While there’s still some room for traditional marketing tactics, nothing can make or break a business more than its online marketing strategy. Almost every industry lives in the digital space.

Even if your dealership has a strong online presence, public interest doesn’t always translate to sales. Setting up the correct campaigns is key to keeping your dealership relevant, generating and converting prospects, and establishing long-term customer relationships.

This is where the drip campaign comes into play.

What Is a Drip Campaign?

The term drip campaign describes a particular form of an email campaign that relies on automatically-generated emails.

A drip campaign targets new subscribers or contacts. Automated communication is designed to help businesses stay in touch with prospective buyers, engage them, and guide them further down the sales funnel.

This differs from a nurturing email campaign which is much longer and focuses more on retention than boosting sales quicker. By default, drip campaigns move prospects through the sales funnel and try to get them closer to a sales conversation. However, they don’t add to the buyer’s journey.

Why Is a Drip Campaign Important?

The biggest benefit of a drip campaign is the response speed to specific triggers, such as getting a new contact, hitting a membership milestone, etc.

Reaching out to each customer or potential customer is time-consuming and challenging, even with a large workforce. However, auto-generated emails can be triggered instantly at specific points and reach the right people in a timely manner.

Most drip campaigns should enjoy an email open rate 80% higher than regularly sent emails and substantially more click-through rates.

This is a very efficient way of engaging prospects while they’re still warm and not giving them time to seek other deals.

It’s also a reliable method of promoting new content and deals and offering answers to questions your prospects might have.

Furthermore, it can help maintain brand awareness by putting your business at ther forefront of your prospects’ minds and doing it consistently without human input.

Drip campaigns essentially allow your team to work on the business and focus on sales calls, knowing that prospect engagement is taken care of. Companies that use drip campaigns and email segmentation can increase their revenue by over 70%.

Once you excel at drip campaigns, you can expect a significant boost in sales.

In addition, a drip campaign is necessary to set up a nurture campaign that will enhance the buyer’s journey and make prospects more likely to buy. If you want a higher conversion rate, setting up a drip campaign for your dealership is one of the first and most crucial marketing moves you can make.

How to Use a Drip Campaign

The reason for using a drip campaign is clear. It quickly engages prospects, moves them through the sales funnel, and makes them more eager to buy.

But the content matters. So, how should you use a drip campaign? What could you promote to set your dealership apart?

Offering a more extensive service package like IT supplies management or maintenance can give your dealership a competitive edge. A drip campaign is an excellent tool to promote this side of your business and make it stand out. If your dealership offers a larger technology stack and can monitor and support the client’s network and infrastructure, your sales might just go through the roof.

You can also direct prospects with a drip campaign towards webinars, lunch and learns, and other events that will nurture and help convert them.

How to Follow Up a Drip Campaign

After prospects go through a drip campaign, you should focus on converting. This is where your salespeople get a chance to shine.

While your sales team is focused on converting, your marketing team can analyze the drip campaign data. Was it as effective as planned? Could it be done differently to achieve better results?

This will help you optimize your next drip campaign.

Another step you can take is to move prospects and customers from a drip campaign into a nurture campaign. This is to ensure you hit your long-term goals, like a high repeat customer rate.

Launching a Drip Campaign

Every drip campaign requires the following steps:

  • Identifying the audience
  • Setting campaign goals
  • Creating the content
  • Scheduling the campaign
  • Launching the campaign
  • Analyzing the metrics to make adjustments

But if time is of the essence, the biggest challenges are automation and content creation. Using the right content and automation software will help you roll out a professional and effective drip campaign that can increase awareness for your dealership and position it as a leading service provider in your market.

Put a Drip Campaign in Your Marketing Toolbox

Automation is already doing wonders for businesses of all sizes. Using automation in the form of drip campaigns for your dealership is a quick and hassle-free way of engaging new prospects, getting them ready for nurturing, and converting them into loyal customers.

A drip campaign will help you keep all contacts informed of your services and maintain good brand awareness without requiring a full-time team to reach out and send relevant emails to your entire audience. Once properly set up, it will be one of your most lucrative tools.

If you want to find out more about drip campaigns, email automation, and how to expand your managed services, contact Evolved Office today.