Drip email campaigns: welcome series, abandoned carts, tools

A newsletter goes to everyone at once regardless of where they are with you. A drip campaign reaches each person at the moment they are paying attention: just after they signed up, just after they bought, just after they left something in a cart. The numbers reflect that.

• Welcome emails typically see open rates of 40% to 60%, against 15% to 25% for a routine newsletter.
• Abandoned cart emails commonly recover 5% to 15% of abandoned orders, and research from Baymard and others puts the average US cart abandonment rate around 65% to 70%. That is a lot of revenue sitting in a sequence you have not built.
• Post-purchase sequences drive reviews and repeat orders at a fraction of the cost of acquiring a new customer.

And they are mobile-ready by necessity. Litmus and Return Path data this year put mobile opens at roughly 35% to 40% of all email, so every template should be readable on an iPhone or Android screen.

Build this first. It applies to every business with a signup form.

Rules that make it work:

• Promise something specific at signup, a discount, a guide, a checklist, and deliver it in the first email. Vague "join our newsletter" forms get vague subscribers.
• Send from a person's name at the business, not "noreply." Replies are a feature.
• One call to action per email. The welcome series is not the place for a nine-link newsletter layout.
• Write the subject lines last and keep them under 50 characters so they survive on phones.
• Stop the series when the person buys. Most tools can do this with a segment or a list move; check before you build.

For online stores this is usually the single most profitable email you will send. The sequence:

1. One hour after abandonment. A plain reminder with the product image, name and price, and a link straight back to the cart. No discount. Many abandonments are interruptions, not objections.
2. 24 hours later. Address the objections: shipping cost, return policy, security, a phone number for questions. Still no discount for most stores.
3. Three to five days later, optional. A modest incentive, free shipping or 10% off, with an expiration. Use this carefully. Shoppers learn fast, and a predictable discount trains them to abandon on purpose.

Requirements: you need the email address before the shopper leaves. Ask for it as the first field in checkout, or capture it when someone logs in or signs up for the newsletter. Your platform also needs to know what was in the cart and pass it to the email tool, which is where the tool choice matters.

Watch the numbers: recovery rate, revenue per email sent, and whether discounting in email three is pulling margin from orders that would have completed anyway.

Once the first two are running, add:

• Post-purchase: shipping confirmation with a human touch, a how-to or care guide a few days after delivery, a review request two to three weeks later, and a replenishment or complementary product email timed to the product.
• Re-engagement: for subscribers who have not opened in 90 to 180 days, a short two-email sequence asking whether they want to stay. Remove the ones who do not respond. Deliverability improves when you stop mailing dead addresses, and Gmail's new Priority Inbox and tab experiments reward engagement.

The choice depends on list size, whether you sell online and how much integration you need.

Small business email tools with autoresponders. MailChimp (autoresponders on paid plans, from about $10 a month for 500 subscribers), AWeber (from $19 a month), Constant Contact (autoresponder included, from $15 a month), GetResponse and iContact. All handle welcome and post-signup series well. Abandoned cart support depends on your store platform: MailChimp's Ecommerce360 and a growing number of Magento, Shopify, Bigcommerce and Volusion plugins pass order data, but true cart abandonment often needs an add-on.

Cart abandonment specialists. Rejoiner, SaleCycle and similar services exist specifically for cart recovery, typically on a monthly fee or a percentage of recovered revenue. Magento merchants also have several extensions in Magento Connect that send abandoned cart emails directly.

Marketing automation. Infusionsoft (around $199 a month and up, plus a setup fee) suits small businesses that want contact management, sequences and ecommerce in one place. HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo and ExactTarget serve larger budgets and sales teams. These add lead scoring, branching logic and CRM sync, at prices from several hundred to several thousand dollars a month.

Transactional email services. SendGrid, Mandrill and Amazon SES are for developers building sequences into their own application. Cheap and flexible, no templates or list management.

Choose the simplest tool that can send the sequences you actually plan to build this year. Migrating later is a nuisance, not a catastrophe.

• Authenticate your sending domain with SPF and DKIM. Every tool above documents how.
• Comply with CAN-SPAM: accurate from and subject lines, a physical postal address in every email, a working unsubscribe honored within ten business days.
• Never add purchased addresses to an automated sequence. Spam complaints from a cold list damage delivery for your whole domain.
• Test every template on a phone. Single-column layouts, 14-point body text, buttons at least 44 pixels tall.
• Watch bounce and complaint rates monthly. Above 0.1% complaints is a warning sign.

Writing all the emails before deciding the goal. Each sequence has one job. Decide what a person should do by the end, then write backwards.

Over-discounting. The first abandoned cart email should remind, not bribe.

Never updating. Sequences built in 2010 still mention products you no longer sell. Review every automated email quarterly.

Not tracking revenue. Tag every link with Google Analytics campaign parameters so you can see what each email produced.

Building in the wrong tool. A beautiful welcome series in a tool that cannot see your orders will never become a cart recovery program.

We work through discover, plan, build, improve. Discovery maps the moments that already exist in your business: signups, purchases, abandoned checkouts, service milestones, renewal dates. Planning picks the two or three sequences with the clearest return, chooses the tool that can actually see those events and defines the measurements. Build is the copy, templates, integration with the store or CRM, and testing on real devices. Improve is the monthly review of open, click, conversion and revenue per sequence, with subject line and timing tests.

Because our automation and web teams work alongside growth and brand, the integration gets done properly. The checkout captures the email early, the store passes cart contents to the email tool, the templates match the brand and the landing pages those emails point to are built to convert on a phone.

A representative engagement is described on our ecommerce work page. An online retailer was sending a monthly newsletter and nothing else. We built a four-email welcome series tied to a specific signup offer, connected the store to the email platform so cart data flowed through, launched a two-step cart recovery sequence without a discount and added a post-purchase review request. The automated emails became the retailer's largest email revenue source within the first quarter despite being a small fraction of volume sent. That pattern repeats: the automated messages do the work, the newsletter keeps the relationship warm.