Drip Campaigns: Converting Prospects into Customers

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I’ve resolved to get back into the swing of things with my writing. I apologize again for the absence, but it has not been for lack of interest on my part. I’ve been head’s down on quite a few projects, a couple of which have inspired me to write about drip email marketing campaigns. This is a lead nurturing technique that can be very effective if done properly. Hopefully, your actions in 2011 yielded a database of prospects that can be converted into customers in 2012.

What is drip marketing?
The premise of a drip email marketing campaign is simple: Subscribers kick off the email series by way of a specific action, such as subscribing to your list, clicking a link in a message, making a purchase, viewing a particular product, or downloading a white paper. Once the campaign is triggered, emails are automatically delivered on a predetermined schedule — a steady “drip,” if you will — until the series ends or the subscriber opts out of the conversation. Drip campaigns allow you to communicate with your subscribers on a one-to-one basis, and because the emails are more relevant, targeted, and timely, they have much higher conversion rates than mass emails.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when developing your drip marketing campaign:

1. Educate your contacts with relevant information: don’t make them do the legwork to research your product or company. If your prospects have to search independently on the internet for more details, they’ll be susceptible to being lured away by a competitor. Since your prospect is interested in your company or product, but not yet ready to buy, your drip campaign messages should address their needs and pain points. What are their needs or pain points? That’ll depend on how they came to be on the list for this drip campaign. Use that basis to segment your campaign and send them relevant links to your site. By directing them to information on your site, you’re limiting their potential exposure to competitors.

2. Make them timely: The purpose of a drip campaign is to maintain regular, continual contact with subscribers in an effort to keep your brand top of mind, increase engagement and accelerate the sales process. Don’t set the campaigns and forget them. Think of when it would be of most use to your recipients to receive a particular piece of information and work backward when developing a message outline. Keep your deployment timing in synch with where the contact is in the sales pipeline and plan your messages accordingly.

3. Have a clear, actionable call to action: This is an opportunity to solicit involvement with your company or brand. Unlike your general promotional email campaigns, drip campaigns are intended to be one-to-one communications. Each message should have a request for a relevant response, such as an invitation to download more information, give feedback on a recent purchase or visit a relevant product page on your site. Don’t bury the CTA – make it a prominent part of the campaign. At the same time, create a sense of urgency to respond.

Prospects may not take action the first time they’re exposed to your service or brand. A drip campaign can keep your company name top of mind when they’re emotionally ready to pull the trigger on making a purchase. A single mass message may not be enough to move the contact from prospect to customer status.

Here are a couple of other articles about using drip campaigns:
Sample of a drip campaign for real estate agents
Tips from Marketing Sherpa to Drive Revenue

Back to school basics for email marketing

In the United States, it’s the time of year when school kids and college students across the country are beginning class for the school year. Fall semester has begun, and with Labor Day (another American holiday) coming up, summer is just about over, for all intents and purposes.

In the spirit of going back to school, a time when students across the country are getting refocused on learning, here is a checklist of items to help your email program come together the way you intended:

1. Start with an objective: what’s the end result you’re aiming to achieve? Students have a degree or certificate in mind when they enroll. Be sure your call to action is going to help you achieve the goal you’ve set out to reach. Don’t bury the action in a big block of text and don’t only include it in an image that’s likely to be turned off.

 

2. Assemble a supply list: what is it you’ll need to get the job done? Whether it’s a relevant landing page for the email campaign or the buy-in from team members to fulfill the email’s call to action, make sure you have your resources in order before activating the campaign. Don’t send an email out with a free giveaway offer if you don’t have the commitment of purchasing and anyone who will have to help fulfill the offer, such as cashiers or your fulfillment house.

 

3. Who else is in your class? If you haven’t already done so, sign up for emails from your competitors.  Check out what they’re doing to keep an eye on the information your customers or clients are potentially reading.

 

4. Remember to put your best foot forward: There are so many ways to address this issue, whether it be testing how your email is rendering across platforms or proofing for typos, be sure your emails are as polished and presentable as they can be.

 

5. Be open to learning: Review metrics after each send and adjust future campaigns accordingly. Hopefully your production lead times allow for flexibility and adapting your plans based on recent past campaign performance.

 

6. Make new friends: In email marketing terms, this is also called growing your list. Just as with personal relationships, look for quality not quantity. Are you adding the best possible contacts to your database? There are plenty of co-registration tactics that will yield a large number of subscribers, but they may not be your best customers in the future. I always recommend promoting an email program in such a way that captures people who have willingly sought you out: web visitors, customers who have made online purchases, personal referrals from current list members and even those who orbit in your social media circles. Don’t forget to capture Facebook friends and Twitter followers – even FourSquare check-ins are a good source of emails.

Why Food Trucks Need Email Marketing

In Atlanta, Georgia, which is where I live, the food truck phenomenon is taking the streets by storm. Not a day goes by when I don’t get a Tweet or Facebook update on the location of one or more of these trucks. Each time, my stomach starts to grumble, and sometimes I even abandon my original plans to partake in their food.

Food trucks have entered the market at the height of social media. Of the trucks I follow in Atlanta, Yumbii, the King of Pops, Tex’s Tacos and Westside Creamery, none use email to market themselves.  Playing devil’s advocate, they could say, “Why should we? We’re selling out our inventory as it is using Twitter and Facebook. That’s enough marketing for us.”

But is it?  Here are my arguments for why food trucks need email marketing*:

1. Not everyone is on Twitter or Facebook. According to a December 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 77% of American adults use the internet. 92% of those adults use email, while only 61% use an online social networking site. While Facebook may have 500 million active users, 50% of which log on in any given day, if you’re not following your favorite truck, you’re likely to miss out on their location or schedule.  Same for Twitter. Even though the service is adding 500,000 accounts daily, according to this report from May 2011, only 8% of Americans over the age of 12 are using it. Using Census figures, that’s ~20 million people. Awareness of Twitter is at 92% of Americans of the same age (12 or older), but adoption is clearly lagging.
2. Email is shareable. Yes, I know Facebook has its “share” button, which is intended to make it easier to spread items among your network on the site. But the trucks I follow post their daily locations as status updates, which aren’t shareable (i.e. no “share” button for that feature). And when was the last time you forwarded a Tweet? I suppose you could re-tweet the tweet of your favorite truck and cc your Twitter friend as if to say, “Want to go?” But what if the friend you want to make plans with isn’t on Twitter? Or you can’t immediately recall their user name? If you’re using Twitter on an iPad, you can mail a tweet. But wouldn’t it be nicer if the information were already in your inbox? I just know that if I were emailed a truck’s schedule for the week, there’s high probability that I’d forward it to a friend to make plans for a meal.  It’s hard to do that with a Facebook status update or Tweet.
3. Space limitations. Tweets are restricted to 140 characters and Facebook status updates are generally fairly short. Perhaps this is why posts are done on a daily basis – there’s not enough room to convey an entire week’s schedule in one place. (Though some do say something to the effect of “Our weekly schedule is up – check the website” with a link to the applicable page on their website.)  But they’re missing the opportunity to share more information about themselves that an email affords. An email, in addition to informing the recipient of the week’s schedule, would also allow the truck’s owner to highlight their menu or feature a particular item. In an email message, one food truck owner could even feature another food truck that offers a complimentary menu item (dessert feature in an entrée food truck email, or vice versa). No harm in some co-promotion among food truck friends, I don’t think.
4. Segmentation. Email allows you to get to know your audience in a way that Twitter and Facebook cannot. As part of the email sign-up process, a food truck could ask for the person’s home and work zip codes. This would allow food truck owners to send subscribers special notices when the truck is going to be in their area. Twitter doesn’t allow food trucks the luxury of targeting, and neither does Facebook (unless you count paid advertising, which I’m not in this case).
5. Email can be distributed via social media. It’s possible to “tweet” an email and broadcast its contents to your followers or “share” an email on Facebook. However, it is possible to share the content within an email via a “tweet this” button, Google’s +1 or a Facebook share button so a particular piece of information, photo or video to be shared via a social network. Similarly, many email software providers offer functionality that will allow for web-hosted versions of the entire email to be distributed via Twitter and/or Facebook when the message is sent. In some cases, these web-hosted versions have a toolbar at the top that includes a button for Tweeting or sharing on Facebook, so even if someone wasn’t on the email’s original distribution list, they can still pass along the email via social media. Also, when an email is posted to Facebook as the campaign is sent, it’ll likely be as a news item with the “share” option included. As I’ve said earlier, Facebook status updates don’t include that option.
6. Email can go viral: Thanks to the forward button, an email recipient can send an email to as many friends as they’d like. If you can’t share a Facebook status update or forward a Tweet, a food truck owner is banking on someone to remember to have an offline conversation about their truck. Given the trucks’ success, it’s happening. Tweets can be retweeted, thus they can be shared many times over beyond the food truck’s network, but it’s worth mentioning that an email has the same ability to go far beyond its original distribution list, even without ever being posted to a social network.

* This was not intended to be a “why email is better than social media” post. Rather, I’m aiming to highlight the food trucks’ missed opportunities by limiting their marketing plan to Facebook and Twitter. I’ll admit that social media is better for last-minute change of plans. Food trucks have the benefit of picking up and moving to a new location when sales are slow or the weather doesn’t cooperate. But since their customers use more than one channel to get information, in my biased opinion, I think food trucks should also diversify their marketing efforts beyond social to expand their reach via an email marketing program. A few additional fans wouldn’t hurt should they ever decide to add a second (or third) truck to their fleet.

Keeping mobile in mind for your email campaigns

You’ve designed a beautiful email, sent it at a time of day when you expect to garner optimal results, but yet there’s something you’re not seeing in the metrics that you’d expected. What’s missing? Did you take into account the segment of your audience who would be reading your email on a mobile device when you devised this campaign?

According to Nov 2010 comScore data for U.S. consumers, some 70 million mobile users accessed email through a mobile device, with 43.5 million doing so on a near-daily basis.  I recently attended a conference at which Justine Jordan of Litmus said that ~9% of all marketing emails sent are opened on a mobile device.

Not all designs are created equal

If you think your results aren’t what they should be, tools like Litmus, Unica or CampaignCog are now available to give some estimates of how many people open your email on a mobile device. If there’s a significant slice of your audience viewing your campaigns on their iPhone, Droid or other mobile device – even iPads, it may be time to think about revamping your template to accommodate those platforms. Think designing for desktop clients was tough? Now email marketers must also take into account rendering on mobile devices while being mindful of how a recipient will interact with the campaigns if viewed on a smartphone. Here’s a link to a blog post by Jordan with a graph that shows mobile email compatibility across a variety of clients.

Finger is the new mouse

If you’ve ever used an iPad, or other mobile device to surf the web or view email, you’ll know how frustrating it can be when you try to click on a micro-sized link only to hit the wrong one. When designing your emails, remember that instead of clicking with a mouse, recipients may be using their finger to respond to your call to action.

Here are some things to think about:

• Are your links big enough to click without expanding the message first? If you have a navbar at the top of your emails to send recipients to various parts of your website, it’s likely that it will be tough for recipients to click on without expanding the message in order to click the right link.
• Font sizes and sentence length: Lengthy sentences written in a small font will be tough to read on a mobile device.
• Include a link to a mobile version of your campaign at the top of the message. This way, recipients can easily click to a text-friendly version of your message.
• Think about your subject line – short and sweet, tell don’t sell. Not all devices have a preview pane to help recipients quickly make an informed “read or delete” decision. Sometimes the only information they have is a subject line and the sender’s name (which should NEVER be “info”).
• Highlight your call to action (CTA): Don’t bury it in the fine print. Make it easy to read and click. Keep it above the fold.
• Keep an even balance of images and text. Make sure the primary CTA is in read-able text even if images are turned off. If a message is one big image, and images are turned off or broken, how is a recipient going to understand your message?
• Time of send: Earlier this year, direct digital marketing firm Knotice announced the results of a study which showed that mobile readers typically view their messages early in the morning or late at night. If you want to catch someone’s attention quickly, lengthy newsletters on a weekend aren’t the way to go since that’s when most folks are just triaging their inbox until a later time when they’re not trying to read their iPhone while pay attention to their kids, friends and the like.

Facebook and Email: Part 2 of 2

As mentioned in my first post about using Facebook in conjunction with your email marketing program, here are a couple more tactics for bringing the two channels together.

Do it “like” this
We all want to be “liked,” right? In addition to sharing our emails, it’s possible to simply “like” them. Facebook’s “Like” buttons can be incorporated into emails, and in some cases, that “liking” activity can be tracked via the ESP.

Comparing “Like” vs. “Share.” The benefits to an email sender of a recipient hitting the “Like” button in an email are similar to that of sharing, but it’s less of a commitment for the recipient. The recipient simply hits the “Like” button and the link to the web version of the email campaign appears on their profile page and also in their friends’ news feed. The difference is that there isn’t a place for a recipient to add in their personal endorsement when the “Like” button is used. So your recipient is still spreading the word about your content and passing it along to their network, but they aren’t asked to take the step of giving an endorsement.

Send it on Facebook
Just announced on Monday, April 25, 2011, is the “send” button for distributing website content within Facebook to a select group of friends.  To use this functionality, you would need to have a URL for your message (the “view as a web version” of the campaign) or embed this button within the landing page that’s a part of the email campaign.  To entice your recipients to “send it to a subset of their Facebook friends,” it will be imperative that you not only give them a reason to do so, but explain why they should keep the message exclusive to a select group instead of “liking” it and sharing with all of their Facebook friends. It’ll be interesting to see how this functionality evolves. Here’s the link to the Facebook developer’s page with more information.

Convert email subscribers to Facebook fans
Just as you’ve converted Facebook fans to email subscribers by including an email sign-up form on your Facebook page, it’s possible to drive email subscribers to your Facebook page and connect with them on the social networking site as well.

By adding an email subscriber as a fan of your Facebook page you’ve created an additional touch point with one of your more engaged customers. This is an opportunity to have a more immediate dialogue with an engaged customer. It’s also an opportunity to speak directly with them and with a greater frequency than through email campaigns. In the end, it doesn’t matter which came first – the email subscription or Facebook fan connection. A customer who engages with you in both channels is very valuable and should be treated accordingly in both places.

Got another idea (or two) for blending Facebook with your email marketing program? Leave a comment on this blog post or a note on my Facebook wall.

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