Demystifying Drip Marketing Campaigns
More companies move towards fully integrated marketing automation platforms as marketing has become more data-driven than ever before. Statistics show an increase in global marketing automation spending from $11.4 billion in 2017 to $25.1 billion by 2023.
Many industry experts believe that single, bulk email blast campaigns are outdated when speaking of lead management and lead nurturing. The shift to drip-based marketing philosophy followed when marketers searched for an easy fix for their unsuccessful email marketing campaigns.
Marketing end-users can sometimes struggle with complicated, feature-rich email marketing applications. Luckily you don’t have to be an experienced email marketing guru to run simple and effective drip-based email campaigns. Some of the most effective drip-based email marketing campaigns are nothing more than bulk-email campaigns with a non-responder component tied to them.
How Does It Work
The easy start to begin mastering drip-based email marketing campaigns is to use the “subject swap” technique that retail email marketers have successfully employed for a long time. The basic premise of a subject-swap drip email campaign is to send a series of emails that are pretty much copies of each other with a slightly modified subject line to progressive segments of non-responders to the initial email at varying days/times. A simple example of this would look like this:
- First email – Main email – Send Tuesday @ 1 PM US EDT
- Second email – Subject Line Variation – Send Thursday @ 4 PM EST to non-responders of #1
- Third Email – Subject Line Variation – Send Monday @ 10 AM EST to non-responders of #2
- Fourth Email – Subject Line Variation – Send Sunday @ 8 PM EST to non-responders of #3
The average office worker receives about 121 emails daily. Sending a single email blast and stopping will leave potential responders on the table just because the time/day was not the optimal viewing time for them.
The idea behind hitting the non-responders with a slightly modified subject line at a different time of day is to try to place your email in the right viewing pane at the time when the recipient is likely to stop, read, open, and click through your campaign. Staggering a series of pre-built drip emails over 1-2 weeks and varying the subject lines and times will more than double, if not triple, the open rates on your original email campaign.
How Does It Look
The basic recipe for a subject swap drip campaign is to pre-build four emails with subject lines that range from formal to casual and some leveraging the recipients’ first name in the email. Examples of subject line styles for a webinar invite may go something like this:
- Formal – [Webinar Invitation] Join our company on this date for a webinar
- Informal – Supercharge your performance with these excellent best practices in our upcoming webinar
- Personal – Hi [First Name], I wanted to share this webinar invite with you
- Time is running out – Webinar Alert – Live event tomorrow at 2 PM
Using various subject lines in the styles like those above will help you get your message opened at a much higher rate. Marketing automation should be a top priority as it is the best way to align marketing and sales efforts and send the right messages to the right person and when the time is right.
For all their power and rich feature sets, marketing automation systems can overwhelm many marketers as you’ll have to spend some time to set up and configure the lead scoring programs and CRM integration. Having the right marketing automation platform with out-of-the-box CRM integrations and AI-powered lead scoring in place is one of the best ways to cultivate customers for life.
The numbers are also encouraging, as marketing automation, on average, drives up to a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads using marketing automation software.
A powerful marketing automation tool will free you from doing constant follow-ups. It will keep you updated on how your recipients react to your messaging campaigns and when a contact has “scored” high enough to hear from your sales team. Having access to customer data is crucial for sales as they might have a personalized approach. Also, they get less pushback on pricing as the leads are qualified.
If you are looking to achieve more meaningful connections with prospects and customers, reach out to us. We’ll share our best practices and help you set up your first drip campaigns.
