Drip marketing, also known as lead nurturing, is an effective way for nonprofits to use emails to build relationships with supporters and prospective donors over a period of time. Along with automated responders, dedicated emails, digest emails and newsletters, drip emails are important to include in your email strategy.
A drip email campaign starts with a donor’s first interaction with your organization—and it’s automated, so once it’s set up, it’s very easy to pull off.
Let’s say I make a donation to your nonprofit—that’s day one, and I receive email number one. It’s the auto responder that you set up, and it’s triggered by my donation.
Then a week or two later, I’m going to get email number two. Maybe this is a short message about your nonprofit’s mission—something that educates. A short time after that, I’ll receive email number three with maybe an opportunity to learn even more about your cause. So I’m on a sequence. This is how the whole process works with the drip campaign.
Of course, every subscriber will be on a unique schedule for drip emails, depending on how and when they interact with your organization. But like I said, these emails are automated, so once you have a system in place, they’re easy to implement. That’s the difference between a drip email and, say, an email newsletter. An e-newsletter is the same message to everyone, regardless of whether or not they became a constituent yesterday or three years ago. A drip campaign starts and ends on a timeline based on that person’s interaction with your organization.
So drip campaigns are very important, and you can use them to education, re-engage constituents, promote fundraisers and events, or to simply keep your nonprofit on your supporters’ minds.
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