You’re looking for effective ways to nurture leads. More than that, you’re looking for innovative ways to optimize your marketing performance. You’ve tried all the ‘silver bullet’ tactics that are touted online and they’re delivering mediocre results at best.

Let us introduce you to a wonderful friend – email drip campaigns.

Email Drip Campaign

Definition: a series of automated messages that are sent in a predefined order that moves a recipient through a sales cycle.

By setting up time-released emails to your subscriber list your audience builds their knowledge of a topic based on previous emails. There are several types of email drip campaigns, also known as nurture campaigns, that can be used to garner stronger leads for your business. In this first article of a two part series, we will address various drip campaigns, their benefits, and how to leverage best practices.

Types of Drip Campaigns

There are several types of drip campaigns that marketers can leverage to move prospects through the sales cycles. Before any of these campaign types are useful, however, it is important to segment your email list by interest or lead type to ensure you are sending the right message to the right potential customer. Once that is established, you can start creating a targeted nurture campaign from one of these effective campaign types.

  • Re-engagement Drips:  The goal of re-engagement drips is to cultivate cold leads or prospects and move them back through your sales funnel. This is your chance to engage these prospects with a new product or incentive that is relevant to them, piquing their interest, and ultimately leading them through the sales cycle. It’s like John Cusack in Say Anything; this is your boombox playing Peter Gabriel.
  • New Lead Engagement Drips:  These campaigns can be a powerful tool to turn a prospective lead into a new customer. You want to grab their attention, show them your worth, and more importantly funnel them through a specific sales cycle, getting them to make that conversion from potential customer to engaged customer. This is where your finely crafted elevator pitch and selling proposition shine.
  • Resource Drips:  This type of campaign can be broken down into many different sub-categories, for example, educational or training drips. Regardless of the sub-category type, resource nurture campaigns can improve your brand authority; establishing your company as a thought leader in the industry or (re)engaging prospects. Training drips can walk a new client through an on-boarding process by encouraging them to complete their profile, watch videos, or read helpful white papers. Educational drips can provide your audience with informational updates pertaining to their industry or interest.
  • Brand Awareness Drips: These drips promote new services or resources for clients. They can also engage cold or new leads by promoting new information. Brand awareness drips usually involve some kind of incentive that makes the user want to engage, be it prizes or giveaways. When you’re using a brand awareness drip campaign, remember, the success can hinge on those incentives.

The Benefits of Drip Campaigns

We live in an age of immediate information; if it’s not timely, it’s not relevant.

Drip campaigns are your relevancy anchors.

  • They ensure timeliness. Scheduling email touch points allows you to deliver brand information to customers without taking huge chunks of your day to do so.
  • They nurture relationships. You want to keep your brand at the forefront of the minds of potential clients so that even if a client isn’t ready to buy right at that moment, they will remember you when they are ready to take that next step.
  • They paint a full picture. With these campaigns, companies are able to create a cohesive overarching message that maintains the big picture of your campaign while delivering timely information that speaks to your audience. It does the work for you.

Drip Campaign Best Practices

When conducting an email drip campaign, here are a few best practices you’ll want to keep in mind:

  • Target the right audience
  • Customize email design, content, and messaging to audience segments
  • Test your campaigns

Target the Right Audience

The variety of audiences you’re able to reach is one of the reasons that drip campaigns are so beneficial. If you are a business that serves multiple industries, an email nurture campaign allows you to target different industries by tailoring your content and messaging to speak directly to their needs.

Customize for each Audience Segment

When designing the email layout, developing the email message, and selecting email call-to-actions, you should consider your audience age, income level, demographic, geography and interests. For example, you wouldn’t market to baby boomers the same way you would to millennials. Your design and content needs to reflect the unique wants and needs of your targeted audience.

Test, Test, & Test Again

Just like all your marketing efforts, testing your drip campaigns often is important to improve your campaigns and helps you stay relevant to your customers. Don’t stop experimenting with the email content, subject lines, and calls to action. You never know what is going to resonate with your audience, and testing these elements can help inform future marketing decisions, even outside of your drip campaigns.

It’s important to incorporate these basics to have a successful drip campaign. Be sure to keep your audience in mind, and segment your email lists accordingly to stay relevant to your customers.

Regardless of which nurture campaign type you choose, timely interaction with potential and existing clients will build up your brand awareness, improve customer engagement and establish a real working email strategy with measurable results.

Read More:  Marcella McKee expands on how to establish email drip campaigns and different A/B testing phases to conduct to increase the likelihood of success.