The Go-To Guide to SMS Drip Campaigns to Reach, Nurture, and Convert

Let’s face it, SMS campaigns come in many forms, from one-off blast messaging campaigns to conversational flows. But SMS drip campaigns are some of the most valuable options for any organization to invest in, particularly if they want to nurture leads and boost engagement.

Drip messaging is all about “dripping” pieces of content into your customer’s inbox at predetermined intervals. For instance, you might use an instant automated text message to welcome a customer to your contact list, then send messages two, five, and seven days later introducing products.

The idea is to gradually build a relationship with your customers through regular, consistent communication. Over time, drip campaigns boost brand recognition, improve customer loyalty, increase conversion rates, and enhance engagement.

So, how do you use these campaigns effectively?

What are SMS Drip Campaigns?

These messages are pre-written, and delivered automatically according to specific rules. However, they can still be personalized, particularly with the use of dynamic fields and dynamic cohorts.

The whole idea behind drip texting is that it keeps the conversation going with your customer, or the contact you want to reach. You basically guide someone through a journey with your organization, with carefully selected messages that introduce them to products, or encourage them to take a certain action – like signing up for an event.

It’s just like using email drip campaigns – except with SMS, you’re not relying on someone to constantly check their inbox.

Text Message Drip Campaign Use Cases

The great thing about SMS drip campaigns is they’re incredibly versatile. Most commonly, they’re used to send promotional texts to customers, helping them to discover new products, or take advantage of an upcoming sale.

But the opportunities go beyond marketing, too. You can use drip texting for:

• Abandoned cart recovery strategies
• Welcome message flows
• Loyalty programs (to maintain engagement)
• Onboarding strategies
• Collecting feedback or reviews
• Encouraging customers to upgrade from a free trial
• Upselling or cross-selling customers
• Winning back disengaged customers
• Nurturing leads
• Issuing service or event reminders
• Recruiting

Plus, companies can add various elements to a text message drip campaign. For instance, you don’t have to automate every interaction. You can allow customers to respond to messages with a specific keyword when they want to talk to an expert, or use AI SMS tools to enable instant conversations.

SMS Drip Campaign Examples: Drip Messaging in Action

Still unsure what a text message drip campaign might look like in action? Here are some genuine examples of SMS campaigns you can “drip” to your audience to improve engagment, nurture relationships, and achieve your business goals.

Welcome Message Drip Campaigns

If you’ve read our SMS marketing guide, you’ll know that welcome messages are incredibly valuable. They set the foundation for a new relationship with your customer, letting them know what to expect after they “opt-in” to receiving messages from you.

They can also be an excellent way to drive immediate conversions. After you thank a customer for subscribing, you can introduce them to products or services they might be interested in. Sending discounts or voucher codes can even increase your chances of an initial purchase.

Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Lead-nurturing campaigns are all about building deeper relationships with your customers. The key to success here is ensuring you don’t just fill your flow with promotional message examples. Instead, use your SMS drip campaign to educate, inspire, and inform your audience.

Send a series of texts introducing customers to your products, achievements, positive reviews shared by other customers, and even valuable insights. That way, you’ll be more likely to earn their trust and convince them to buy something from you.

Abandoned Cart Recovery Sequences

One of the most valuable ways to use a text drip campaign, is to bring customers back to the checkout page after they abandon a purchase. Customers are easily distracted in today’s digital world, so if you’re using ecommerce SMS marketing tactics, you should have a plan for recapturing lost sales.

If you don’t you risk losing a lot of cash – remember, around $4.6 trillion in sales is abandoned every year in online shopping carts. Use your SMS strategy to remind customers of what they’re leaving behind, encourage them to complete the transaction with a discount code, inspire FOMO, or even answer questions they might have with AI.

Onboarding SMS Drip Campaigns

If you sell complex products (like software or technology), services, or subscription packages, you can use a text message drip campaign to help “onboard” your customers. After they make a purchase, send them a series of messages introducing them to valuable self-help guides, videos, and resources they can use to make the most of their purchase.

This is a great way to improve your relationship with customers, and earn their loyalty. Just make sure your customers still have a way to contact you for direct support if they encounter any problems during the onboarding journey.

Post-Purchase Campaigns

Even if you don’t need to “onboard” your customer, it’s still worth taking advantage of SMS workflow automation to handle a few post-purchase admin tasks. For instance, you could create a drip messaging flow that goes through the stages of:

• Thanking a customer for their purchase
• Upselling or cross-selling related products
• Providing updates on shipping
• Asking for feedback or reviews
• Announcing upcoming sales and releases

Loyalty Program Text Drip Campaigns

Loyalty programs are excellent at strengthening customer relationships and leading to higher long-term sales. In fact, one study found that 83% of customers who join a loyalty program are encouraged to continue buying from the same business.

You can use a drip texting campaign for everything from encouraging customers to sign up for your loyalty campaign to sharing exclusive updates and insights with VIPs and even reminding users to take advantage of their rewards.

Win-Back and Re-Engagement Campaigns

Ultimately, to stay compliant with TCPA guidelines, and A2P 10DLC registration rules, you’ll need to ensure that you stop contacting a customer as soon as they “opt out” of your contact list. However, until that happens, you still have a chance to win them back, with a re-engagement sequence.

If you notice that your customers aren’t opening or engaging with your marketing texts as often as they did before, create an SMS drip campaign to recapture their interest. Remind them of the products they love, your unique selling points, and the benefits of buying from you. Consider offering them a discount or a reward in exchange for their next purchase.

Reminder Messages

Sometimes, you don’t need a full drip messaging sequence to remind customers of something. For instance, if you have a one-day flash sale, you might just send a mass text to all of your customers once, reminding them that the event is happening.

Other times, it makes sense to use your text message reminder service to send a series of texts to customers over a set period. For instance, if a customer arranges an appointment with your healthcare company, you might send one text confirming the appointment, a text a week before the appointment, and another message the day before.

Conversational Messaging Campaigns

Even if you’re automating the majority of your text message drip campaign, you can make the experience feel more conversational for customers. Sending messages to customers asking them to respond to questions with simple letters or keywords can help you to improve your SMS personalization strategy, helping you to serve the right content to specific customers.

All you need to do is ask simple questions like “What products are you interested in” or " Would you like to hear about an upcoming sale?”

Feedback Solicitation Campaigns

Another way to use conversational marketing techniques in your SMS drip campaigns, is to use them to request feedback and testimonials. Sometimes, customers need a couple of nudges before they find the time and energy to leave you a review. However, all of those reviews are incredibly valuable when it comes to learning more about your customers.

Remember, try to make it as easy as possible for customers to share their insights, with links to a review page, or the option to choose their satisfaction level on a scale of one to five. Always thank customers for their feedback too.

Recruiting Text Drip Campaigns

As mentioned above, SMS drip campaigns aren’t just for nurturing and engaging customers. They can help you interact more effectively with other contacts too. For instance, in recruiting SMS, you can use drip campaigns to keep candidates updated about the progress of their applications.

You can also use these texts to gather information from candidates, whether it’s insights into when they might be available for an interview or feedback on the recruitment process.

The Benefits of Drip Texting for Businesses

SMS drip campaigns are valuable tools for businesses. They can help convert prospects into active buyers, increase repeat purchases and average order values, and even boost engagement levels, ensuring that you maintain strong relationships with your customers.

Although you’ll still need to follow the standard best practices for using SMS in business, like adhering to opt-in and opt-out rules, and personalizing campaigns, you can benefit from:

• Direct, Immediate Communication: Unlike emails, which often end up gathering dust in inboxes or spam folders, SMS messages have an off-the-charts average open rate. They help you to reach your customers wherever they are, at the most valuable moment in their journey.
• Two-Way Interactions: With support for shortcodes and even AI-powered tools, a text message drip campaign can be a two-way conversation. You can gather insights from customers to learn more about their preferences and dynamically upgrade your marketing strategy while improving customer service campaigns.
• Enhancing other Communication Channels: Using SMS drip campaigns doesn’t have to mean giving up on other communication or marketing channels. In fact, it can enhance your omnichannel marketing campaign. Imagine you’re launching a new product, you could start by teasing it on social media, then message opted-in customers closer to the launch date.
• Increased Engagement: Text drip campaigns are fantastic for enhancing customer engagement. They help keep your company top-of-mind with customers, answer questions they might be having proactively, and encourage them to interact with your brand.
• Valuable insights: If you’re using a dedicated messaging platform to schedule text messages for your drip campaigns, it should give you access to valuable insights. You’ll be able to monitor engagement rates throughout messages to help you adjust your messaging schedule and strategy. You can even learn from real-time feedback from customers.

How to Set up an SMS Drip Campaign: Step by Step

Now that we’ve covered the use cases and benefits of a text message drip campaign, it’s time to start experimenting with your own. Platforms like Clerk Chat make this easy, with convenient SMS templates and workflow builders to help you optimize your campaigns.

However, there are still a few steps you’ll need to master.

Step 1: Segmenting Customers or Leads

First, you’ll need to arrange your customers into “segments” based on their interests, location, and various other factors. Segmentation is a key part of ensuring you can send more personalized, relevant campaigns to customers at the right stages throughout their journey with your company.

It’s also crucial to ensure adherence to SMS compliance rules, as many regulations require companies to avoid sending blast texts to customers at inappropriate times. Create groups taking advantage of your SMS CRM integration, so you can organize customers based on their behavior, demographics, and preferences.

Ensure you’re also using dynamic cohorts or segments, meaning you can update customer details automatically. This will help you to follow SMS opt-in and opt-out best practices.

Step 2: Name Your SMS Drip Campaign

The name of your text message drip campaign might not seem important at first, but it’s important for clarity. If you’re running multiple campaigns with your ecommerce SMS texting service, for instance, you’ll want to make it easy for your sales and marketing teams to find the right workflows.

Make sure the name you choose is clear, straightforward, and relevant. For instance, you might name a campaign for a Summer Clearance “Summer Clearance 2025”. Every time you update that campaign or use the template to create something new, update the name.

Step 3: Create and Review Your Messages

Next, is actually creating the messages for your drip texting campaign. These messages should follow a logical sequence. For instance, if you’re creating a welcome campaign, you’d likely start by thanking someone to subscribing to your texting service, then move on to gradually introducing the products and services you offer.

Every message should be concise and consistently adhere to your brand’s tone of voice, and personality. Each of your messages also needs to deliver value to your customers, whether it’s with information, sales, discounts, or something else. Here are some great B2B SMS marketing examples to guide you if you’re creating drip sequences for your B2B brand.

Take advantage of dynamic fields to ensure each message is personalized. This will help you automatically refer to customers by name or share insights into their previous orders.

Step 4: Test, Review, and Optimize

Launching an SMS drip campaign is just the beginning. Once you start sending your messages, you should be tapping into your analytics and reports to gain insights into how you can improve. Pay attention to relevant metrics, like the open and click-through rates for each message, or the overall conversion rate of a full campaign.

Look at how often your messages prompt customers to unsubscribe, and consider asking for direct feedback from your customers regularly, about how you can improve your strategy. You can even use A/B testing with different groups to explore the value of different strategies.

Even if your drip strategies deliver excellent results right out of the gate, remember there’s always room for improvement when you have the right data.

Tips for Successful SMS Drip Campaigns

Finally, before we leave you to dive into your own drip texting strategy, we have a few final tips to share. Remember, while drip messaging is a valuable way to engage audiences, you need to overcome various hurdles, from maintaining compliance with regulatory standards to ensuring you constantly deliver a great customer experience.

Here are our top tips for success:

1. Remember Compliance

Don’t underestimate the importance of compliance. You’ll need to acquire consent from a customer before you contact them with any text message, whether it’s a one-off notification or a drip campaign. You’ll also need to ensure you’re protecting customer data.

Remember the difference between group texting and mass texting (you don’t want to accidentally share personal details with the wrong people). Additionally, if you’re using 10DLC numbers for marketing campaigns, register every campaign.

2. Keep Messages Short and Sweet

Brevity is your best friend in the world of SMS drip campaigns. You’re going to be spreading the conversation across multiple messages, so there’s no need to tell your customers everything at once. Get straight to the point with a single focus for each message in the sequence.

For instance, if you’re using SMS for retail to send a drip campaign to customers letting them know about an upcoming sale, the first message should just announce the sale. The second could share more details about the products you’ll be offering, and the third could introduce extra benefits.

3. Deliver Value

As mentioned above, every message in your text drip campaign should have a purpose and deliver clear value to your customers. Rather than just sending a welcome message that says “thanks for signing up,” use that message to tell customers what they’ll get from opting into your contact list - like early details about upcoming sales.

When you’re sending nurturing messages to customers, letting them know about the things you do well – like delivering great customer service, show them how that’s going to benefit them. Review every message and ask yourself, “What does the customer get from this?”

4. Be Clear on the Next Action

When you’re setting up your SMS drip campaign, always be clear on exactly what you want the customer to do next. If you’re sending a message about an abandoned cart, include a link encouraging them to revisit that cart and complete the purchase. If you’re using a texting service for nonprofits to encourage a donation, include a link to a donation page.

If your message is about an upcoming event, ask them to register and let you know that you want to attend by a specific time. If you’re just reminding customers about something (like an upcoming appointment), encourage them to add it to their calendar or reply to your message if they need to reschedule. Every message should drive an action.

5. Be Consistent with SMS Drip Campaigns

Being consistent with your text drip campaigns doesn’t mean ignoring personalization or using the same content in every message. Instead, it means ensuring you use certain elements in every message, such as your brand’s name, a specific tone of voice, or messaging style.

You should also be consistent with when you send your messages. For instance, you might send weekly updates, monthly messages, or messages at specific times of the day. A consistent schedule will ensure customers know when they can expect to hear from you.

6. Use Automation Wisely

Finally, messaging platforms with built-in automation tools, like Clerk Chat, make managing your SMS drip campaigns much easier. Rather than sending thousands of messages manually, you can use a platform to schedule and send mass texts from a computer in seconds.

However, it’s important to use automation correctly. Still make sure you’re implementing elements of personalization into your messages with dynamic fields and integrations for your CRM solution, or other tools (like your ecommerce platform).

Ensure you’re reviewing your automated workflows regularly, too, finding ways to upgrade and improve experiences. For example, you could add an AI bot that customers can interact with if they have any questions about a message you send.

Launch a New Text Drip Campaign with Clerk Chat

SMS drip campaigns are an excellent way to promote new products, nurture leads, improve customer experiences, and drive business growth. All you need to get started is the right strategy and the technology to bring your vision to life.

Clerk Chat, the ultimate conversational messaging platform, makes creating and implementing powerful drip campaigns easy. With convenient templates, workflow builders, dynamic cohorts for segmentation, and integrations with various tools, you can build an end-to-end solution for all kinds of marketing and sales strategies.

Ready to drip your way to bigger profits? Explore Clerk Chat today.