The Campaigner Guide to Effective EMAIL DRIP CAMPAIGNS

The Campaigner Guide to Effective EMAIL DRIP CAMPAIGNS

Successful Email Marketing is a Marathon Not a Sprint A 2013 Gallup poll on honesty and ethics in various professions found car salespeople near the bottom of the list, with an honesty rating of just 9%. 1 Why do those selling cars face the public s lowest levels of trust? Because, as the reasoning goes, in car sales you have one chance to make a sale and even if you do, you won t likely see that customer again for years. So building a relationship isn t the objective; the lifetime value of any customers who walk into your showroom will be whatever revenue you can earn from them right now. As an email marketer, of course, you take the opposite philosophy: Don t jeopardize your hard-earned subscribers and customers by bombarding them with high-pressure promotional emails. Here, the long-term customer relationship is the main objective. Or, as marketing expert Seth Godin puts it, One subscriber is worth 1,000 surfers 2. View it this way: Car selling is a sprint (sell to them right now, before they leave), while smart email marketing is a marathon (build a relationship, and sell to them forever). So how can you simultaneously maximize your email campaigns effectiveness, taking care not to send too many messages (or too few, or too irrelevant) to your subscribers, while also streamlining the process for more efficiency? Create a custom, automated Email Drip Campaign. 1

When it s Time for Water, Marathon Runners Don t Gulp: They Sip. When it s Time to Market, Smart Emailers Don t Blast: They Drip. So what exactly is an Email Drip Campaign? Drip Campaigns are a logical sequence of emails automated to send at pre-set time intervals, based on specific actions taken by the recipient. After a visitor to your site downloads a brochure, for example, and opts to receive future informational emails and subscriber-only offers, your series of messages will begin automatically dripping into their email inboxes over time. When you create them properly, segment them for relevance and personalize each message, your smart Email Drip Campaigns can help you build the trust and even anticipation of your content by subscribers. A successful Email Drip Campaign involves two interrelated components: A well-planned series of highly relevant email messages sent to subscribers or customers based on specific actions they take (signing up for your newsletter, making a purchase from your store, downloading your white paper, etc.). Carefully planned time intervals to send or drip these emails. Too frequent, and you risk turning off the subscriber; too infrequent (or too unpredictable), and you might not build the relationship and mindshare you re aiming for. The race does not always go to the swift, but often to the ones who keep running. Anonymous 2

Drip Campaigns: Why They re So Darn Powerful For most of email marketing history, the best marketers crafted and sent personalized, relevant messages to their various list segments, based on specific interests or behaviors. But this was a time-consuming, manual process and it did not scale. Worse, without a simple way to access and analyze all of the raw data generated from their email campaigns (what days of the week emails were most likely to be opened, which subject lines performed the best, etc.), these marketers were forced to rely on intuition, rather than testing campaign elements to statistical confidence levels, and using those learnings to continually refine and improve their messages. Today, however, smart email marketers can take advantage of all of these components: real-time testing and reporting to determine the winning elements of any campaign, analysis of Big Data to find business intelligence and key insights contained within their previous campaigns and the ability to use this information to build an automated sequence of emails to be sent at the right times, to the right segments, with just the right message. 3

Campaigner Workflows: The Next Milestone in Your Email Marketing Marathon Indeed, you can begin creating sophisticated, action-triggered Email Drip Campaigns easily, quickly and cost-effectively with Campaigner Workflows. Workflows from Campaigner lets you set up automated drip sequences of highly relevant emails, which you can trigger to send to each subscriber or customer at intervals you decide, based on actions they take. Workflows will not force-feed your customers irrelevant emails, but instead allows you to send based on recipients unique actions or inactions within the automated email flow. With this sophisticated component of your Campaigner Email Marketing suite, you can create an email strategy, implement it once, and then monitor its success or tweak it over time, based on tracked results. Workflows from Campaigner gives you enterprise-caliber Drip Email Marketing that you can simply set and go. 4 ways that Workflows, when integrated into your Campigner Email Marketing service, can dramatically boost the effectiveness of your campaigns: Workflows lets you send customized messages to prospects when they react to specific triggers. You can create workflows that set in motion a series of automated actions for prospects who demonstrate specific interest at a specific moment. You ll be able to learn more about each prospect over time, to continually create more relevant, anticipated and lucrative email campaigns. And Workflows will help you improve the email experience for prospects by providing information when they want it building loyalty and improving ROI. If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. Emil Zatopek 4

Your Training Begins: 3 Best Practices for Effective Drip Campaigns Offer Value A key component to the success of any Drip Campaign is how your subscribers view your emails over time. Among the most important methods for becoming must-read material for your subscribers is to deliver messages containing real value. Send your promotional offers and other marketing messages, yes, but make sure your Drip Campaign also includes a significant percentage of information, education or entertaining content as well: links to articles, videos, blog entries, industry surveys or studies, and other useful material relevant to each specific subscriber segment. Offer Relevance Emails that are rich with detail, include offer deadlines or are otherwise relevant to and actionable by the recipient are likely to be kept longer in the inbox and likely also to be opened more than once. Relevance can also relate to timing. One of the many benefits of using Campaigner is that the web-based service constantly collects, stores and makes available for analysis all of the raw data generated by your email campaigns. So you can continually learn what is working, what isn t, and how to make modifications and improvements to generate better ROI from each email. One element to watch for in your campaigns will be how timing plays a role in their success: what times of day and what days of the week are best for opens and click-throughs, and what is the best time interval between messages. Offer a Reason to Share Successful information marketer Robert W. Bly urges email marketers to include in their messages to subscribes offers exclusive through the email itself, with a note encouraging readers to forward the offer on to friends. Indeed, Bly recommends email marketers place such recommendations in the P.S. of the email proven to be one of the most read elements in any note. Like offering value through useful content and delivering relevant messages at the right time, offering exclusive deals in your emails and then letting your subscribers know those deals are available to anyone to whom they forward your message, you can actually use your Drip Campaigns to generate even more subscribers. 5

How to Use Email Workflows to Win Big Here are several ways Campaigner s Workflows lets you build a highly customized email relationship with each prospect from introduction to purchase, and well beyond. A workflow lets you think proactively, building a sequence of emails and if/then rules based on your prospects specific actions rather than simply reacting to each email reply, form submission or request for information with a manual response. You can also learn from your prospects behavior, to continually refine and improve your workflows. You can use workflows to build ongoing value for your prospects and earn their trust and loyalty by creating content at the outset and sending it to them at regular intervals or when they ask for it. Either way, a workflow lets you stay in contact with prospects and always be responsive, no matter how big your list becomes, or how busy you get. Your workflow can be as detailed as you need it to be tracking every movement of a prospect as they interact with your email or websites and using that information to enhance the relationship for both your prospect and you. You can, for example, automatically send a discount offer to a prospect who has abandoned their shopping cart on your site. 6

Just a Few Great Workflows You Can Use to Chase Down New Business New Customer Welcome Workflow triggered by first purchase You can create a series of welcome emails for a lead or subscriber who has just made their first purchase. This is a great way to build on your relationship by giving your new customer useful information at just the right time, and a reason to continue engaging with your business. This Welcome email series can also include training on your product or service, if relevant, which your new customer will see as extremely valuable and timely. What better message to send than that your business is there to help your new customer get the most of your offerings right away! Event Workflow triggered by registration or attendance at your event Whether you host seminars, exhibit at trade shows or run live webinars (another great marketing tool!), you can create an email workflow to automate communication with prospects and leads who attend (or even just sign up to attend) these events. You can create a series of content-rich messages, for example, for prospects who have attended one of your webinars with content specific to the webinar s topic. This is a great way to deepen engagement with the information-hungry segment of your market (which webinar attendees are by definition) with just the type of information they ve already shown an interest in receiving. Re-engagement Workflow triggered by a period of inactivity from a lead Reopen the lines of communication with leads or prospects you haven t heard from in three months, a year, or whatever timeframe you specify. You can use this series of emails, for example, to send time-sensitive discount offers, or new content, or something else of value to your inactive leads. People get busy and distracted. Why not set an automated series of emails to remind those on your list who ve gone quiet why they engaged with your business in the first place? Business is a sprint until you find an opportunity, then it s the patience of a marathon runner. Robert Herjavec 7

Give Your Email Marketing Some Legs With Campaigner Workflows You want to reap the successes of your continually improving email marketing campaigns for many years. You plan to enjoy repeat business, high lifetime-value customers and the trust, and even the anticipation of your new content, from your subscribers. The good news: You can accomplish all of these goals, and more easily than you might think. The key is a well-thought-out email strategy for each scenario, each segment and each type of subscriber. That means the right messages, in the proper sequence, offering a mix of relevant information and relevant promotions, and sent at intervals proven to resonate with your subscribers. The best way to achieve this level of intelligence is to develop smart Drip Campaigns, set them and go with Campaigner Workflows, and use the sophisticated analysis tools to learn what s working so you can refine what isn t. With Campaigner Workflows, then, you will enjoy the ability to build and refine, with minimal effort, an automated sequence of emails to be sent at the just right times, to just the right segments, with just the right messages. Sources: 1 Gallup, US Views on Honesty and Ethics in Professions (2013) http://www.gallup.com/poll/166298/honesty-ethics-rating-clergy-slides-new-low.aspx 2 Seth Godin blog, In Search of Meaningful (2014) http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/06/in-search-of-meaningful.html 8