Optimizing Daily AI Drip Campaigns

Now that you're comfortable with the basics, let's jump into advanced use cases to maximize lead conversion.

This article is designed to help you get the most out of Daily AI drip campaigns. If you have not yet read “Getting Started with Drip Campaigns,” please complete that article first. You’ll need to have those basics covered before making full use of these tips. 

In this article, we'll look at drip timing, different setups, best practices, and advanced use cases. 

Drip Timing

In a drip campaign, you will see the “Drip Timing” button on the top right corner. Drip timing allows you to control when a campaign will run. 

For example, you can allow a campaign to run during business hours or 9-5 Monday through Friday. This means if a lead comes in on Sunday at 8 pm, they will not receive the first step of the campaign until Monday at 9 am. 

However, you may customize drip timing to include weekends, or to run from 6 am to 9 pm — whatever suits your needs. 

Setups

At the top of the screen within a drip campaign you will see the following buttons “Starting Date with subsequent delays,” “Set all dates,” and “Set all delays.” 

“Set all delays” is the standard setting and denotes that the steps are triggered by a delay. For example, a contact is added to a campaign and 1 minute later a text goes out. One hour later, an email goes out. 

“Set all dates” allows you to set a campaign that triggers on specific dates. This can be commonly used for holidays. 

“Starting date with subsequent delays” allows you to create a campaign that starts on a certain date and then runs off the standard delay format. This is popular for a weekend campaign for realtors, i.e. sending a text on Friday and sending a follow up a day later. 

Best Practices

In general the following is true:

• MMS or video texts/a text with a GIF gets the highest response rate.
• SMS gets the second highest response rate.
• Leaving voicemails gets the third highest response rate.
• Email gets the lowest response rate by far.

That said, there is nothing wrong with sending emails; however, we strongly recommend using a combination of the other communication types. 

Other Best Practices:

• Use the merge field functionality to make messages seem more personal and dynamic. You can insert or other fields from the contact or transaction.
• Use the “test” functionality to send yourself a test step. Use this if you are worried about formatting, using the proper merge field, or simply want to see what you are sending out before you send it.
• All campaigns stop on reply by default. This means if a contact responds after "step 2" they will not receive "step 3." By design, most campaigns should operate in this fashion. Could you imagine continuing to send out sms messages to a contact when they repeatedly tell you to stop?
  
  However, if you do wish to continue to send messages even if a contact replies you may click the "Do not Stop on Reply" button towards the top of the screen. We recommend only using this for email campaigns - such as a monthly newsletter where a contact may thank you for the email but you do not want to stop sending them ongoing content.We always recommend inserting the unsubscribe merge field into the email so if they do unsubscribe they will not receive any automated communication for you.
• At the bottom of the drip campaign you will see an option to "add follow up" or "update status upon completion." This allows you to trigger additional follow up campaigns once the campaign is completed. For example, you may add a lead to a 7 day campaign, but if it hey do not respond you will want to add them to your 1 year nurture campaign.
• Update status on completion gives you even more options and flexibility. For example, you can update the status to "no reply to outreach" and then allow that milestone/status to trigger a nurture campaign for the contact AND send an sms to the referral partner.