How to Create a Drip Campaign in any CRM

I have spent years in IT jobs, and the last few positions I have held I was asked to create drip campaigns that would automatically email (or text) the client base. Considering that i've now set this up many times I thought I would write an article about it to help others who would like to do this but have no idea where to begin.

The steps involved in getting a drip campaign setup and working are as follows:

1. Get your customer list imported into a CRM
2. Setup your email in the CRM so you can send email from it
3. Create the "Automations" in the CRM

For this article I am going to use Snapforce CRM to do this, I am choosing them because I used them in the last job that I did this and it was remarkably simple and quick. However you can do this process in most respectable CRM's on the market. If your CRM does not have the feature set to do this I would recommend switching.

 

Step 1 - import your customer list

Sample Customer List

When importing your data into Snapforce it is simple, you don't need to have the columns in any special order. The system let's you map the columns yourself right before it imports them.

Data Import Wizard From Snapforce

The last thing to do is click "Process" and the list will import. The screenshot below shows the results of the import, after I click "Process".

Import Results

Step 2 - Setup your outbound email in the CRM

Since we are making a "Drip Campaign" that will automatically send emails to our customers, we need to have our email setup so the system can actually send the messages from our email address. We don't want our customers to see a random email address the CRM uses, so we configure our own email address in Snapforce. Just click on your username in the top right corner, then select "Settings", then select "SMTP" under the Integrations section.

Email Setup Page in Snapforce

The settings in the screenshot above are correct for Gmail, all you will change is replace "joe@gmail.com" with your email address and put your Gmail password.

After you do this, your outbound email is ready to be used. You can send email manually in Snapforce or setup a "Drip Campaign".

Step 3 - Creating Automations

Since we are using Snapforce CRM for this tutorial, I am using the terminology of their system, Snapforce calls this feature "Automations". Your CRM may refer to this feature as something else.

For this article I will create a "Drip Campaign" that automatically sends 3 emails to any new customer. The first email will send 1 week after the customer is sold, the second email will send 2 weeks after, and the last email will send 3 weeks after. To do this click your username on the top right of the page, click "Settings", click "Automation", then click "Create Rule" and fill out the form for the first automation rule we are creating.

Create New Rule For First Drip Campaign Email in Snapforce

 

After you click "Next" button a new page will load that you should follow exactly as I filled out in the screenshot below. This part is how you instruct the "Drip Campaign" to send exactly 1 week after the customer was created.

When to execute the automation in Snapforce

You can specify other ways and times to send this first email by playing with the settings in the above step. The next thing to do is choose the action to take place when this rule is processed (which will be exactly 1 week after the customer was created). For our purposes we are going to send an email, this is where you write the email you want to send for the first email in the Drip Campaign.

Creating the email for the Drip Campaign in Snapforce

 

When creating the email to send you will notice in the screenshot above I used some placeholders for the "To" field and for the "First Name" in the body of the email. There are placeholders for any field you are using in the CRM, this page will show you all of the placeholders, these are just the two that I am using for this first email.

Once you click "Save" on this action you are done with the first email, it will automatically send 1 week after a new customer is created. To setup the other 2 emails you would do the same thing we did in Step 3, just create two more "Automations" and choose 2 weeks and 3 weeks after the customer is created.

If you have questions please leave them in the comments I am happy to help.

Integration

One more thing to note is that if you need more custom workflow automation built into your drip campaigns, it may be necessary to build your own integration to your CRM. For Snapforce there is a good starter php script I found to help you integrate to their API. You can find it here: https://github.com/exploitify/snapforce-crm-integration.