What Is a Drip Campaign for SMS?

Drip... Drip... Drip...

Did you just get an image of a leaky faucet? And can’t you just hear the steady sound of that water slowly drip, drip, dripping?

That image illustrates the idea of a drip marketing campaign (the name reportedly being derived from the concept of drip irrigation).

A drip campaign is a series of automated messages that “drip” out over a period of time.

Because we all know that automation can help free up time in your busy life and focus on what’s important!

Plus, you’re already aware of the dominance of texting in society, and you want to take advantage of it. (There were 2.2 trillion texts sent in a single year in the United States alone, after all!)

You may already know about the concept of a drip campaign for email. But what is a drip campaign for SMS? Can you do the same thing with texting?

The answer is yes!

Here we’ll talk about how you’d go about that.

What Is a Drip Campaign for SMS?

Before we get into how to set up a drip campaign for SMS, let’s go a bit more into what is a drip campaign for SMS?

Let’s say you what to send out a series of messages to your audience. Maybe an onboarding campaign or a promotional series or educational snippets.

But here’s the rub: You don’t want everyone to receive the flow of messages at the same time.

You want them to get started on the messaging flow when they take some kind of action, like signing up for your texts, for example.

And you also don’t want to deal with the hassle of manually scheduling out all of these messages individually to all of your contacts. Because that would be a nightmare!

So what do you do?

Enter SMS drip campaigns.

Drip campaigns allow you to set up the entire series of messages you’d like to send ahead of time. (You can even include delays in between the messages to indicate how far apart each message should be sent from the previous one.)

Then people will individually start receiving the message series once they’re added into the campaign.

This allows you to individually send out the flow of messages you want to send in the timeframe you’re wanting to send it. And it frees you up from having to manually schedule all of these messages one by one.

What Is a Drip Campaign Use Case for SMS?

So the idea of SMS drip campaigns is an interesting concept.

But is it actually useful?

You betcha!

So how can you use it?

Although the possibilities are only limited by your imagination, there are 3 primary use cases for SMS drip campaigns.

Promotional

You know that texting is the best way to get in front of people (and thus drive up sales and engagement).

So you can use a drip campaign to send out a series of promotional texts.

For example, let’s say you have an awesome, extended deal or series of deals. You want to set it up so that when a user takes a particular action, like signing up for your texts, they receive a new deal a day for 7 days.

How would you go about that?

The answer: SMS drip campaigns.

Set up a workflow with the deals you’re wanting to include and your campaign will cycle through the messages automatically for each individual recipient.

Just set it up once and you’re done.

How cool is that?

Onboarding

Onboarding new customers, users, or employees can be a tricky thing.

What’s the best way to go about it? How much hand-holding do people need? How much documentation should people have to go through on their own?

An SMS onboarding campaign can be a nice tool to help simplify this process.

Through an SMS drip campaign, you can guide people step by step via manageable text messages.

Bite-sized chunks of information sent out through texting are digestible and reach people where they’re actually looking (on their phones).

Education

Say you have a segment of your audience that needs education about something.

They could be employees or recruits needing training about your company/organization.

They could be customers who want info about a new product or service.

In any case, an SMS drip campaign gives you the freedom to automate a series of educational texts so that you can provide people with the info they need at little hassle to you.

It’s a win-win all around!

What Is the Drip Campaign Setup Process?

Learning new tools can be difficult, even if you know they would be beneficial.

Sometimes you avoid things just because you have so much to think about already. You don’t want to add yet another thing to the plate!

Will these SMS drip campaigns be difficult to set up? Will it be time-consuming and stressful to learn the platform, figure out the tool, and make it effective?

As long as you know what messages you’d like to send, you can have your SMS drip campaign set up in minutes.

Here’s how.

Step 1: Sign Up for the SMS Platform

In order to utilize the drip campaign function you’ll first need an account on the Mobile Text Alerts platform.

Sign up here to test it out for free (no credit card or obligation required).

Step 2: Navigate to the Drip Campaigns Page

Once your SMS platform account is set up, you can navigate to the Drip Campaigns page.

From there, you’ll be able to see a list of any drip campaigns you’ve created. Click the “Add Drip Campaign” button to set up to create a new campaign.

After typing in the name you’d like to give to the campaign and clicking “Save,” you’re ready to start setting up the workflow for your campaign. Click the “Workflow” icon.

Step 3: Set Up Your Flow of Messages and Delays

From within your campaign workflow edit page, you can click “Add Message” to create your message.

You have the option to select the time of day you want your message to go out if you’d like. You can also include an image in your message.

Once you’ve filled out the message content, you can click “Save.”

You can add delays between messages by clicking the “Add Delay” button. This will allow you to select how many days of delay you’d like there to be before the next message in the workflow sends.

You can position new messages or delays that you add anywhere within the workflow. (You can reposition them later on as well if you change your mind.)

Step 4: Assign a Group to Your Campaign

Once you have your drip campaign workflow all ready to go, you just need to assign a group to the campaign.

“Groups” are organizational segments you can create within your account to help you manage your contacts. You can go ahead and create a group from the Manage Groups page by selecting the “Add a Group” button.

Once your group is created, you can go back to editing your drip campaign. Then, select the group(s) from the drop-down menu at the bottom, and the campaign will begin for that selected group.

This means that any of your contacts that get added to the assigned group will be automatically added to your drip campaign as well.

Thus, they will receive the messages you set up for your drip campaign workflow.

--

And you’re done setting it up!

Rest easy that you don’t need to spend hours figuring out how to get the drip campaign tool to work.

(And support is always willing to help with any questions.)

What Is a Drip Campaign Tool Used in Conjunction With?

A drip SMS tool may be fine and dandy and simple to set up, but are there other features that you need to learn in order to use it?

You want to make sure you’re not signing up for more than you bargained for!

There are 2 features that the drip campaign tool requires in order to work: opt-in methods and groups.

Opt-in Methods

An “opt-in method” is simply a way to add contacts into your text platform’s database.

Adding contacts can be as easy as clicking a button and typing in some information (if you want to manually add in people who have already agreed to receive your texts).

So this can be very simple and straightforward.

There are a couple other ways you can add contacts on your end as well:

• Import a spreadsheet of phone numbers
• Set up integrations with your current database management services via Zapier.com or by using API (if you’re a developer or have access to developers)

You can also give your audience options to subscribe themselves and be added to your database automatically.

There are several methods by which you can give this option to them:

• Provide them with a “text to join” keyword they can text in
• Post a QR code they can scan
• Share a link to a free web form they can fill out

As you can see, getting contacts loaded into your database can be very easy, but there are also robust options in case you’d like to dig deeper.

Groups

“Groups” allow you to organize all of those contacts from your SMS database into manageable segments.

You can manually assign your contacts to groups on your end, both individually or by importing a list.

Or, to save time and hassle, you can have your contacts add themselves to groups when signing up.

You can do this by assigning your “text to join” keywords to a particular group you’ve set up. Or by allowing your audience to select their desired group from the free web sign-up form.

As it relates to SMS drip campaigns, “Groups” are how the system knows which people to send the campaign messages to.

The campaign workflow is triggered automatically as soon as your audience member is added to the campaign’s assigned group(s) - whether they are added manually on your end, or whether they add themselves.

--

Onboarding for these other features that are necessary for drip campaigns to work is not difficult.

So not only can you have your drip campaign set up in minutes, you can have people added into your database to receive your messages within minutes as well.

The whole process can be set up and ready to go within half an hour.

(Sign up for the free trial today and schedule a demo to get a live walkthrough of how to get it set up.)

Other Frequently Asked Questions

How Much Does It Cost?

SMS drip campaigns are included in all of our plans.

Pricing starts at $19 per month billed annually, or $25 month-to-month.

What Is the Difference Between a Scheduled Message and a Drip Campaign?

With your SMS platform you can set up scheduled messages to send at specific days/times.

So what’s the difference between a scheduled message and a drip campaign?

While a scheduled message has to be scheduled for a specific date, drip campaigns will go out according to whatever date the subscriber is added into the drip campaign’s group.

Another difference is that scheduled messages can only be set up one at a time. A drip campaign, on the other hand, is a workflow of a series of messages and delays.

Can I Send More than One Message on the Same Day?

Yes! By specifying the time you’d like a message to be sent, you can also set up another message to be sent later in the same day by simply selecting a later time of day.

Can the Drip Campaign Messages Start as Soon as a Subscriber Signs Up for Texts?

Yes, you can assign a "text to join" keyword to a specific targeted group. Then you can assign your drip campaign to that group.

Whenever someone texts in that keyword to sign up for your texts, they’ll be added to that targeted group and will start receiving the messages in your drip campaign right away upon sign-up.

Free Up Your Busy Life

Any way that you can successfully automate processes is a win!

After all, your life is busy and your time is precious.

Use SMS drip campaigns to help you make the most of it.

SIGN UP TODAY FOR FREE