Best B2B email drip campaign examples: From onboarding to upselling

Email marketing revenue is estimated to reach almost 11 billion by the end of 2023. By applying drip campaigns in your marketing strategy, you ensure that your prospects are more likely to get to their planned destination while moving along their buying journey. Allowing you to send the right email at the right time and to the right audience, drip campaigns are a great tool in B2B to nurture your leads on a longer conversion path.

Moreover, with tailor-made drip campaigns, your chances to turn back those slipping out of your funnel increase since they receive only personalized and targeted content prepared specially to their preferences. 

At Belkins, we launched 16 drip campaigns that consisted of 70+ different emails. Within 2 months, these automated email campaigns brought us 15 new deals and almost 150 nurtured contacts who either replied to our emails or were moved to the next lifecycle stage.

In this article, we will cover top drip campaign types with real-life examples and best practices to help you bring your email marketing to new heights. 

Types of B2B email drip campaigns (+ proven examples from Belkins)

There is a set of drip email cases you can create to nurture prospects and leads, but we’d like to share the ones that are proven to bring us the most results. For more insight, we compiled our own B2B drip campaign examples.

1. Nurturing flow for your new leads

Nurturing drip campaigns are geared toward those leads who expressed an active interest in your services, but they are not SQLs or opportunities yet. They are those coming from gated content, webinars, lead forms on your website, and other sources where users voluntarily leave their contacts. In B2B, the main goal of this flow is to explain the specifics of your services and products and push these contacts for a call. Such campaigns are recommended to send emails once in 3–7 days.

It is important to dive deep into your value proposition for your leads. Craft emails addressing their pain points and bottlenecks, and offer them relevant solutions that resonate with their needs and challenges.

The best practice is to nurture them with educational emails, up-to-date newsletters, and emails that introduce you as a company.

Since you cannot automate newsletters as news is time-sensitive, you can surely automate your evergreen educational content, sharing your checklists, e-books, articles, or just any useful insights with your prospects.

Example of the B2B email nurturing campaign:

A nurturing newsletter that engages readers

2. Reengagement flow for your lost SQLs and opportunities

When working with your sales qualified leads (SQLs) or opportunities, you definitely get plenty of contacts who didn’t convert into clients and moved to your “lost” prospects. They are those who: 

• Went with your competitors
• Don’t have time to dive into specifics at the moment
• Can’t allocate the needed budget

In any case, don’t give up on them right away! Create drip campaigns that will help delicately reach out to these prospects. Check the status and engage with them via relevant and useful info on your new services, customer success cases, achievements and awards, trends, etc.

Example of the reengagement campaign for prospects who went with competitors:

One of the emails we send to prospects who chose competitors highlights the financial benefit of working with Belkins.

3. Upsell flows for your existing customers

If you have more than one product or service to suggest, it is always a good idea to upsell/cross-sell to your existing customers, as their conversion rate is much higher compared to the prospects’.

Set up a drip campaign where you cover the main benefits of your alternative offerings and include a CTA to discuss them with your sales team. As an option, you can offer your customers a complimentary product or service to enhance their current results or utilize loyalty discounts to buy a more expensive product or service.

Example of the upsell campaign:

We chose CRM integration and consultation as a supplementary service that enhances our clients' sales performance

4. Onboarding flow (community + subscribers)

If you offer your prospects the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter, community, podcasts, or other related resources or profiles, make sure you do not leave them wondering what they should do next. Create short and informative drip campaigns that onboard your new subscribers, sharing their next steps with them and guiding them through your best materials/channels, etc. If applicable, also remind them about your products or services.

Example of the onboarding campaign: 

Belkins onboards community members with a summary of ongoing activities and benefits

5. Reactivation for unengaged leads

Not your whole database will be engaging with your emails. The best practice is to reactivate your unengaged contacts with several emails and, if they do not get back to you, exclude them from your sending lists. Follow these two steps:

1. Make a dynamic segment that will include all the contacts who got 10+ emails and didn’t open any of them (or tailor these criteria to your specifics). 
2. Create a drip campaign that will get triggered when a contact enters your “inactive segment” and send 2–3 reminders to confirm their subscription to your emails. If they don’t, mark them as unsubscribed or exclude them from your database.

📚 Related article: How to scrub your email list for better open rates and ROI

Example of the reactivation campaign

One of the methods we use to reactivate leads is offering them to check out our usefull content

How to create a B2B email drip campaign: A step-by-step process 

1. Identify the audiences and choose the triggers

Think about whom you want to target with every drip campaign. Addressing your target audience’s needs will help you craft personalized messages. For example, if users downloaded a case study on your website, you can set up a drip campaign to automatically add them there and send them fresh and relevant success stories.

Once your audiences are identified, it’s time to segment them. Ask yourself, “What can trigger this audience?”

2. Think through your process steps and goals

Imagine how your whole process will look and visualize drip campaign sequences by such criteria as type and goal. If you plan to create more than 1 flow, draft a scheme of your flows in tools like Miro. Check if your emails overlap, what intervals you need to put between them, etc.

3. Select a drip campaign software

If you already have a CRM, it makes sense to check if it also supports creating drip campaigns. Mostly, tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and others have this feature already available, so you won’t need to connect anything else. Otherwise, you can consider email marketing services that only provide you with features related to marketing and drip campaigns: Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Iterable, and others.

📚 Related article: How HubSpot & sales enablement drove Belkins’ 15% closing rate of outbound leads and $5M in new revenue

4. Choose your suppression criteria

Suppression criteria are ​​the rules according to which you remove the contact from your drip campaign. For example, if you need to exclude your existing customers from your nurturing flows, you will need to set up a suppression criterion like “Suppress if the lifecycle stage = customer.”

Ask yourself the following: 

• Whom do you want to exclude from this flow immediately? 
• Do you want people to get enrolled more than 1 time if they meet your trigger criteria?

Make sure you build your suppression criteria accurately so that you don’t overwhelm irrelevant audiences with plenty of emails. See the example below:

5. Craft the message for each email

Now, when you understand your flow, it’s time to start creating personalized emails. Write strong copy, prepare visuals, and create HTML templates. Keep in mind mobile adaptation, the actuality of dark theme, and key factors that influence email deliverability.

📚 Related article: How to write B2B emails that win big deals

6. Measure the campaign and adjust accordingly

To ensure you get clean analytics, here are several simple tips:

• Make sure you include UTM parameters in all your emails to track their performance in Google Analytics. Many email marketing tools allow you to do that automatically, so we recommend you check for these settings.
• Create standardized names for your emails. For instance, use this template for titles: “Type – Audience – Full name of the email –  Date.” This helps you sort your campaigns easily to pull relevant stats on their performance.
• Once every few weeks, check the performance of all your drip campaigns. Change emails’ order, intervals between them, and other parameters if needed. Run A/B tests if your tool allows that. It is recommended to test subject lines, visuals, text length, tone of voice, CTAs, etc. 

When tracking the results of your B2B drip email campaigns, you should take into account the average indicators of email campaigns in general: open rate (OR), click-through rate (CTR), and click-to-open rate (CTOR). So on average, the email performance stats are as follows:

These are average metrics that significantly vary depending on the industry and your company specifics. Here are the other factors that influence your email marketing results:

• The conversion and engagement of drip emails that are connected to the recent event will be higher.
• However, drip campaigns for inactive leads are likely to bring low results since the audience is passive. 
• But if your campaign is connected to the prospects’ actions and to the specifics of their segments, traction will be obvious. 

In our practice, automated email flows perform better than one-time emails. Moreover, the deliverability rates are higher for drip emails since you are sending them one by one instead of creating bulk campaigns that are more likely to trigger spam filters.

📚 Related article: What are B2B cold email response rates? Belkins’ 2023 study

Best practices for B2B drip campaigns

Based on the abovementioned process, we’d like to add some more tips to streamline your drip campaign workflows:

• Use your existing data to establish the most profitable segments you can target with drip campaigns.
• Think through the sequences’ details. How will your automated flows overlap? What will be the timing? Do you need to exclude them from your one-time campaigns?
• Make sure your tech stack supports what you intend to design. We suggest HubSpot for B2B drip campaigns.
• Set up the workflows.  Decide on your suppression lists, indicate whether you’d like people to re-enroll and whether you want to exclude non-fit subscribers, etc.
• Test senders’ persona. Consider whether you should contact recipients on behalf of the CEO, community manager, or content marketer.
• Apart from that, test the letter format. Determine whether it should be designed as HTML or a plain text letter.

Besides these recommendations, it’s essential to craft email campaigns that are focused on conversion in the long run: booking an appointment, signing up for a demo, buying a product/service, etc. We compiled some useful materials on that topic to help you tune up your emails and close more deals:

• How to get a sales appointment via email
• 6 best cold email templates to close more sales
• 9 proven B2B email templates for generating more leads

Conclusion

The true power of drip campaigns lies in their ability to meticulously segment your email list, allowing you to unleash personalized messages that resonate deeply with your target audience. By understanding their pain points, addressing their specific needs, and offering tailored solutions, you establish a connection that goes beyond mere marketing. It’s like speaking directly to the core of each prospect’s business challenges.

We helped companies achieve 300% YoY growth and 10M+ deals in the pipeline. If you need a boost in your lead generation campaigns and book up to 20 appointments per month, let us help you with the following:

• HubSpot setup consultation and support
• Lead generation with further systematic cold email sequences
• Warm-up of your IPs and domains to increase email deliverability
• Due diligence of your current email campaign performance with further recommendations for improvement

If you have any questions or need consultation, contact our experts — they are willing to help you in your cold outreach campaigns anytime.