Drip Email Marketing: 3 Crucial Steps for Drip Campaigns

Drip email marketing [link to 3 types of drip content post] is a super easy and effective way to nurture leads into customers. It increases sales and revenue for your business. But before you can start, you need to nail down the logistics. Soooo… let’s do that!

1) Choose a Program:

The first step is to choose an email marketing program to use for your drip email campaigns.

Here are some of the most popular ones:

• MailChimp
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• iContact
• InfusionSoft

Each of these has its own benefits and drawbacks, so it’s important to explore them for yourself to see which one will fit your needs best. For example, MailChimp is known as one of the more user-friendly programs, whereas Aweber is a bit more complicated but offers more advanced capabilities. Many have premium and free options to fit your budget as well.

2) Choose a Schedule:
This depends on your sales cycle (how long it takes a prospect to become a customer after the first contact). Here is a basic guide to get you started:

• Sales Cycle 1 week: Daily Emails
• Sales Cycle 4-6 weeks: Emails Twice per Week
• Sales Cycle 6 months-1 year: Weekly, then quickly stretching into Monthly or Quarterly Emails

You always want to send the first email as soon as the lead is entered, and then a follow-up a few days later, to make sure you keep the communication lines open while the lead is hot. After that, use the above as a jumping off point and optimize your frequency as results start coming in from the campaigns. Obviously if you are getting a ton of people unsubscribing, you want to reduce the number of emails you’re sending. (But keep in mind there will always be unsubscribes, you just need to find a good balance.)

Basically, your schedule should be frequent enough to keep your brand at the front of prospects’ minds without barraging them with too many emails.

3) Build Your Email Database:
In order for this to work, you need to try to collect email addresses…. like, everywhere! Here are three highly effective ways to collect email addresses:

• Contact forms on your website
• Email subscription form on your blog
• Receptionist collecting email addresses from callers

Once collected, you need to move all the email addresses you get from these sources into your email program’s database so they can be used for your drip email marketing.

By following the steps above, you will find setting up your email drip campaigns to be a fairly straightforward process. And the setup is the main struggle with drip campaigns, since they pretty much run themselves after that!

Want to learn more about creating effective drip email campaigns? Download our FREE report: Email Follow Up: 4 Steps to Generating Up to 98% More Sales From Your Prospects!

Best,
Joy