaign Set-up
At the Property and Group level - Drip Campaigns will be available for all One-Time Campaign types. At the Property level this is also available for Automated Pre-Arrival Campaigns.
Steps in Creating a Drip Campaign
To learn more about the campaign create flow we encourage you to take a look at some of our other related training content.
- Select your Campaign Type
In the campaign creation flow when choosing the type of campaign you are sending note that under each modal you will see DRIP next to the A/B testing icons.
Note: You may A/B test or create a Drip Campaign but you may not do both.
- Enable Drip Campaigns
Selected your campaign type, then name the campaign and toggle to enable the Drip campaign feature.
Once you have toggled Drip Campaigns on, select the number of campaigns you would like to include in your messaging. We currently provide up to three emails added as it is a best practice in email marketing.
- Choose your Designs
Select the design for each of your email campaigns. Select from sent campaigns (these will be any campaigns you have previously sent) your saved campaign templates, Revinate’s design collections or your own advanced HTML options.
Going forward you will be able to distinguish which email in the campaign you are working on based on their numbering (eg. 1 of 3 or 2 of 3 etc).
All aspects of the campaign may now be edited with the exception of the sender name. Follow best practices for optimizing your email communications. Add engaging content, images and link your call to action buttons.
Note: The sender name must be the same for all emails in your Drip Campaign
Edit all emails you will send out (eg. edit 1 of 3 or 2 of 3 etc) until you reach the final Save/Next button to lead you to the Preview stage.
- Preview and approve for delivery
Preview your campaign to ensure optimal rendering on desktop, mobile and specific email software. Make sure to test all emails in the campaign (eg. preview 1 of 3 or 2 of 3 etc).
You may send yourself a test email of the campaign. You will in this step need to specify which of the emails you would like sent or you would like all the email sent to the email address you will enter.
When you are happy with how your emails are rendering make sure to click to approve them for delivery and move on to the next steps.
- Segmenting
Select or create a segment for your campaign. For more information on Segmentation feel free to check out our other segments content.
At this time, all subscribed guests in the segment will be set to receive all emails in the Drip Campaign. In the scheduling section you will be able to add additional options to your segmentation.
All campaigns begin enqueuing 30 mins before the set send time, and calculate exclusions based on campaign send limits, additional options, subscription status, and segment qualification. It is important to note that within this timeframe (~30 minutes from set send time) it will not be possible to stop or delete a campaign
- Scheduling
After selecting your segment, you will be in the scheduling section of the campaign flow and will set the time of day and date for each of your email communications to go out.
The exclusion of guests who have future stays is checked by default in the scheduling section of the campaign flow - as marketing campaigns should not retarget guests who have converted. If your Drip campaign series is informational, and you would like to communicate with guests who have future stays, you may uncheck this box.
- Review
After scheduling the email communications, review all settings for the email and select the ‘SCHEDULE NOW’ button to activate and send the campaigns.
Recipient numbers may be large as there are multiple emails going out so ‘send’ numbers will be higher than the number in the segment. As the ‘sends’ number is related to emails sent and not number of people receiving the emails.
Reporting
Reporting for Drip Campaigns will be visualized similarly to all other reporting with a few additions. A small icon will appear next to your campaign name on your campaigns page to indicate that this is a Drip Campaign for easy viewing.
*Note that Click-Tracking reports will divide by the email (eg. click tracking for 1 of 3 or 2 of 3 etc) the data on audience engagement and click behavior. This is for ease or viewing and analysis of individual email effectivity.
Drip Campaign Tutorial Video
For a quick overview and example of a drip campaign, see our instructional 5 minute video below.