A key component of many email marketing strategies is a "drip" sequence. A drip sequence sends a series of emails to an audience over a time period chosen by the marketer. This type of campaign can be useful for a variety of cases, such as a welcome sequence to a new member, a series of reminder emails to people who have added a product to their cart, and more. This article will show you how to construct a drip sequence in Feathr.
Auto Send Campaign Combos
Feathr offers three types of email campaigns. If you're setting up a drip sequence, you will be using Auto Send campaigns to do so. That's because an Auto Send campaign is triggered by a behavior, and a drip sequence will trigger more than one email send based on that behavior.
Begin by logging into your Feathr account and navigating to the Project you'd like to use for your drip sequence. Then click +Add Campaign in the top right corner. Choose Auto Send from the menu, and name your campaign. That will bring you to the Campaign Wizard.
Setting up the first Campaign
Step 1 reiterates your Campaign name and asks you to choose a send window. Send window is not the date the email will be sent, but the open window of time you would like the campaign active. For example, if your drip sequence corresponds with a 3-month membership drive, make the send window the same 3 months.
The next step is sender info. This asks you to validate the email address your email will use to send. Your recipients will see this address in their inbox as the sender, so make sure it is appropriate for the project.
In step three, you will choose your trigger activity, delay time, and frequency of send. These are the most important elements of a drip sequence.
Trigger Activity
An Auto Send campaign will send the email attached to the campaign to anyone who 1) performs the trigger activity, and 2) has a known email address in your Feathr database.
For some trigger activities, such as a membership signups or event registrations, you will collect email address by definition, since providing it is part of the trigger activity. For simpler trigger activities like URL visits, an email will only be sent to page visitors who have a known email address in your database already.
Defining a trigger activity is the same concept as defining a goal activity for an ad campaign: you are choosing the activity that will trigger an email to be sent, and building the filter that defines that activity in your campaign. Learn more about goals here.
If your trigger activity involves a 3rd party vendor or form submission, you may need to set up an advanced conversion prior to publishing your drip sequence.
For lots more about how to use activity filters just like the one in your Auto Send campaign, browse the Community section of our Help Desk.
Delay Time
Along with trigger activity, delay time is the crux of the technical success of any drip sequence. It is, in fact, what defines the "drip" part. For the first email in the sequence, you can choose an immediate send (no delay), or something relatively short (such as 30 minutes). If your trigger activity is more complicated than a URL view, some processing time might help make sure you actually retrieve the email address of your target, in which case a 30-minute delay time is suggested.
For every additional email in the sequence, you will set up a separate Auto Send campaign with the same trigger activity, but a longer delay time and a different email message.
For example:
Email 1's trigger activity could be signed up as a member, the delay time could be 30 minutes, and the email message could be a simple "welcome to our organization" message.
Email 2's trigger activity would also be signed up as a member, but the delay time could be 24 hours, and the email message could be a "benefits of membership" message.
Then, email 3's trigger activity would still be signed up as a member, the delay time could be 48 hours, and the email message could be a "activities near you" message.
This works because the "countdown" to send begins for all three emails upon the exact same trigger activity, but the delivery times are staggered appropriately.
Send Frequency
In the same step of the Email Campaign Wizard, you have the option to send your email to an individual every time they complete the trigger activity, or only the first time. For most email drip sequences, you will set this to only the first time. To make an informed decision about this setting, consider your trigger activity and if any of your online audience is likely to do it more than once during the time your drip sequence is published. Also consider how specific the messages in your emails are to the trigger activity.
For example, if your sequence is meant to support a membership signup, it is unlikely someone will do that more than once since membership is a relatively long-lasting status.
A product purchase from an online shopping cart might be an example where the sequence should trigger every time, since people are more likely to make repeat purchases of products and you may want to extend the same information to them via email sequence with each separate purchase.
Completing the Sequence
Once you've completed the steps above, the rest is like any other email campaign. The remaining steps are primarily to make sure your email templates are complete and connected to the corresponding Auto Send Campaigns.
Read this help desk article for full instructions on how to build an Auto Send Campaign.
Read this help desk article to learn more about creating email templates in Feathr.