Web Excursions 2022-09-18
Drip Marketing: What Is It and How Is It Done?
Have you ever signed up for an organization's newsletter and immediately felt out of the loop—like you missed a hundred emails leading up to the most recent one?
That's because new newsletter subscribers only see the emails that come after they've signed up.
Everything before that is lost to the void.
Drip marketing is the solution.
Drip marketing is a strategy that involves automatically sending out marketing emails on a schedule or based on user actions. It's known by many other names, including:
Drip campaigns
Automated email campaigns
Lifecycle emails
Autoresponders
Marketing automation
The content of the emails can also vary based on actions the person has performed. Some examples of actions that might trigger a drip campaign are:
Signing up for a service
Making a purchase
Abandoning a shopping cart
Registering for a virtual event
Put simply, drip marketing is all about giving people the right information at the right time.
Drip marketing gets its name from irrigation—you're slowly developing a relationship with your user by nurturing them with info, like a farmer would do with a sapling
When should you use a drip campaign?
Nurturing leads
Welcoming
Onboarding
Abandoned shopping carts
Recommendations
Renewals
For automatic renewals, try using an autoresponder that sends users an alert that their account is about to be charged.
If your subscriptions don't auto-renew, craft your drip campaign with a clear call to action, prompting users to re-up with your service.
Confirmations
Engagement
Courses
Unsubscribes
How to set up a drip campaign
Identify your target audience
Drips are usually based on one of two types of triggers:
An action taken on your website/app or from an email
An added piece of user demographic information
You might also try targeting audience segments based on user characteristics
Craft your message
Plan out your campaign
figure out the logistics of your drip campaign—what the workflow looks like from first contact to sale to support
set the goals
decide how you're going to measure your results
How many emails am I going to send, when, and in what order?
Do my triggers line up with my message?
How am I going to measure success?
Depending on your analytics capabilities, you could look at bounce rate, click-through rate, conversions, or time on site.
Just make sure your measurements loop back to the "why" of your campaign.
Start your campaign
Evaluate and adjust
When Tragedy Becomes Banal: Why News Consumers Experience Crisis Fatigue
Half a year later, the violence continues.
But for those who have not been directly affected by the events, this ongoing war and its casualties have been shifting to the periphery of many people’s attention.
Being attentive to realities like war is often painful, and people are not well-equipped to keep a sustained focus on ongoing or traumatic occurrences.
Ongoing tragic events, like the assault on Ukraine, can recede from people’s attention because many may feel overwhelmed, helpless or drawn to other urgent issues.
This phenomenon is called “crisis fatigue.”
Malevolent actors and authoritarians like Putin are aware of public fatigue and use it to their advantage.
This idea was articulated by the 20th-century French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil.
According to Weil, moral attention is the capacity to open ourselves up fully — intellectually, emotionally and even physically — to the realities that we encounter.
She described such attention as vigilance, a suspension of our ego-driven frameworks and personal desires in favor of a Buddhist-like emptiness of mind.
This mindset receives, raw and unfiltered, whatever is presented without avoidance or projection.
The difficulty of sustained focus on events like the war is due not only to the inherent fragility of moral attention, however.
As cultural critics like Neil Postman, James Williams and Maggie Jackson have noted, the 24/7 news cycle is one of many pressures clamoring for our attention.
Online news, with its perpetual drive to keep eyes trained on screens, is unwittingly undermining its own goals: to provide news and keep the public informed.
Journalists can include more solutions-based stories that capture the possibility of change.
Avenues for action can be offered to readers to counteract paralysis in the face of tragedy.