Drip Campaigns 101 by Rebecca Gill of sys-con - A good introduction and a starter checklist for businesses and marketing executives who have been putting this off for another day. IT WORKS - so don’t delay this any longer. If you need help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
Drip marketing campaigns are very effective for sales cycles that occur infrequently or those that take a considerable amount of time to close. In these situations, you frequently come into contact with a prospective customer well before they are ready to make an actual purchase. You need to stay in front of them until they are ready and the drip campaign allows you to do just that.
My marketing background started in enterprise software sales where a given prospect could be in the sales funnel for six to twelve months. We would have a new visitor reach our website while they were still researching available software solutions. Because of the extremely long sales cycle, we had to find a way to stay in front of people while they continued to investigate solutions and weight their purchase options. Even though I was selling into a B2B tech environment, the same process would hold true for a real estate agent, mortgage broker, or financial advisor and these are all B2C businesses that sell to consumers. The element they all share in common is that the sales cycle is long and the purchase happens infrequently.
Drip marketing typically refers to email related interactions. I think that is old school and I believe drip marketing should be a multifaceted approach. With the advent of social media, drip marketing can refer to virtually any digital marketing and includes blogging, emails, newsletters, tweets, and posts.
Steps to Mastering Drip Marketing:
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Pick an Email Campaign Provider – There are a ton of email software providers available today. Some are free to start and some cost money immediately upon sign up. The important thing is to consider your requirements, document them, and then compare solution providers. Match the providers’ features and functionality to your needs and don’t settle for just the easies solution or the cheapest. Do you need the software to automatically send multiple emails to the same contact over time? Do you need the software to easily integrate with WordPress or another CMS solution? Do you need prebuilt templates or the ability to whip up your own in HTML? Decide what you need and you’ll easily find a solution to fit.
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Consider Your Personas – Who are your personas (aka target market) and what do they need? Different target markets need different types of content, presentation, and frequency. Know your personas and document their needs well before establishing your drip campaign plan.
View the rest of the Eight Steps to Mastering Drip Marketing
If you still have some questions and want more information, please check out some of the drip marketing campaigns ListEngage has put together for our clients.
Drip campaigns take the set it and forget approach - which may seem a bit counter-intuitive when it comes to being proactive with subscribers and clients, but hear us out. They are the best way to keep a subscriber engaged over time, while not worrying about how many emails you have to send out. There are however tips and tricks to having a great email drip campaign.
I came across an interesting list of don'ts when it comes to drip marketing - and getting started. This is a list of 10 things to avoid for every excited marketer embarking on a new drip marketing journey on a newly acquired marketing automation platform. Afterall, tools are as good as processes defined and decisions made by the people behind it.
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Don’t keep dripping the prospects who are sales ready
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Don’t overlap the lists for different drip marketing tracks
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Don’t over-drip a prospect to annoy him/her- don’t give a chance to hit unsubscribe
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Don’t make the drip marketing template ‘salesy’ in content
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Don’t drip a contact who is not even remotely interested- don’t give a chance to hit spam
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Don’t repeat messages/themes in drip campaigns
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Don’t repeat HTML rich emails
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Don’t make it impersonal- as drip campaign is a series of emails, it is easy to get lost
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Don’t make a list too long – segment your list and have multiple drip marketing tracks
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Don’t just send a ‘Thank You’ email in drip campaign- attach interesting content to engage further
I think that the list above are great things to avoid to keep your campaign fresh, and to really use a set it and forget to your benefit. It's all about making a subscriber seem that you are genuinely interested in them - and that you actually want their business, and not just to spam them.
Check out some of the drip marketing campaigns we have put together for our clients here.
HTML, CSS, and coding - these words seem to be the scariest and costliest thing for marketers to hear, but HTML emails are the best way to get the exact email you want. The main idea to take away from the following article is: keeping a low image-to-text ratio and sending multipart messages are just two ways to keep deliverability high.
B2C: If you want to include images, videos, branding or a color scheme in your emails, you have to create them with HTML.
Some people don’t want to do that (and that’s okay). They don’t want to learn HTML or hire a designer; plus, they believe sending HTML emails will bring down their delivery rates.
If that’s you, read on. Creating HTML emails is just as simple as plain text (we’ll show you how). Plus, we’ve checked in with Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise, a leading expert on email delivery, for the straight story on hitting the inbox.
HTML & Basic Templates Make It Simple
When you create a plain-text email, you’re just typing words. You can do the same thing with an HTML message. Just use an email template – a pre-designed background you can type directly into.
Many email services provide them, or you might be able to get a few for free across the Web (here and here, for example). If you use AWeber, you’ll find hundreds of templates already available in your account.
Earlier this fall I was invited to speak on a panel at ExactTarget's Connections 2011 User Conference entitled "Bridging the Divide: Internationalizing Your Marketing Efforts" where I presented a case study of how ListEngage has helped Parametric corporation with their monthly international email sending needs in 9 different languages and solved some specific challenges. Collectively the panelists offered some great insights. Charlie McAtee from ExactTarget summarized them well. Here they are:
1. Make training easy. Sean Mattson of Hitachi Data Systems stressed that robust training is a key. When rolling out a global email marketing initiative, Mattson found the best training tool was to create short video clips to build a robust library of “how to” videos that marketers across the world could turn to for answers. At Hitachi Data Systems, new features are constantly being rolled out and employees can easily lose their familiarity with the software if they don’t use it for a period of time. Constant training to update employees on new tools and to refresh their memory on previously learned tasks is an integral part of the training process.
2. Establish a support system. Whether you establish a 24/7 support system or encourage local marketers to connect with one another when they have questions, it’s important to offer a way for them to get their questions answered. Gina Mencias of Roche Diagnostics explained the advantages of creating a culture that empowers the local marketing employees to turn to one another, regardless of geography, with questions – whether they’re technical questions or inquiries about what types of content is working well for each market.
3. Listen to subscribers, and look for ways to automate their requests. For a global client, Altaf Shaikh of ListEngage shared an example of how they were able to automate a frequent request from their international email subscribers. Because the global marketing campaign delivered email messages to subscribers in their preferred language, it was difficult for subscribers to forward the content they found valuable to their colleagues who spoke a different language. ListEngage developed a process to create a Language Bar where the intended recipient’s language could be selected and thus receive the message in their preferred language, not the original subscriber’s language.
4. Keep messaging simple. Not only will simple messaging keep translation costs down, but it will eliminate the possibility of a subtle nuance or a mistaken play on words that doesn’t resonate across all local markets.
5. Provide a framework. In order to develop a turn-key global email campaign, Gina recommends providing global teams with a framework from which to structure their email marketing programs. One item in particular she’s found very helpful to share with her international email marketers is an international calendar of holidays. These will provide timely ideas for content that will be relevant to subscribers. Suggested design templates and sharing content that’s performed well in other regions are also part of the framework she provides.
Thanks to Charlie for his insight and great breakdown of the session! Have an email dilemma of international proportions?
Email us and we'll share our thoughts.
It’s the end of August, one of the traditionally slowest months for productivity and growth for many industries — and maybe you found a little dip in your email marketing ROI this summer? All of those “Out of Offices” and clicking latencies are precisely the reason it’s time to restructure your email goals — and plan to hit your targets dead-on once “school’s back in session”.
So this summer, as the dog days dwindle – why not swing back into action with
3 Fool-proof Ways to Deliver Targeted Email Marketing:Send Emails Based on Attributes: Your “Master List” is a living database of all of your many, and uniquely different subscribers. If you’re a sporting goods store who knows their customers favorite sports you can pre-determine that while Joey the runner from Chicago, IL may want nothing to do with your “Fall Footbal Blowout Sale”, Coach Bill in Plano, TX might be looking for all new padding for his defensive line. By sorting on the “Sports” profile attribute and sending the email to Coach while avoiding Joey, you’ve made one football fanatic ecstatic and saved another customer the grief of deleting another email from his inbox!
Drip Campaigns: Someone shows up on your circuit board website and asks for a quote, but certainly isn’t ready to buy. They leave their name and email, and you send them a series of emails based on what you know about your buying cycle. Day 3 after quote, a handy “What to Consider When Buying Circuit Boards Email”; Day 8 after quote, a reminder email; Day 11 after quote a discount coupon worth 10%; and if they happen to buy somewhere in between the mailings stop.
Dynamic Content: Don’t want to make 50 emails with varying content for the 50 states you send to from your Daily Deal website? With dynamic content, a feature that ListEngage is fully versed in, you can create one email and define what content you want to go into a template based off of what data you have on the subscriber. With dynamic content you can send one email and simultaneously feature the daily “Lobster Roll Deal” in Boston and the daily “Wine Tasting Deal” in San Francisco! It’s easy enough to pull together and a tremendous time-saver that delivers targeted results.
Can you think of other ways that have helped your business target your subscribers? Do you have a targeting problem you think ListEngage could help you with?
Send us a note and let us know!
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