Drip Marketing is a method used in direct marketing to acquire customers through lead nurturing communication broken down into bite size chunks. It involves sending marketing information to prospects already in your sales funnel and spread across an extended period to gently nudge the prospect to take an action, instead of going for the hard sell.

Here are some examples of drip campaigns:

The below email examples are what you get when you browse Amazon, but do not buy anything – that’s drip marketing automation.

What is Drip Marketing

When you subscribe to a course, you get emails with course videos, quizzes etc. This is to encourage you to act and eventually buy the course.

What is Drip Marketing

So, when you do drip marketing, you do not try to sell in the first or second interactions but rather build value for the potential customer and get them to trust you.

“You track your prospect’s behaviour, send them bits of content they’d find interesting, and sell only when they are perfectly ready to buy, based on their actions.”

What are the most important features of drip marketing?

a) Keep it relevant 

Each lead is unique – they are individuals, with opinions, preferences, likes and dislikes. You cannot ignore that when you communicate with them.

b) Personalize your communications

Drip marketing engages your leads in a highly personalized manner. It is not spray and pray, it is drip and grip. 

It takes into consideration the interests of your leads, and is triggered based on their activities, instead of sending the same generic message to everyone.

Kind of like how Amazon does things. 

I looked up “Full metal Alchemist” on Amazon but did not buy it. In some time, I received this email.

What is Drip Marketing

“To market like Amazon is every marketer’s aspiration, and their drip marketing workflows are a strong reason why.”

You obviously know that these messages are automated. But, because they are personalized based on the recipient’s interests, they are highly effective – in catching the recipient’s attention, being opened, and making a sale.

c) User behaviour

Just last month I got a Kindle from my brother. Within 15 minutes, I had downloaded the Kindle versions of all the books in my reading-list (the ones that I found free). The next email I got in my inbox was this.

What is Drip Marketing

Then again, because I did not check this email, I had the following email in my inbox, after 8 days. A 1-month free subscription to Kindle Unlimited:

What is Drip Marketing

Now, the chances that I would subscribe for a free month are higher, and then after a month, there is a good chance that I would buy the 12-month subscription – conversion!! (this is exactly what I did with Amazon Prime).

d) It is pre-written

These user journeys are pre-defined and the emails pre-written. You are not writing a new email every single time a new prospect is interested in what you are selling. They just enter your pre-existing user journeys.

e) It is automated and sent on a schedule

Of course, by now it is clear that drip marketing is automatically triggered.

The trigger can be any action – (buying a book, completing a purchase, signing up for a product free trial, subscribing to a blog etc.) or inaction (not completing the purchase, not clicking an email, not using the app for a month etc.). The simplest trigger is passage of time (ex: a ‘Help’ email goes out 3 days after the user signs up for a product).

What is Drip Marketing

What are the key elements of a drip marketing campaign?

You know that drip marketing is a pre-defined, pre-written chain of email communications. So, to plan a good automation campaign, you need to understand a few elements. Now, what you call these elements depends on the drip marketing software you are using, but the essence and the function of these elements remains the same.


These events cause the entry of a lead into a drip user journey, or a lead’s movement down the funnel at a later stage. The Triggers can be anything from the creation of a lead, a first-time user registering on your online store, someone subscribing to your blog, or someone leaving an item unpurchased in their shopping cart.

What is Drip Marketing


While triggers set the drip campaign in motion, some Conditions might need to be met for the engagement actions (emails in this case) to begin. Example of a condition is: After a lead is created wait for 3 days to send him the first email, or after the 1st email has been sent out wait for the lead to click on a particular link of the email to send out the 2nd email.

What is Drip Marketing


These are the actual engagement elements – automated emails in this case. The Customer Review emails that go out to the prospective travellers when they express an interest in a travel package (marketing automation), the cart abandonment emails (e-commerce email automation), or the movement of a lead down the sales funnel when they have a positive phone call (sales automation), are all Actions. In case of drip marketing, they will be emails, SMSs, or social media messages.

What is Drip Marketing

Now that we understand what drip marketing is, what makes a campaign a drip marketing campaign, and what are the major elements of a drip marketing campaign, let’s move on to the benefits of drip marketing campaigns and why should you use them.

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