Email Drip Campaigns
An email drip campaign is an excellent marketing tool that is being used by thousands of companies to promote their brand and help new subscribers learn more about them. If you have signed up on a website that offers services or products, chances are that you have already gotten at least one of those email newsletters from them.
How the email drip campaign is conducted can make all the difference between a recipient marking the emails as spam and remaining a subscriber who wants to be kept abreast of what’s happening.
Planning your perfect campaign isn’t an easy job, but at the very least, this article will attempt to give you the necessary help that could make things that much faster.
Understanding Email Drip Campaigns
The email drip campaign has many different names, such as lifecycle emails, automated email campaign, etc., but all of those names have the same meaning. They represent automated emails that are being sent to subscribers on specific dates staggered over a period of time.
These emails are written in advance to be sent on a schedule. You can consider these emails your company's personal newsletter service. They should be sent not only to notify about new features, services, and products that you offer but also to help your subscribers get up to speed with existing offers.
Since these emails are written in advance, they need to be carefully planned out. Here are a couple of tips that can improve your email drip campaigns.
Know Your Target Audience
When you are sending an email to a friend, you immediately know how to compose it. That is because you know your friend’s personality and interests. That’s how it is when it comes to drip campaigns.
Once you realize who will benefit from your product the most, the next step becomes easier. Think about what your products and services actually offer people and you will know what your subscribers want. You can imagine your target audience as if it is one person.
How will you know what a specific user needs? That depends on the products that the user is buying or their other actions on your website.
For an example, if a user downloads your new app, you’d want to send them instructional emails. Also, if a user purchases a specific product, an instructional email that features similar products or accessories to the purchased product would make sense.
That’s how you can promote your other services while delivering the information that your target audience needs.
Basically, your goal should be to set up a profile for each and every single customer that subscribes. Initially, it won't have much information, but with tracking behavior (like website cookies, etc.) you will fill in the gaps and continue to personalize that profile.
Your system will use that information to know which set of emails is intended for which users.
Compose an Engaging Email
A good place to start is the first email that your clients get once they subscribe. That is arguably the most important email that you can send.
Your goal should be to come up with an engaging message that will instantly grab your subscriber’s attention. Think about what you would like them to learn or do, explain the benefits and make interesting offers.
These messages shouldn’t be enormous blocks of text. Keep in mind that people actually do judge a book by its covers and put some work into the design. The text shouldn’t be challenging to read. Instead, work on something fun and informational.
Plan Ahead
And now, the tough part. Let’s say that you have written everything that you planned and you now have different sets of emails that you will be sending.
All that’s left now is to figure out when you will be sending them, to whom and how consistently.
You don’t want to irritate your subscribers by sending emails each and every day. Also, you don’t want to send emails to the wrong person. Wasting your subscriber’s time with useless information will do more harm than good for your company.
Monitor the Analytics of Your Email Drip Campaign
What if you aren’t getting the expected numbers even though you are doing everything correctly? You’ll find to want to find out early. And if it’s working, you’d want to know as well and find out what works.
This is why you should measure your email drip campaign’s success rate. Proper analytics is key!
UTM codes are very useful when it comes to analytics. UTM or Urchin Traffic Monitor codes can tell you almost everything about your user’s activity (where the user has been, how many times they’ve visited your website, etc.). These codes represent small text strings that you paste to the end of a URL.
Besides from UTM codes, you could try monitoring apps. Once you get the results, you will know if your campaign plan needs changing.
Conclusion
This information should be enough to get you started with your email drip campaign. Keep in mind that all of the hard work you put into these emails will be worth it at the end – if it is done correctly, that is.
Although nowadays social media platforms dominate when it comes to online communication, emails are not old news. As a matter of fact, research[1] shows that there will be over 2.9 billion email users by the end of 2019, and email marketing is highly affordable compared to ads and has among the highest ROIs.
That only proves that email drip campaigns are a worthy investment.
[1] http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf