How Email Crip Campaigns can Boost a Referral Marketing Strategy

Read time:  6 mins

Email drip campaigns are one of the most effective ways to talk to your customers. Compared to a single email, automated emails triggered by specific user actions, such as signing up for an account, have an 80% higher open rate. Overall, email marketing revenue stands at approximately $11 billion.

Marketers often want a direct route into their customers' inboxes. But if they get it wrong, they’ll lose trust, respect, and, ultimately, revenue.

So, how do you make an impact without being obtrusive?

What is drip marketing?

Drip marketing is a communication strategy that delivers a series of pre-written, automated messages—via email or other channels—based on specific timelines or customer behaviours. The goal? To guide your audience down the customer journey, one well-timed ‘nudge’ at a time.

Instead of overwhelming a customer with a single information-heavy communication, drip marketing lets you “drip” valuable content, offers, and prompts over time—keeping engagement high and your brand top of mind. Whether it’s a welcome campaign or a post-purchase follow-up, these touchpoints help build relationships that lead to loyalty, referrals, and long-term revenue.

Smart drip marketing strategies meet the customer where they are—providing helpful, relevant content when they need it most.

What is an email drip campaign?

An email drip campaign is a sequence of automated emails that are triggered by customer activity (or inactivity) and sent out on a specific timeline.

Each email in the sequence has a purpose—it might introduce your brand, highlight helpful content, nudge a customer to refer a friend, or send a friendly reminder to complete their purchase. The beauty of drip campaigns is their ability to deliver the right message to the right person… without adding extra manual work for your team.

Unlike one-off email blasts, drip campaigns are personalised, contextual, and often segmented by customer actions—so they feel more like a conversation than a promotion. They’re not just great for enhancing your referral programme; they’re a must-have for nurturing leads, driving conversion, and retaining your hard-won customers.

Why do you need an email drip campaign?

Done well, email drip campaigns do more than just improve open rates. They become a key engine for growth—replacing guesswork with strategy and one-size-fits-all blasts with tailored customer journeys.

Here’s why drip campaigns belong in your marketing stack:

1. They keep your brand top of mind without overwhelming people.
People rarely make decisions after one interaction. Consistent, helpful follow-ups drive conversions.

2. They deliver value at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Whether someone’s just discovered your brand or they’ve already referred three friends, drip campaigns enable smarter, more relevant marketing.

3. They scale with your business.
One brilliant series can serve hundreds—or hundreds of thousands—of potential advocates, without additional manual work.

4. They maximise the performance of referral marketing.
When you time your referral asks based on readiness, relevance, and behaviour, customers are more likely to act—and even more likely to advocate.

In short, email drip campaigns aren't just about automation. They're about building trust, deepening relationships, and getting meaningful results with less effort.

Types of email drip campaigns

There’s no one-size-fits-all email journey. Different customer actions (or inactions) call for different email flows—each tailored to move customers closer to conversion, advocacy, or loyalty.

Here are some of the most popular (and powerful) types of drip campaigns that can easily integrate referral moments.

Onboarding campaigns

First impressions matter. Onboarding drips help new users get started quickly and with confidence. Depending on your business model, this could include early guidance, product how-tos, account setup instructions, or even referral introductions—”Love what you see? Share it with a friend.”

The goal here is building familiarity and removing friction. If someone feels supported early on, they’re more likely to stick around—and ultimately refer others.

Welcome emails

Think of your welcome email as your virtual handshake. It sets the tone for your brand, introduces your value, and offers the next best action for your new subscriber or customer.

Whether it’s a one-off message or a three-part series, great welcome drips inform, excite, and activate. They’re also a great moment to softly introduce your referral programme and plant the seed for advocacy later.

Post-purchase drips

This is where retention and referral truly come to life. A customer’s experience doesn’t end after they buy—it’s just beginning.

Post-purchase drip campaigns keep your brand front and centre. You might include order confirmations, product care tips, usage suggestions, upsell offers—or well-timed referral asks once they’ve had a chance to enjoy their purchase.

Set up correctly, these emails feel helpful, not pushy, and can lay the foundation for future engagement (and more purchases).

Re-engagement campaigns

Even loyal customers can lose touch with your brand over time. Re-engagement drip campaigns are designed to reach out when activity levels drop—to rekindle interest and bring your dormant customers back to action.

This could include highlighting new products or collections, reminding them of their unused referral link, or offering time-sensitive rewards that reignite urgency. The key is to make the message feel personal and relevant, not random or rushed.

Educational/content series

These are your value-driving, trust-building emails. Educational drip campaigns deliver helpful, engaging content that builds authority and deepens the customer relationship over time.

Whether you're showing customers how to get the most from your product, sharing inside tips, or spotlighting how others are using your brand in creative ways, these touchpoints create lasting impact—without asking for anything in return.

Better yet, they prime customers for future referrals by reinforcing your brand’s utility and credibility.

The birthday drip campaign

A personal favourite—literally. Birthday emails consistently outperform the average email by a wide margin when it comes to engagement. They make customers feel noticed and valued.

Birthday drip campaigns are perfect for rewarding loyal customers, offering limited-time gifts, and even encouraging celebration through referrals: “Celebrate with your friends—give them £10 off and get £10, too.”

It’s worth the effort to capture this data (with permission, of course), especially if your goal is to build emotional loyalty and surprise-and-delight moments at scale.

Defining your referral marketing objectives

Having a clear set of objectives is crucial to the success of your email drip campaign. Before you start, look at your customer journey and decide where you want to place referral requests.

Nurturing customer relationships through targeted email marketing strategies, such as post-purchase drip campaigns and welcome emails, is essential. These strategies not only engage leads but also build lasting connections with existing customers, making it easier and more cost-effective to sell to them over time.

Do you want to run a campaign dedicated solely to asking customers to refer? Or do you want to use referral marketing to strengthen other areas, like your welcome campaign?

Are your customers ready to refer? Or is another action more suited to where they are in the referral journey?

There are lots of other actions that drive value in your business:

• Sharing your brand on social media
• Visiting your community or posting in a forum
• Leaving a positive review

When customers do any of these things, it’s fantastic news for your business: If your customers are advocating on behalf of your brand, you don’t have to devote as much budget to paid ads, marketing, and customer acquisition.

A good referral marketing strategy rests on being able to identify which, if any, of these advocacy actions your customers are ready to take. Advanced referral marketing tools help you identify those customers who are most likely to refer and create more tightly targeted messaging in your email campaigns.

Segmentation strategies

Referral campaigns are only successful if they resonate with the customer who receives them. You don’t want to clutter someone’s inbox with irrelevant messages. At best, they’ll ignore or unsubscribe, and at worst, it will create such an unfavourable impression that they’ll churn.

To produce relevant and engaging emails, you need good data and good analysis. With enough high-quality customer data, you can create meaningful segments and deliver different messages to different groups of customers. Segmentation is crucial for the success of drip email campaigns, as it allows you to tailor your messages to specific customer needs and behaviours, fostering long-term engagement and loyalty.

It’s often difficult to tell which of your customers you should be focusing on to make referrals. There’s no correlation between high spenders and the likelihood to refer, for example. Conversely, a customer who has a relatively low lifetime value could generate several times their own revenue in referrals. How do you know what email campaigns to send to which groups of people?

Mention Me’s customer advocacy intelligence platform allows you to segment your customers based on referral activity, creating segments based on high, middle, and low referring customers. This makes your emails more targeted and relevant.

Decide on triggers

As well as creating email campaigns based on customer segments, you can trigger campaigns after a customer takes a certain action, such as:

• Hitting a spending threshold
• Writing a 5-star review
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Referring a certain number of times

Using triggers in drip marketing strategies can significantly enhance brand awareness, customer relationships, and conversion rates through targeted, scheduled communications.

If you have a referral platform that integrates with your CRM, referral data can inform smarter email campaigns, making automated decisions about the next best action to take with a customer. Mention Me integrates with Klaviyo and Emarsys to power smarter, more personalised marketing decisions and drive more revenue from referrals.

Lifecycle-Based Referral Messaging

Great referral marketing is about asking to share at the right moment, not just to share in volume.

That’s where lifecycle-based messaging comes in. By aligning your referral asks with specific stages of the customer journey, you can dramatically increase relevance, conversion rates, and overall referral performance.

Think of it like this: not every customer is ready to refer the moment they make a purchase. Some need to experience your product first. Others may need a nudge or reminder. And your most loyal fans? They’re likely ready to shout about your brand already—all they need is the opportunity.

Here’s how you can use lifecycle-based referral messaging across key touchpoints:

Post-purchase
The customer’s just bought, excitement is high, and it’s a great moment to thank them—and plant the referral seed for next time. A gentle “love what you bought? Why not share it?” message works well here.

Repurchase window
If you know your customers typically reorder after 30 days, this is a prime time to prompt referral. They’re already in the mindset of engaging again—it’s a perfect moment to suggest they bring someone along, too.

After clear positive signals
Triggered events like leaving a 5-star review, engaging with your social content, or responding positively to an NPS survey are gold dust moments. These signals suggest advocacy readiness—making it the ideal time to present a referral opportunity.

Loyalty milestone
If a customer has hit a spend threshold, purchased multiple times, or belongs to your loyalty programme, they’ve already shown deep affinity. Personalised “thank you” referral messages at this point tend to convert at higher rates.

Post-referral
Yes, referral begets more referral. When a customer successfully refers someone, they often feel even more connected to your brand. Recognise their contribution and invite them to keep going—you’d be surprised how far one happy advocate can take you.

By structuring your referral messaging around the customer lifecycle, you’re not only improving timing and relevance—you’re also showing that you truly understand your customers and their journey with your brand.

Creating a compelling email drip campaign

Your emails need to be snappy, easy to read, and skimmable:

• Short copy: Longer-form copy is unlikely to convert well.
• Use images to break up the text.
• Have a clear CTA in a prominent place.
• Subject lines need to be short, too. Longer subject lines are more likely to be cut off by the browser and binned by the recipient.

Next, you need to structure your campaign. First, decide how many emails you’re going to send in total. Then, you can start to map out your content: Where does each piece of information or CTA best fit in the campaign? Consider the strategy of creating drip email campaigns that cater to the specific needs of your prospects. Tailored campaigns can help build relationships and trust, making your emails more effective.

There are no hard and fast rules for how long a campaign should be (or how you should structure it). Mailchimp recommends a range of 4-10 emails but emphasises it depends on the nature of your campaign, the type of customers, and what industry you’re in.

For general guidelines on how to drip your messaging in over the course of your campaign, we recommend the advice (complete with templates and samples) from Hubspot. Your later emails should progressively refine your messaging and include bolder CTAs.

Personalise your drip campaigns

Rules are meant to be broken. You should play around with text length, layout, colour schemes, etc., to get a feel for how your email resonates with your customers when they read it.

If you’ve done the preceding steps properly, the personalisation should take care of itself. If you have well-segmented groups with clearly defined objectives that relate to points in the referral journey, your drip campaign emails will be relevant, delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

The last personalisation building block you need in place is data. Make sure you have your customer’s first name and any other first-party data you want to reference on the email list you’re pulling from. Be absolutely sure they’ve given permission for you to use this data as part of the campaign.

A/B testing and continuous improvement

Test different versions of your drip campaign to gauge which has the most impact on referrals. This applies to both the order in which you send emails and the layout of the email itself.

Using data from previous campaigns can significantly enhance future campaigns, allowing you to leverage successful elements and quickly adjust strategies based on performance insights.

Some elements to experiment with are:

• Messaging—For example, suggesting someone give a discount to a friend vs. saying they get money off themselves can elicit different responses. What works best for your audience?
• CTAs — Does short or long copy work best in the CTA?
• Images — What type of images are most engaging? How many should you include in your emails?
   

Email Design and Content Best Practices

A high-performing email drip campaign relies on more than just timing—it needs to be well-written, visually clear, and action-oriented. Whether you're prompting a referral, welcoming a new subscriber, or re-engaging an existing customer, great design and compelling content are what turn opens into clicks, and clicks into conversions.

To maximise the impact of your referral emails, follow these core best practices.

Keep it simple and skimmable
Long paragraphs, cluttered layouts, and overwhelming visuals will send your readers elsewhere. Stick to concise, punchy copy. Use plenty of white space, clear subheadings, short paragraphs, and bullet points to guide the reader through your message.

Use clear, action-driven CTAs
Your customer shouldn’t have to guess what to do next. Keep your call-to-action straightforward and prominent—for example, “Refer a Friend,” “Claim Your Reward,” or “Get £10.” Make sure the CTA stands out and appears early in the email.

Optimise your subject lines
Strong subject lines are brief (ideally under 50 characters), focused, and clearly convey value. Calls to action or personalised references (like the customer’s name or recent purchase) can boost open rates, but avoid sounding too salesy.

Personalise your emails
Use personalisation beyond just a first name. Tailor content based on customer behaviour—such as what they bought, when they purchased, how they’ve interacted with your programme, or their referral history. Contextually relevant messages perform significantly better.

Use brand-consistent visuals
Good design builds trust. Ensure every email reflects your brand identity: colours, fonts, tone of voice, and imagery. Avoid distracting or overly promotional visuals. Keep layouts clean and make sure key information is always the central focus.

Design for mobile first
More than half of all emails are opened on mobile devices, so your layout must adapt accordingly. Use single-column designs, readable font sizes, and buttons that are easily tappable. Always preview and test across screens to ensure accessibility.

Highlight the dual value of referring
One of the most effective ways to drive action is by clearly showing what the customer and their friend will get. Referral emails should always highlight this "give and get" value upfront—ideally in the headline, and again in the CTA.

Example:
Give £10 to a friend. Get £10 for yourself.

Add social proof where relevant
Customer quotes, ratings, or testimonial snippets lend credibility and reinforce trust. If others are referring and enjoying the benefits, new customers will feel more confident doing the same.

Email campaigns that lead to referral success are those that are strategically timed, visually intuitive, and conversion-focused. Follow these best practices to ensure your emails don’t just land in inboxes—they drive action and build stronger customer relationships.

How frequent should your emails be?

Your customers get a lot of emails, so focus on sending fewer, high-quality emails rather than frequent, low-value messages. Another good way to check that you’re sending the right amount is to monitor for burnout. Keep an eye on unsubscribe rates and engagement levels to avoid subscriber fatigue. Anywhere between bi-weekly and once every two weeks is a good frequency.

An effective email marketing strategy involves targeting specific email lists and automating email sequences to nurture customer relationships and provide valuable content based on user actions.

But again, there are no set rules for frequency, and the timing of your emails depends on the nature of your campaign and customer base.

If you ask customers to refer their friends, how long do they usually take to do so? Does this change with different groups of customers at different stages in the referral journey? Use behavioural data to determine the frequency.

The Call-to-Action (CTA)

What’s the main action you want your customers to take after receiving the email? Getting clarity on this will boost your conversion rate. In marketing emails, clear messaging and audience engagement are crucial for success.

• Have only one main CTA in your email
• Make it related to what triggered the email in the first place
• Put it in a prominent place, with images and concise copy around it

Test out different things in the CTA. While you should only have one main CTA, try experimenting with subsidiary CTAs around it. For referral marketing campaigns, these might be prompting your customers to leave a review or asking them to share your brand experience on social media.

Real-life Drip Campaign Use Cases for Referral Marketing

The best referral strategies meet customers where they are—at the right moment, with the right message. Drip campaigns make this possible by automatically delivering referral prompts that align with customer behaviour and intent.

Here are some key use cases brands are using right now to drive meaningful, referral-led growth:

Post-purchase referral invites
After a customer completes their first order, schedule a referral email a few days later once they’ve had time to engage with the product. For brands with lower price points or fast shipping, try triggering it within 48 to 72 hours. For experience-based brands (like travel or beauty), delay until post-delivery or product use for better timing.

Milestone-driven prompts
Celebrate key moments and deepen brand engagement—reward loyal customers with a referral prompt when they hit a certain order count, spend level, or loyalty tier. These customers are already invested in your brand and far more likely to share it.

Review to referral follow-ups
If a customer leaves a 5-star review or submits positive NPS feedback, follow up with a referral CTA while their sentiment is high. These moments signal peak satisfaction and advocacy readiness.

Win-back campaigns
For customers who haven’t ordered in a while, combine a re-engagement email with a referral offer. Sometimes a simple message like “Refer a friend and come back together” can reignite interest and drive two conversions instead of one.

Post-referral sequences
Don’t let the excitement of a successful referral stop after the first interaction. Send follow-up emails to thank the referrer, show their impact (“3 of your friends just joined”), and invite them to keep going. Advocacy often breeds more advocacy—if you give customers the opportunity.

Referral in your welcome flow
New customers are often excited to share their discovery. Consider adding a softly worded referral introduction toward the end of your welcome series. Frame it as an insider benefit rather than a pushy CTA.

Each of these use cases pairs best with smart segmentation. Tailor the timing, copy, and incentive to the audience segment and journey stage—and you’ll transform more one-time buyers into long-term advocates.

Drip Campaign Tools

You don’t need to build everything from scratch. A strong tech stack makes creating, launching, and optimising your drip campaigns faster and more effective—especially when it’s connected to your referral programme.

If you’re already using an email service provider (ESP), you may have the essential tools in place.

Here’s what to look for in a drip campaign tool—whether you're optimising existing flows or just starting out:

Automation capabilities
Drip campaigns rely on triggers. You need a platform that lets you automatically send emails based on specific actions (like purchases, sign-ups, or referral completions) and time delays. Tools like Klaviyo, HubSpot, and Emarsys integrate well with referral marketing platforms and offer sophisticated automation flows.

Behavioural segmentation
To personalise your referral messaging, your tool should let you create audience segments based on behaviours—such as “first-time buyer,” “loyal referrer,” or “hasn’t purchased in 90 days.”

Visual workflow builders
A good visual editor lets you easily map out your drip journey—see all the emails in the series, test decision branches, and quickly make changes without navigating complex menus.

A/B testing functionality
To improve performance over time, your platform should allow A/B testing for subject lines, email content, CTAs, images, and send times. You’ll need this to continuously optimise referral messaging based on what’s really converting.

Integration with your referral platform
This is key. When your referral data (such as shares, referral codes, successful conversions) flows seamlessly into your ESP, you can trigger smarter messages and adapt your strategy in real time. Mention Me integrates with Klaviyo, Emarsys, and more to make this easy.

Analytics and reporting
Look for tools that provide insight into open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and unsubscribes—broken down by campaign and audience. Bonus if you can tie referral actions directly back to specific sends.

Customer data compliance
You need tools that support GDPR and data protection best practices so that all personalisation and triggers respect privacy preferences. Always check permission settings before launching campaigns.

With the right tools connected to real-time customer data, you don’t just automate emails—you build relevant, responsive journeys that turn each message into a meaningful opportunity for brand engagement and referral growth.

Leveraging Social Proof and Testimonials

The social proof you use should be authentic, relevant, and specific to the email subject and the customer's needs.

If you’ve encouraged customer reviews and social media engagement elsewhere in your referral marketing, build a social proof collection and incorporate it into your email drip campaign. Lead nurturing through educational content and personalised interactions is crucial to maintaining engagement and guiding prospects along the customer journey.

An engaged customer base who loves your brand can have even more impact if you include their reviews and testimonials in your drip campaign. It lets your customers know they are amongst friends and can be an inflection point for starting to build a community of advocates around your brand.

Monitoring and Analysing Drip Campaign Performance

Once you’ve built a drip marketing campaign that’s targeted and relevant to your audience, you’re in a good place to measure your success. Drip marketing campaigns are highly effective in engaging audiences by delivering personalised content over time. What that looks like depends very much on your industry.

The KPIs you should be monitoring are:

• Open Rate — Gauges the appeal of subject lines and sender reputation.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) — Measures recipient engagement with email content.
• Conversion Rate — Indicates the success of emails in prompting desired actions.
• Bounce Rate — Highlights email deliverability issues and list quality.
• Unsubscribe Rate — Reveals audience perceptions of content relevance and value.

Hubspot and Campaign Monitor both produce annual benchmarking by industry, so you can see where you should be aiming for.

Compliance and best practices

You need to be aware of privacy and security regulations when sending emails to large groups of people. Getting this wrong can cause serious financial and reputational damage to your brand.

• Your emails need to be compliant with security protocols like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF so that they are not marked as spam or phishing emails.
• You must abide by GDPR and other similar data protection regulations. This means asking permission to send emails and removing people from your lists if they withdraw their permission.

Beyond the legal minimums, there are best practices you should follow so you don’t risk creating a bad impression with your customers. Make sure your opt-outs are clear and easy to follow, don’t send too many emails, and don’t use personal information that makes you look creepy.

A well-executed drip marketing campaign emphasises the importance of personalisation, segmentation, and automation to build meaningful relationships with customers.

See your email campaign as a place to build trust. If you abide by best practices and are respectful of customers’ privacy, time, and space, they’ll respect and trust you back. If you’re aiming to get your customers to share your brand with friends and family, you need to build a relationship of trust with them first.

Maximising Referral Conversions through Drip Campaigns

Whatever form your drip campaign takes, your chances of success are improved massively if you understand where your customers are in the referral journey and how likely they are to make referrals.

Post-purchase drip campaigns are a cost-effective strategy for strengthening relationships with existing customers, encouraging repeat purchases, and fostering loyalty.

Email drip campaigns can be highly effective, but only if you craft your message sensitively and make the right ask at the right time. Mention Me’s customer advocacy intelligence platform helps you identify and nurture your biggest referrers, amplifying the love they have for your brand and increasing the opportunities they have to become customer advocates.

Conclusions

Referral marketing works best when it's personal, relevant, and timely—and email drip campaigns are one of the most effective ways to deliver on all three.

By aligning your referral asks with customer behaviours and lifecycle stages, you create a journey that feels natural and invites advocacy without being pushy. Add in thoughtful segmentation, compelling content, strategic timing, and the right tools, and your referral programme becomes a powerful, scalable growth engine.

The bottom line: when you treat referrals as part of a broader customer relationship—not just a quick-win tactic—you unlock long-term loyalty and sustainable growth.

Harness the power of your customers today:  Request a demo