Just about every business has some sort of email drip campaigns. For some, it is as simple as a monthly newsletter. For others, it is a more elaborate maze of different email messages going out at different times. Whatever the case, most of us are not doing enough in this area, and this post is all about giving some actionable advice to resolve that.
What is an email drip campaign?
An email drip campaign is simply a set of emails designed to go out to a recipient over a period of time. The main goals of a drip campaign are to trigger a response, to educate, to build interest, and to stay fresh in mind.
Why are email drip campaigns so important?
This is a pretty critical piece to a sales and marketing strategy for one key reason. It is very likely that a prospect is not going to be ready to purchase when you reach out to them. Often, when they say “No,” it is not no as in never; it is “No, not right now.”
With that being the case, what is critical to success is finding a way to stay fresh in the prospect’s mind so that when they are ready, they know that you are an available option, and they reach out to you.
Segmenting Your Audience
One step that often gets overlooked is segmenting your email contact list and database, and we sometimes end up sending the same messages to everybody. This is a bad misstep as to be most effective; you should be sending different messages to the different audience segments.
A prospect should not get the same emails as a current and past client. We use the following segments in our marketing:
- New prospects
- Hot prospects
- Warm prospects
- Cold prospects
- Closed prospects
- Current clients
- Past clients
- Referral partners
Building Email Campaigns
Once you have your audience segmented, you can start to build for the different segments. These will be groups of emails designed to go out staggered over a period of time.
One way to go about it is to create campaign tiers. This allows you to send campaigns to multiple segments. Here are some of the tiers that we use.
- Tier 1 – Lead Generation
- Tier 2 – Building interest
- Tier 3 – Cross-selling
- Tier 4 – Staying in touch
- Tier 5 – We want you back
We hope this helps you with building your email drip campaigns!