What if the greatest marketing secret happened to be nice and simple?
E-mail marketing is still an effective tool. And combined with a solid drip campaign, e-mail can be the secret marketing weapon you've been waiting for.
Want to know why? Keep reading to discover the answer!
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Email marketing is old news. How could it be more effective than social media?? Discover why a drip campaign is the secret weapon your business has been waiting for...
What Is An Email Drip Campaign?
A series of pre-written emails sent out on an individualised schedule based on some triggering action. Your business sends them out at strategic times in order to drive customers towards conversion.
Of course, conversion doesn't happen right away. This is why these campaigns "drip" useful info to potential customers in order to build and maintain their interest in company products and services.
To make such campaigns easier, most companies rely on software that helps to automate the entire process.
We've put together this solid guide to show you how such a drip campaign can seriously benefit your business.
Part Of The Larger Campaign
Many sceptical businesses have a simple question for such a marketing campaign. What is the difference between a drip campaign and standard email marketing?
The short answer is that drip campaigns are a part of a larger marketing campaign. Standard email marketing may simply tell someone about an upcoming sale and hope it builds interest. Drip marketing sends out a series of messages over a prolonged period of time in order to drive conversion.
Good drip campaigns also use behavioural triggers to send out certain emails at certain times. For example, if someone hasn't logged in for more than 30 days, you can send a message telling them how much you'd love to see them return.
Now that you know a bit more about what a drip campaign is, let's dive into the benefits of drip marketing.
3 Ways Drip Campaigns Boost Your Business
Increase Engagement
One of your obvious goals should be to increase engagement with your customers. But the real secret is to increase that engagement without seriously increasing your marketing budget.
Drip campaigns certainly increase your engagement. In fact, Instapage reports that such campaigns increase the click rate of users by 119 per cent.
What about time and money, though? Once you write out the e-mails that you will use, automation takes care of the rest. You get all the benefits of boosting customer engagement without committing too many resources to this single project.
Drip campaigns can explode your customer engagement. How much? Instapage found they can increase user click rates by 119%... But won't that cost you a lot? You'd be surprised.
Accurate Segmentation
Segmentation is one of the biggest keys to accurate marketing. Instead of treating your customers as one big lump, segmentation lets you target different groups and customize both your marketing and products.
Drip campaigns are perfect for customer segments because you can create a different campaign for each group. It takes a little more time to set up but creates serious benefits for your bottom line.
Also, A/B testing during the process (more on this later) helps you improve the accuracy of your segmentation. In this way, drip campaigns can improve data collection and overall marketing efforts.
Always On Their Mind
In some ways, the best part of online marketing is also the worst. Online marketing lets you really bring your products and services to life for prospective customers. At the same time, you must constantly compete with all of the other companies doing the same thing.
It's easy for customers to get distracted by this marketing bombardment. And even if they were really interested in something one day, they may easily forget about it a week or two later.
With drip marketing, you can constantly stay on your customers' minds. And just as drops eventually form a pool, this steady drip eventually builds serious interest in what your company has to offer.
Your target audience is bombarded with marketing noise from all sides. How can you make sure you're always on their mind? Drip, drip, drip. Click the link to find out more.
Different Kinds Of Drip Emails
Let's say you're interested in creating a drip campaign. The next question is likely to be, "What kind of emails should I be sending?"
There are countless possible emails you may craft for customers. Generally, though, drip campaign emails fall into a handful of simple categories.
For customers who sign up for something on your website, you should send a "welcome" email. This can tell them more about you and your company and even direct them to other offerings (such as blogs you have written).
Onboarding emails typically target those who signed up for a free trial. Such emails describe the benefits that come with the full version.
We already touched on re-engagement emails. These are messages that target customers who haven't logged in for a while or even those who haven't been opening your messages.
Abandoned cart emails are pretty self-explanatory. You email those who still have items in the cart and try to persuade them to complete the order.
Confirmation emails are nice and straightforward. After someone completes an online sale, you confirm their order and thank them for their business!
What Are Email Drip Campaign Best Practices?
Once you begin a campaign, how do you make sure it is successful? It all comes down to following the best practices.
- 1Timing is everything. Align your drip campaign with your sales funnel. You must know when to send certain emails to nudge your leads towards conversion.
- 2Don't overwhelm your customers. Send no more than one drip email a day and no less than one drip email a week.
- 3Follow the golden rule of online communication: keep it short and simple. Combine catchy subject lines with short, relevant emails and a personalised CTA.
- 4Connect customers to other channels. This is the perfect time to get someone to follow your company on social media or check out your Youtube videos.
- 5Test! Run constant A/B testing on your campaign. This ensures the accuracy of the drip marketing and also lets you fine tune your customer segmentation throughout the campaign.
Email marketing might be old, but it's still good. Really good. A solid drip campaign can actually help you grow your social media following! That's not all...
Your Next Move
Now you know about email drip campaign best practices. But do you know who can really bring your campaign to life?
We specialise in modern marketing techniques that take companies to the cutting edge and beyond. To see what we can do for your own business, book a strategy consultation today!