Your email mailing list is coming along nicely. You’ve set up a great funnel and people are clicking through and hitting that subscribe button. Your content marketing is also on point - you’re using social media for all it’s worth and your blog is picking up backlinks. You’ve got this marketing thing nailed… right?
Well, yes, sure, but also… Here’s the problem: Content marketing, social media marketing, and building your SEO are all there to drive traffic towards your website and to get people engaged with your company. They’re there to help you build up a strong mailing list and convert leads into hot leads, and hot leads into customers.
But what do you do with that mailing list once you have it? What happens after they’ve clicked subscribe and are ready to start getting your ongoing email marketing? Here’s our quick guide on how drip email marketing gets your customers engaged.
What is Drip Email Marketing?
Drip email marketing is an email marketing method that allows you to set up a series of pre-written, automated emails that get sent as soon as a customer or potential client performs any one of a series of trigger actions.
Some of the other terms you might have heard used to describe it are: autoresponders, automated email, lifecycle emails, or marketing automation. Effectively, they’re all the same thing: emails that go out according to a schedule, based on what your subscriber does.
How it Works
A drip campaign follows a few simple, automated steps, like this:
1 - Opting in. Your customer or subscriber opts in on any one of a predetermined series of trigger events. These could include subscribing to your newsletter, requesting more information about a specific product, service or event, such as a webinar, or buying a particular product or service.
2 - Sending the emails. Your automated email set-up then sends a series of pre-written, scheduled emails that each perform a specific function. As an example, these could include a welcome email, an invitation to download a video or ebook, a follow-up to find out whether they enjoyed the video, read the ebook and so on, followed by a final email to invite them to sign up for a consultation.
3 - Encouraging further opt-in. Your drip campaign will usually have a limited lifecycle, and you might want to end it after that cycle, or you might want to get people to sign up for the next campaign. If you want the latter, you would encourage further sign-up.
When to Use it
You could use drip email marketing for any of a number of reasons, such as:
- To generate leads: autoresponders can be very useful as part of your marketing funnel, to help channel interested and engaged potential customers into the sales process.
- For ongoing customer nurturing: Once someone is your customer, you want to build a relationship with them. You can do this with a combination of personalized communications and automated emails that each serve their purpose in maintaining and growing that customer relationship.
- Ongoing sales: If someone buys your product or service as a one-off, you can use a drip email campaign to encourage them to buy more products or services.
- Generating feedback: It’s always good to know how customers feel about the product or service they received, and this type of email marketing campaign can help you get that valuable feedback.
There are, of course, many other reasons you could use an automatically generated email campaign, and these could vary depending on what industry you’re in and what you are trying to achieve. It’s always good to remember, though, to use a combination of personal follow-up and autoresponse, to make sure customers don’t feel like they’re just being funnelled in a direction.
What would you use a drip email marketing campaign for? Tell us in the comments.
Need to generate autoresponders that sell? Get in touch and we’ll help you.