When it comes to your clients, we understand how important it is to stay top of mind and cater to them with the news, promotions, and educational information they need – without being annoying.
Drip email marketing is a great way to automate the process, while staying in control of content, frequency, and how your users are interacting with the content. In essence, it is a lead nurturing tactic.
As with most things, there are some best practices that are essential for an effective email marketing drip campaign.
Choose an Audience
Regardless of your business, there’s an audience – someone or something – that you want your words to influence. This audience is particularly important for effective emails.
People have email on their phones, their computers, and their tablets, and they want to read through them quickly. Therefore, tailoring your content with your target audience in mind provides a much better chance of them taking the desired action.
In short, make sure your emails are something your audience wants to read and keep them short and to the point.
Define Your Purpose
Once you decide who you want to target in your email marketing campaign, then it’s time to determine the “why.” Your readers naturally need some direction, so your content needs to act as a guide to get the desired outcome.
Do you want to inform them? Educate them? Excite them? Challenge them? Get them to request a free quote? Etc.
Decide your overall intentions and then tailor your campaign with those goals in mind.
Below are a few types of campaigns and some calls-to-action or next steps to encourage your reader to take:
- Top of mind – These are intended to keep your readers thinking about you more often than they might on their own. You may want to draw their interest towards a feature of your website or a specific product or service you want to highlight. In short, think of this as brand awareness coupled with staying in front of your target audience in a nonintrusive manner.
- Educational – These campaigns are designed to teach your readers something valuable. For example, you may wish to share a white paper, video, or blog post that explores an area related to your business in-depth to provide a better understanding. This method is designed to increase trust by making your company an authority on the topic. The result? Your readers are more likely to choose you over the competition.
- Re-engagement – These emails are intended to remind your readers that they need you after they haven’t heard from you in a while. You may want to highlight some of the products or service that they may already know about by using a unique twist to re-peak their interest. A campaign with this focus may wish to offer a discount for their next purchase.
- Competitive – This type of campaign is to encourage your readers to compete for the chance at some offer that you propose. You might want to direct them to your site to fill out an entry form or have them like or share your posts on social media for a chance to win a gift card. Be creative and use social media to help encourage participation.
- Promotional – These campaigns offer special pricing or a free gift associated with another action. You may want to pair these with best-sellers.
- Training – These are intended to teach your customers to use what they already have. You may want to use visuals with each step to better guide your readers. If you help train your customers to better utilize your products or services, then you will likely keep them as clients much longer.
Evaluate and Re-evaluate
No matter what email drip marketing strategies you take part in, the most important step is to analyze the results. If a part of your drip campaign isn’t working, then it is time to change it. If something works well, replicate it. The key is to continue to examine everything you do and make small adjustments along the way as needed to improve your overall results.
At the end of the day, email drip campaigns are designed to show you results and to get people in your proverbial (or real) doors by getting them to take the desired action.
Stay in front of your target audience and automatically nurture your leads with an effective email marketing campaign.
Learn more about effective drip marketing with our free white paper: “A Business Owner’s Guide to Lead Nurturing.” Click here to download it now!