Is drip marketing part of your marketing mix? No? Then, you’re missing out on one of the most effective ways to educate prospects and customers about your products and services.
A drip marketing strategy can form part of your Inbound Marketing Plan and consists of sending out automatic messages in a predefined order, at a predefined interval to identified prospects, leads, and customers to guide them through your sales funnel.
Messages will usually be distributed via emails, or social media platforms to the people who have previously agreed to receive them. A great advantage of using this form of automated marketing is that it reduces the sell-product curve, allowing you to sell more products over the same time frame. It all sounds great, isn’t it?
Now, the question is: Where do you start?
Drip Marketing: The Plan of Action
Drip marketing can be used not only to engage and nurture leads, but also to build relationships with existing customers. Even better is that once you have developed a campaign via automated software, it basically runs itself, giving you the opportunity to focus on other business aspects. Here is how you should go about creating your first email drip campaign.
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- Define your campaign goals: Whether you want to get more people to purchase products from you or to persuade existing customers to buy a new product, the first thing you need to do is to set up your goals. How can you do this? By considering what your prospects and customers need to know in order to take the desired action. If your goal is to attract more prospects, for instance, you could create a series of emails to establish your brand and build credibility (e.g. address prospects’ hesitation or teach them something useful). If you wish to convert leads into customers, your emails should focus on product features and advantages.
- Strategise the execution of your plan: When should you start sending emails? How often should you do it? What type of content should you create? If you’re asking these questions, you’re on the right track. The best approach is to start with a higher frequency (every day) and slow down as time goes on (once a week or once a month). But sending emails won’t do much if the content is irrelevant or of poor quality. For the best results, your content should be short, to the point, and provide the value subscribers expect. Other way, they’ll consider it spam and become hostile towards your campaigns and company.
- Segment campaigns according to your audience: Whilst some of your leads may be interested in educational materials, others may want to find out more about your products or services in order to make informed purchase decisions. By creating several parallel campaigns, you can fine-tune your drip marketing strategy to address different concerns, needs, and wants.
- Track and measure results: Using specific metrics (e.g. email open rates and unsubscribe rates) to measure the performance of your campaigns isn’t enough; you should also check their impact on your bottom line. The secret to making the most of your campaigns is to assess them constantly, modifying them according to your findings. If one of your campaigns is yielding a negative response, for example, you could replace it with something more effective.
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Unless you’re very lucky, your first drip marketing campaign may fail to generate the results expected. But the good news is that a variety of Marketing Automation and CRM solutions are available today to help you manage your campaigns efficiently so that you can attract more prospects, nurture more leads, retain more customers, and generate more revenue, whilst saving time and valuable resources.