Create A Simple Email Drip Campaign With ConvertKit

If you are looking for a convenient way to market your brand, content, or products to your audience, email marketing is a sure way to succeed.  While there are several marketing automation platforms available, ConvertKit is a flexible tool and affordable option for creating email drip campaigns.

Why create email drip campaigns?

1. You can customize your emails based on interests, member status and much more. This is a better option than broadcasting an email to your entire audience and knowing that only a small portion will take interest in it.
2. It’s great for keeping your brand in the back of your subscriber’s mind. Subscribers that are part of automation sequences can periodically receive customized emails at no extra effort.
3. It’s great for sales. If you have a product that has a longer buying cycle, emails are a good way to keep customers informed about your products. You can also use different content strategies such as text, images, and videos to keep your product fresh and relevant to your subscriber.
4. It requires little to no work in the long term. Designing and creating email drip campaigns require more work upfront. However, once those campaigns have been created, there won’t be much additional work to maintain them. As long as you continue to add new subscribers to your campaign, it will continue to run. In the future, you can always come back and revamp some of the emails for higher open rates and click-through-rates.

There are 3 main aspects that we’ll be looking at when building an email drip campaign in ConvertKit. The first is audience segmentation. ConvertKit allows you to tag your subscribers so we’ll be using tags to segment your list of subscribers. The second aspect is email sequences. These are the series of emails that will be sent out to your segmented audience. The third aspect is automation workflows. These workflows determine when your email sequence should be triggered and for which audience type it should be triggered for.

Segment Your Audience

Whether you are just starting to build your list of subscribers or already have an established list, you will want to segment your audience so that each subscriber will be part of a relevant email sequence.

Navigate to the Subscribers tab and scroll down until you see the Tags section on the right-hand side. Create the appropriate tags for your audience.

Tips For Segmenting Your Audience Based On Interests

If you are struggling to come up with tags, this tip is a sure way to help you understand your audience’s interest. You will want to broadcast an email to your entire subscriber list and ensure that the email contains multiple links to different topics. When you insert a hyperlink into your email, you will have the option of tagging subscribers that have clicked on the link. By doing this, you can insert them into an email drip campaign of a topic they have clicked on and therefore shown interests in.

Create Email Sequences

Now that you’ve decided how to segment your audience, you can create email sequences with content specific to that audience. 

Click on New Sequence in the Sequences tab.

Give your sequence a name.

Write a compelling title in the subject line of your email. Also, write the rest of your email. Be sure to save periodically.

Click on Add Email to add another email to the sequence.

Once all your emails are written and ready to be sent, set them to Active status. Be sure to space out the WhenTo Send time so your subscribers don’t get overwhelmed with too many emails in their inbox. I like to space out send times by 5 to 7 days, but this can vary depending on your niche.

Tips For Creating Email Sequences

You’ll want to ask yourself a few questions prior to writing any emails.

1. What is your objective? Do you want to sell a product or provide information?
2. How can you break your objective into smaller chunks?
3. What would your subscribers want to know?
4. If you are selling a product, do you have any testimonials, ratings, or incentives?
5. Is your content or product time sensitive? If so, you’ll want to highlight this in your emails.
6. Is there a limited quantity of a product? If so, you’ll want to highlight this in your emails.
7. Are there any frequently asked questions or concerns that you’d like to address?
8. Are there any statistics that you’d like to share? Numbers can provide credibility if the information you are sharing is backed by reliable sources.

After going through the questions above, you may find it easier to brainstorm ideas for email topics in your sequences.

Set Up Automations

The simplest automation in ConvertKit is to start an email sequence once a subscriber has been added to a tag.

Navigate to the Automations tab at the top and then select New Automation.

Create an event trigger by selecting Is added to a tag and selecting or typing in the name of your tag.

Next, select Action from the set of options and add the subscriber to an email sequence of your choice.

Lastly, enable your automation and you’re done!

Now, if you have multiple email sequences and your subscribers can move from one sequence to another, your email drip campaigns will look more complex. Take a look at the two examples below. The first campaign is for subscribers that have signed up online to get more information. The second campaign is for subscribers that have signed up for a membership.

Feel free to experiment with your drip campaigns to determine what works best.

Tag Your Subscribers

The easiest way to tag subscribers that are already in ConvertKit is to navigate to the Subscribers tab, select relevant users from your list, and select Add a Tag via the Bulk Action dropdown.

Another easy option is to upload a CSV file with your subscribers’ information.

Click on Add Subscribers in the Subscribers tab.

Next, select Import a CSV.

Upload your CSV file, select the tag(s) you want to add to the subscribers in your file, and select the field names associated with the columns. Click on Import Subscribers and you’re done!

Conclusion

I hope you are one step closer to providing personalized emails to your users, customers or subscribers. Whether you are a local business or an online retailer or blogger, email drip campaigns can have a positive impact on your business and your subscribers. Overall, it’s great for sending targeted emails and automating content delivery without much effort.