Drip Campaign Strategies

Using Email Drip Campaigns to Increase Automotive Service Winbacks

drip campaign
There are many components that make an email campaign successful. However, drip campaigns are a key necessity for successful automotive email marketing campaigns.

What is a Drip Campaign?

Drip campaigns are follow-up marketing campaigns. You might think of them as extensions of the main campaign. Customers receive a primary email campaign. Marketers use the engagement data (email opens, clicks, scroll-depth, etc.) to further segment the audience into follow-on campaigns, called drips.

Drip Campaigns Increase Open Rates

Automotive email marketing campaigns have an average open rate of around 22%.

A 22% open rate means OVER 75% of customers never read that email. The first and simplest drip implementation is the addition of a “Did-Not-Open” drip.  A “Did-Not-Open” drip segments the customers by who didn’t open the original email. This audience will receive a new version of the original email, but with slightly different content.

The goal of the drip email is to increase the open rate of the campaign and capture incremental service revenue.

Did Not Open Drip

To make this drip successful, the campaign is adjusted with:
  1. Different Send Time
  2. Alternate Subject Line
These changes solve the following challenges to the original email:
  1. The Time of Day of the first email send didn’t work with the customer’s daily schedule (i.e. recurring meetings at work, watching the children, etc.)
  2. The Subject Line was not attractive enough to capture customer interest.
Many automotive marketing agencies or stock OEM marketing cadences will only send one email per month and blast it to as many customers as possible. Casting a wide net, as they say, is a useful strategy in some scenarios. But you can’t do this for campaigns like Service Due Reminders. Not every customer is due for service.

The “Did-Not-Open” drip will typically increase open rates by another 35%.

Opened/Clicked Drip

The remaining segment is the customers who open or engage with the email. Open behavior is extremely helpful in knowing customer intent. If a customer opened a service related email or automotive promotional offer, there is high customer intent. 

We know this customer is considering a service-related purchase in the near future. The second drip every automotive email cadence should implement is the Opened/Clicked Drip. Customers opening emails have already don’t most of the mental leg work related to needed service. 

The Opened/Clicked Drip engages customers who open or clicked the first campaign. The content is usually similar to the first with more enticing offers. You know these customers are ready to buy, so it’s crucial to get them to a call or schedule service through your website.

Use Drips to Increase Winbacks

These are just a few of the common drip strategies that increase winbacks. If a customer has lapsed from service, drip campaigns are one the easier strategies to include in your outbound marketing cadence.

More engagement on your email campaigns can make the difference between a “good” month and your best service month ever!

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