Email marketing is now the fastest and most effective way businesses interact with consumers. However, due to the amount of emails that get sent, there is a difference between creating a successful campaign and one that ends up in the spam folder.
A good email campaign uses timing and quality content to promote positive engagement. While it may sound simple, finding a solid strategy to fit your demands can be tricky. So where do you start? One great way to promote good content and smart timing is by creating an email drip campaign.
To put it simply, a drip campaign is a series of emails that get sent in a specific order at specific times. The idea is to stay consistent by planning content and follow-up responses in advance. This way, you can stay relevant to your audience without being too pushy and have the best chances of hitting your marketing goals.
Check out these 6 strategies to see how it is done!
1. Define Your Goal
Any good marketing campaign starts with a clear goal.
There is no clear way to know what you can possibly accomplish and possibly achieve without a clear and concise goal.
Knowing what you want from your campaign should be chosen long before the send button is pressed. Are you promoting a product launch, an event, a new brand?
Having this information in advance will help you determine what to send, when to send it, and how to follow up.
It’s important to tag links in emails that you send with UTM parameters so that data can be analyzed, read, and reported to better understand your future goals through Google Analytics.
2. Create Specific Content
The most important part of any email is its contents.
This may seem obvious, but length, language, and layout all play a huge part in making a captivating and unique campaign. Keeping your target audience in mind is the only way to make truly specific and relevant content. Are your emails going to shoppers, gamers, educators, entrepreneurs?
Knowing who will be reading your email will help you determine things like color choices, graphic styles, and reading level.
Using an email productivity tool to curate relationships, build trust, and increase response rates by up to as much as 300% at times may also improve cost-efficiency and set the correct behavioral triggers to ensure that you are always getting the correct message across to your audience.
Ideally, you want to develop a variety of personas and curate specific emails with valuable content that speaks to that person’s pain points. Over time, you can continue to nurture them through automated email responses according to what actions they choose or fail to keep up with.
3. Provide a Call to Action (CTA)
Sending out interesting emails is not enough.
In order for your email to achieve a specific goal, it must provide information that encourages engagement. It’s great to have your email opened and read, but it is even better when it serves as the gateway for visiting a landing page or providing user feedback.
That can mean relevant news with a corresponding link, or having easy access to submit responses and opinions. Either way, having a CTA is a critical part of getting involvement from your audience.
You can easily implement this strategy by encouraging readers to “click here” at the end of a blog post or provide them with a button on the email that takes them to another resource or allows them to download a piece of content that provides extra value to whatever you’re already offering.
4. Determine the Best Timing
What makes a drip email unique is its use of timing.
Think about timing as the difference between a single email and a campaign. Instead of sending one email with all the information you have, space your messages out so they reinforce your objective with consistency and repetition.
By sending strategically spaced messages that work together to reach your audience with a single uniform goal, your campaign will have the best chances of nurturing conversion. In addition, you have to understand your personas in order to place your emails within their lifestyle.
It’s generally a good idea to start with higher frequency emails and slow them down as time goes on. You may find that you at first send emails every day, then every few days, but as time goes by, only once a month.
For instance, if you have demographic comprised of construction workers, chances are they open emails early in the morning before starting a job, which proves as a good time for you to share health and wellness tips or retail discounts for work clothes.
5. Be Personal
Filling your emails with individual and targeted information is the best way to reach people on a personal level.
This has a lot to do with identifying the people in your audience and addressing their individual concerns. For example, if you are selling a product that is intended for both students and teachers, having unique messages for each audience is the best way to ensure you are appealing to their specific needs.
Additionally, you can personalize you emails based the recipient’s behavior and how much interest they show in your product. For example, by using Mixmax’s sequencing, you can create a series of emails you want to send to a prospective customer. Using email rules, you can then set it up to send a second, more detailed email about your product if they open the first email. You can also set up a different intro email to go to the group that did not open your first email.
Create email groups and lists that allow you to use different templates for different recipients for more effective outreach. Email automation is another great way to add personalized touches like individual names on every email you send!
6. Stay Consistent
An email drip campaign only works if you follow through with it!
The effectiveness of a drip campaign relies on consistency. It is all about maintaining visibility without being aggressive. The goal is to find the right balance of interesting content and specific timing that will best reach and intrigue your audience.
This means making sure all your content and automated responses are planned in advance, and that you set yourself email reminders. It also means tracking your engagement to see what is working and making small adjustments along the way!
Getting Started
If you are looking for a way to make the most of your email marketing, a drip campaign may be the perfect solution for you.
Mastering these basics will ensure that you will be able to move onto more advanced tactics and will provide a grounded foundation and understanding in how to best reach your audience through email in the future.