What's the difference between a drip campaign and an email newsletter?

[Anonymous]

We're getting ready to structure a lead nurture program, but I'm trying to understand what the difference and the upsides/downsides of a drip campaign vs a regular email newsletter. 

I suppose you could have both but that would be too much content for me to manage now. So here's what I'm seeing. What would you add, counter?

We were thinking of creating drip campaigns that:

• consisted of evergreen content so we could start everyone at the beginning of a series of content
• had an ending, e.g. drip ends depending on leads engagement with the drip
• would not require explicit opt-in, only implicit based on something you downloaded related to the drip

But then my colleagues asked if we could have several different newsletters instead, by topical area:

• this content wouldn't be evergreen, so if you entered it now you wouldnt get any content that was already sent 
• would never have an ending because if you subscribed to that newsletter, it meant you wanted all that content
• probably still would not require explicit opt-in, it'd be implicit like above - however there is the option to opt-in

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hey Christine, 

I would suggest getting consensus around the goals of your nurturing program to figure out the best strategy. 

E.g., (rhetorical questions) who are the leads you are intending to nurture? How did they get on your list? What problem are THEY trying to solve? What behaviour are you trying to encourage? What types of communications would best achieve this? 

From a technical perspective, I think you could combine your ideas in a variety of ways using an engagement program. 

The program could start everyone at the beginning and drip out your evergreen content. If you have some content that is time-limited you could enter it into the stream and make it availble for a limited time. Later leads wouldn't get it. 

You could have it be endless by adding new content and also have an exit program based on engagement (e.g., if MQL remove from stream, etc.). You could also have different streams/programs for topical areas to make it more relevant, if the volume of each segment made this worthwhile. 

I would generally recommend having an evergreen program that leads go through and receive a consistent experience. This way you can test and optimize to figure out what works best, as well as adding new stuff at the end for leads who are exhuasted. 

But again this could vary depending on the business scenario. 

[Anonymous]

We add everything to our nurturing programs - even newsletters. Then you edit availability of the newsletter to set an end date to which it can be sent out. Or perhaps you add a newsletter, it runs as long as the content is relevant. Then a month later you create a new newsletter and archive the old one.

We don't blast out any emails anymore. 

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree with both Adam and Justin here.

Newsletters can be very easy to run with Engagements now. But you need to split out your ideas.

1. Newsletter
2. Nurture of some type(s) with specific goals
3. subscription management. best to do opt in. Just make sure you dont send to EU or Canada if they havent explicitly opted in.

[Anonymous]

That's good advice everyone - I hadn't thought of setting up the newsletter as an engagement program. It sounds to me that the engagement program is really the way to go and I'm really still trying to understand how to optimize our use of it.