Before we jump right into the explanation of an email drip campaign, you may ask why we are even writing a blog about email marketing at all. After all there is social media, online advertising, peer-to-peer texting, and the list goes on. Is email even still considered as a viable marketing tool? Our answer is yes.
Optinmonster recently wrote a blog called “Is Email Marketing Dead? Here’s What the Statistics Show.” Here are a couple of key stats from their research:
- More than 85% of adults send or read email
- 78% of teenagers use email
- 99% of people check email every day
- Every dollar spent on email marketing brings you $38 in return
With this in mind, email drip campaigns will help you touch more prospects and save time. An email drip campaign is simply a set of marketing emails that are automatically sent to users based on specific criteria you have put in place to nurture your relationship with the customer. To illustrate, let’s say you have a customer that came to your site and bought a product. After they enter their information, you send them an email with a thank you message and confirmation number.
With a drip campaign, we can take this a step further to nurture your relationship, so they will become a lifetime, loyal customer. Your confirmation email will be the first email of the drip campaign. You can schedule another email asking for product and customer service feedback to send automatically after they received the product. Two weeks after the feedback email, you can send another automated email with recommended related products and then follow up with new ways to use the product they purchased.so on.
This sounds like a lot of work, so is the effort worth it? Yes, and here’s why.
Your audience is constantly changing whether it is demographically or behaviorally. Email drip campaigns help you stay in front of your audience and, most importantly, understand your audience. How they interact with your emails will give you insights into their behavior and decision making. We’ll give you a real-life example. One of our consultants was hired by a science-based organization to create an email campaign for an event. Because there was not a lot of data available for their audience’s behaviors, he helped write content and designed a layout based on common email marketing fundamentals.
At first, the response was subpar. Our client decided to try minimizing graphics and made the content more technical for each of the drip campaign emails. Immediately, there was an increased response rate with each of the emails. If they had just done one email for the campaign, they would not have known how their audience prefers to read emails. They would have considered it a bust, but because they implemented a drip campaign, they were able to understand their audience and get a favorable response.
Drip campaigns are very effective for:
- Prospects – Engage your prospects by sending them educational emails to demonstrate your interest and expertise. Drive prospects to your website’s landing pages where they can respond to your emails
- New signups – Send them a welcome email and then follow up with automated emails for new published blogs, upcoming events, and calls-to-action.
- New purchase – Begin with a confirmation and thank you, followed by product feedback and then continue to nurture with related products, new products, and product tips.
- Events – Start with a confirmation and thank you, followed by reminders, event info like parking details, and upcoming related events.
Drip campaigns will support your high touch approach so that your targets know you are thinking of them. It keeps you “top of mind” among prospects and clients so they think of you when they are ready to buy or reorder. Our CRM gives you the ability to create drip campaigns to deliver content to your leads based on your contact lists, where they are in the buyer’s journey, and their engagement. If you are not using email because you think it is dead as a marketing tool or you are sending one-off emails to your audience, there is a good chance that you are losing customer loyalty and revenue. It is time to start your drip campaign and see the new customers, longer lasting relationships and increase revenue.
