Digital marketing technology and strategies are constantly evolving. With new technologies, many new marketing strategies develop quickly to help make use of the new mediums we now have access to. One such marketing strategy, drip marketing, is a modern way to market to a specific set of potential customers through targeted emails with relevant information that can help convert them into an opportunity and ultimately a customer. Microsoft’s new marketing platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, can help provide businesses with the tools they need to execute complex marketing strategies like drip campaigns.

Drip campaigns are used quite frequently, in fact it’s likely you have received drip campaign emails at some point. There are quite a few uses for this marketing strategy that any business may find helpful. Some of these can even be used to help coordinate marketing campaigns entirely remotely which can help a lot during experiences like the coronavirus outbreak.

A good example of this would be something like a group yoga program which must now take place entirely on a video call platform like Zoom or Microsoft Teams. An email list could be set up to automatically send the users an email with a link to that Teams meeting. The users can be easily sent new information before each session and additional information should the group owner decide to write out an email to send to all of them.

A drip campaign could then market to these contacts to provide information on additional sessions or helpful tips for practicing at home. The campaign could be more diverse even offering recommended products that the studio could ship. These are all ways in which a company who may otherwise have struggled during these times can now diversify and offer a wide variety of options to existing customers.

Of course, it would also be incredibly helpful to market to people that have not yet had contact with the company using a drip campaign. An example of this could be  a potential customer who has not had contact with the company registers for a free online webinar that is being broadcast by the company. The company could set up a registration portal in which users fill out their contact information, and the company sends them a link to a webinar. The user could then opt-in to a subscription list where they receive information about the company and any additional webinars or materials that they may be interested in.

Over time, the customer may find something else that interests them on one of these emails and will be willing to pay to view a webinar, or simply decide to do further business with the company. This is a prime example of how the “drip” of drip campaigns work: each email is essentially a new way to market to that subset of potential clients and each email presents an opportunity to convert that customer to a sales opportunity.

Drip campaigns are a very useful marketing practice that is utilized by most companies with a digital marketing strategy. Any time that an email subscription occurs, the subscriber is likely being targeted by a drip campaign. These may seem complicated to setup to someone without a technical background, and, to some extent, they are, but Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing provides a user friendly interface to set these drip campaigns up. One point of confusion that some may miss when looking at Dynamics 365 Marketing is that drip campaigns are not called drip campaigns in the system. While this may confuse some, a drip campaign is truly just a system of mailing lists that have specific emails created for whichever list they are working with.

Dynamics 365 Marketing uses the Customer Journey entity to create and manage drip campaigns. In Dynamics 365 Marketing, a Marketing Email is simply any email that is sent to a list of contacts. If you’ve ever looked at your subscribed emails and wondered how they can be so personalized, Dynamics 365 Marketing or a similar program likely had a hand in it. Marketing Emails are also very good at avoiding spam filters simply because whatever the marketer is trying to send in the drip campaign likely is not spam.

Dynamics Marketing provides tools like spam ratings to help a marketer create something that will make it through.

Marketing Emails are not the only part of a drip campaign, however. The other key part that Dynamics 365 Marketing offers are marketing segments. Marketing segments are selections of contacts which fall into a specific category. If a company was trying to market their new curbside pickup program which has just been activated in New York City, they likely wouldn’t want to include contacts which live in Denver. Segments allow for contacts to be grouped based off demographic information, location, or even the way that the contact was met in the first place. These allow for quick targeting according to specific details which make for much more effective marketing overall.

Not only does the customer in Denver know more about the products and services the company offers in Denver, the customer also will recognize that the marketing system, and ultimately the company, knows that they live in Denver. If you’ve ever been to a website which believes that you are in a completely different state or city than where you are, it can be very frustrating to change the data when it could have been solved immediately. Segments, then, allow for better personalization and relations with a potential customer.

This brings us to the final component that Dynamics 365 Marketing is uniquely engineered to help with. The most crucial part of the drip campaign is the actual emails that are being sent from it. Not only does Dynamics 365 Marketing provide marketers excellent options for creation of emails, but the customer journey system allows for very detailed breakdowns of what Marketing Emails get sent, who they get sent to, and when they are sent. The customer journey system is designed to slowly progress a contact towards the end result of a sale. It sends out different email based off what level of interaction the potential customer has had with the prior emails, then sends different emails in response to the next interactions.

Essentially a marketer using Dynamics 365 Marketing plots out a course for potential customers to take as they interact with the drip campaign they have built. The end result is a tailored towards the specific interests of the user which can cause tremendous amounts of sway towards further interaction with the company. A well-planned customer journey can give a huge edge over normal emailing lists because it pays attention to the user automatically. The best part of this is that it is entirely possible that the potential customer could have gone from completely unknown to the company directly into an opportunity status.