Instant gratification is of great significance to every business owner. . But if that gratification comes from some marketing strategies, then it will cost you more than you can imagine. And the results of such marketing campaigns aren’t long-lasting.
So what’s the solution here?
Various traditional marketing strategies are an effective means to capture your audience’s attention. Out of various strategies, email drip campaigns are one such strategy that can keep your target audience hooked to the brand all the time.
However, the success of the email drip campaign also depends on how you implement it.
Before we dig into this, let’s understand the concept of drip marketing?
Drip marketing is a communication strategy that requires companies to send or ‘drip’ certain messages to the prospects and customers repeatedly over a more extended time to generate leads. These messages are pre-written and often form the part of email marketing and social media marketing.
An effective drip marketing campaign can impact a significant increase in the number of leads who are highly likely to convert into customers. The key takeaway is never to leave the customer alone and maintain steady communication with them.
So, a drip marketing campaign is certainly a highly effective strategy that marketers can implement to ensure a consistent flow of potential material to their customers. In terms of email marketing, the future seems bright. According to the data published by Statista, there will be more than 4 billion email users globally by 2023.
Let’s take a look at the 10 best practices that will allow you to optimize your drip campaign and understand the importance of customer experience to make it successful for your brand.
Optimizing Your Drip Marketing Campaigns
A well-framed drip email program is usually automated and provides valuable information to suit your clients’ needs and interests. While you can also send separate emails, it is recommended to design an automated flow that contacts your prospective clients at specified time intervals.
Here are the 10 essential tips to optimize your drip marketing campaign.
1. Understand Your Target Audience’s Opinion
Not every customer available is your target audience. Filter out a segment of customers that you can target for email marketing purposes. On the basis of the targeted email sent to the customers, you’ll be able to gauge who’s most likely to convert.
2. Send Out Surveys to Know What Clients Are Looking For:
Surveys are a useful tool to understand your client’s preferences and expectations from your services and products. An efficient email will offer valuable insights into the gap between the features that your products or services have and what customers are expecting from you. By removing this gap, you can significantly boost your client base. You can easily search online to get common survey questions examples and use them the next time. There are a number of survey tools available that you can employ for this like ProProfs Survey Maker, LimeSurvey, eSurvey Creator and more.
3. Use Split Testing to Help You Get More Clicks:
Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a highly competent tool to understand the priorities and preferences of your client base. In a split test, you create two variations of one email marketing campaign and send to a very small number of your recipients to see which one is more effective in terms of clicks or open rate.
A split test offers the user choices, and depending on what he/she chooses, the next campaign is framed. By the end of a split test, users can provide you the sequence of priority they consider for the features.
4. Be a Storyteller in All Your Emails:
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Every email that you send out should tell a story. Instead of blandly stating the features and benefits of your product, try placing the user in a situation in which your service or product could be used. Story telling gives you an opportunity to narrate the USPs of your product in an indirect way. It can help you connect with your audience in a unique way leading to developing a bond like never before, thereby increasing the chances of sales.
For example, if you provide groceries on-demand, your email should tell a story of a person who realized the benefits of your service by using it.
5. Use CTAs at the Right Time and Place:
When done right, a call to action (CTA) has the potential to boost your business significantly. For instance, once you have told a story where a person benefited from using your service, you can place a call to action at the end of the email, encouraging your prospective clients not to miss out on your services.
You can also place a CTA at the beginning of your email in the form of a question or statement directing prospective clients to try your services. For example, if you offer door-to-door laundry service, you can put a CTA at the beginning of your email that says, “what will you do this weekend if you didn’t have to do your laundry?”
6. Add a Personal Touch With Welcome Emails:
Whenever a new user joins your client list, send him/her a personalized welcome email. In the email, you can mention all the services that your platform provides and the options available to the client. For example, if you are an online shopping platform, you can put a brief introduction of the sections of the shopping platform in the email, along with the latest inclusions on products that the new user is interested in. Also, always ensure to include the client’s first name at the beginning of the email.
This is one of the biggest benefits of drip marketing emails as it helps you take the first step towards hooking in the customers and presenting an excellent picture of your brand.
7. Send Relevant Content After Understanding the Needs of Your Audience:
Use segmentation and predictive analysis to understand the needs of your audience first and then launch your drip marketing campaign. Providing your clients with relevant content is crucial for turning views into clicks and clicks into actual client conversions. For example, let’s say, you have noticed that the return rate for a specific product is very high due to ineffective performance. In your future communications, you can suggest a newer version of the product or a more competitive similar product to your clients in the emails. A more convenient way to understand customer’s needs is to conduct frequent website feedback survey and get direct answers from people that matter most.
8. Never Forget to Segment Your List:
You cannot emphasize the importance of segmentation enough. It is neither prudent nor practical to draft emails for individual clients. Instead, you need to divide your clients into groups that have similar traits. After segmenting your users into meaningful groups, all you have to do is draft customized emails for each section. For example, sending an email listing your luxury range of cosmetic products is bound to generate better traffic from a segment of users that have a higher average spending behavior for cosmetics as compared to the users generally shopping for school supplies.
9. Always Measure Results:
Measuring the effectiveness of your email campaigns by monitoring and tracking the campaign results is a crucial step. Keeping a keen eye on your ROI as measuring results allows you to understand which consumer segments are the most promising ones, which consumer segments require better attention, and which are the weak points of your marketing strategy. As any marketing expert will tell you, an effective drip marketing campaign is only as good as the results it is producing. Not measuring these results will deprive you of valuable insights into how you can improve the campaign.
10. Don’t Be Too Pushy, Consider Email Frequency:
The quickest way to reach the spam folder is via too-frequent emails. I can speak from experience and I’m sure you’ll agree that we receive a colossal amount of emails every day. If you send emails too frequently, the chances of your emails ending up in the trash or spam folder are rather high. Send out succinct, relevant and meaningful emails at a moderate frequency (once a week or once every two weeks). Not being too pushy will gain you better attention and increase the chances of the user following through.
Emails are the most effective mode of marketing, earning marketers $44 for every $1 spent on an average. And, drip marketing is an automated email marketing method that reduces your effort and increases your profits. However, you need to be attentive to what you send to your users, how frequently you send it, and which users do you send it to. By achieving the delicate balance between these three factors, you will optimize your drip marketing campaigns and maximize the ROI from your drip marketing campaign.
