Tag: drip marketing

Are Your Drip Marketing Emails Too Long?

Drip Marketing has been around for some time now – long enough for people to understand that it is a way of keeping your company, product, or service ‘on top of mind’ over a period of time. It has been found to be a successful strategy, and is being used by a growing number of small businesses who realize that its benefits are not only the province of large companies.

There seem to be two different types of drip marketing campaigns – at least that I have observed. As far as I can tell, they produce very different results.

The first type is similar to mass emailing – only that mass emails are executed as drips. ie. Don’t only send one mass email; send a number of them, with perhaps some changes from one to the next.

The second type employs some level of interaction, and uses this interaction to determine what to do next.

The first type falls under the category of one-way communication (“Hello there! I have something to tell you!”), while the second uses, and relies on two-way communication to succeed.

The first type usually results in emails that are too long. There can be a number of reasons for this, but typically, senders are trying to get as much information as they can into each message. Result: recipients’ eyes gloss over, or the message gets deleted or ignored.

A number of articles have been written about why your emails are too long (Why your emails are too long — and how to improve, 10 Reasons Your Emails Are Too Long), and they get near, but don’t get the cigar. The real reason is relevance to the recipient’s question. This is the point. If you are employing one-way communication, you don’t have interactivity. Without interactivity, how do you know what the recipient is asking? And if you don’t know the question, how do you know that your message is relevant?

If you are the sender of interactive emails, your messages can be short, and to the point. Result: they are much more likely to be read – and responded to.

People no longer have time for wordy emails – especially when the communication is one-way. Email is not dead, and email campaigns will be around for a long time to come. The success of services like Twitter have shown that messages don’t have to be long to be understood. And this is especially true when interaction provides the context by which we communicate. So be brief!

As Baltasar Gracian (Spanish Philosopher) said: “Good things, when short, are twice as good.”

BizConnector employs two features which enable relevant interactivity in drip marketing campaigns:

  • It is based on rules, which only fire when their conditions are satisfied. Rule conditions are allied with relevance.
  • The Instant Feedback feature updates records in real-time when recipients respond to questions in the body of emails.

Isn’t it time you made your campaigns interactive?

 

Handling the Long Tail – Rules Working Together

BizConnector rules are autonomous. Ostensibly, they are not aware of each other.

But through rule actions that update fields, they can be made to work together in a seamless symbiosis!

Handling ‘the long tail’ is one example of how this can be implemented effortlessly in BizConnector. Let’s take a simple example:

  • Let’s say you have a web form on your site inviting people to learn more about a specific product or service.
  • And you have a rating system for leads – say hot, warm, and cool.
  • When anyone indicates their interest by submitting name and email address, you want to send a sequence of seven weekly emails.
  • You think the weekly frequency is appropriate for people who are interested in what you have to say.
  • You set up systems for those who respond quickly.
  • But what about those who don’t respond in the seven weeks?

 

Here’s the BizConnector solution:

  • In addition to the email content for the seven weekly emails, decide on email content that will be sent at a slower pace – for those leads who are not quick to respond.
  • Let’s say you will re-use some email templates, and create a few new ones as well.
  • The solution involves two rules – one for warm leads and one for cool leads. (Hot leads are those that responded within the first seven weeks.)
  • The warm rule will send seven weekly emails, and in the eighth week will update the Rating field to ‘cool’.
  • The cool rule will fire, and send ten monthly emails (note the slower pace…)
  • That’s all you need to do!

The effect of this is:

  • Everyone will start receiving the seven weekly emails.
  • But those who respond will only receive the weekly emails up to the point that they respond. They are not sent ‘irrelevant’ emails because of the ‘Check Before Send’ feature basic to the tool.
  • After the seventh week, those still on the drip will have their Rating field changed to ‘cool’.
  • This kicks off the cool rule, which starts sending the monthly emails.
  • You remain ‘top of mind’ for these non-responders.
  • Think of this as the ‘long tail’, about which plenty has been written – on the internet and elsewhere.

Now that was easy, wasn’t it?