With the emergence and immense popularity of digital marketing, e-mails have begun to put on a new face. E-mail Marketing has evolved into a trustworthy online marketing companion. According to Oberlo, it promises an ROI of $42 for every dollar spent. A well-planned e-mail marketing strategy can push your business up the charts.
The good thing about digital marketing is that it is relatively less expensive. If strategized accordingly, it can reap benefits in a few months because the online streets are the busiest ones on earth today.
With limited resources and funds, you will need a fool-proof plan to go about your marketing agenda. E-mail marketing is an arena in with you can invest without a second thought. Let’s get you both acquainted with each other.
What is E-mail marketing?
Every business is treated uniquely. Therefore, to resort to the right campaign strategy that suits your business would be a difficult job. Worry not; that’s what we are here.
E-mail Marketing involves sending messages/e-mails related to your business to your potential customers or leads via e-mail. This modern marketing strategy is a favourite of B2B marketers for being a productive revenue churning method. Advertisements, solicit sales, donations and offers and business requests are all part of this strategy.
Marketing Automation
Majority of the marketing departments utilize marketing automation which allows multifunctional campaigns to unfold automatically. Using this technology, you can target your leads with automated messages across e-mails, social media, text boxes and the web.
With e-mail automation marketing strategy, marketers can send regularly timed promotional e-mails to subscribers. It allows the construction of personalized e-mails, uniquely targeting each lead/customer.
We will learn more about it as we go along. Let us now understand the two different types of e-mail marketing campaigns that are popular today.
1. Drip Campaign (A Game of Time)
‘Dripping’ mails to your customers enable the recent developments in your business to be shared with your customers at regular intervals. It works on a lead’s/customer’s behaviour on the web and channels personalized e-mails, direct mails or social media messages that suit their taste.
This strategy helps your customers get comfortably familiar with your brand. If the interval between e-mails is consistent, they will look forward to hearing from you.
In this way, you can create a well-timed and evenly-spaced bond with your customers.
Advantages
- According to Pintpointe, drip campaign promises 80% higher open rates and three times the click-through rates earned by e-mail blasts or single-send e-mails.
- Companies that follow this strategy have generated 80% more sales at 33% lesser investment.
- Drip campaign ensures that your faithful customers are retained by constantly checking with them.
- It also helps to nurture new leads and increases brand awareness.
Different Types of Drip Campaigns
- Welcome Drips: To introduce prospects/leads to your brand’s specifications.
- Top-of-Mind Drips: To maintain a steady relationship with hesitant ‘Leads’ over a long period.
- Competitive Drips: To differentiate the merits of your product/service from those of your competitors.
- Re-Engagement Drips: To target inactive audiences to have them consider purchasing from you.
We all have been targeted in one way or the other by some of these strategies of e-mail marketing.
Do you know how they work? Let’s find out!
- Identify your goals; be it targeting new leads, retaining faithful customers or creating brand awareness.
- Create content that suffices your goals. Make it relevant, optimized for mobiles and reader-friendly. Add a CTA too.
- Define your target demographics. It will ensure that your e-mails are personalized to each subcategory of targets.
- Test your strategy using A/B testing and optimize accordingly.
2. Nurture Campaign (A Game of Behaviour)
E-mail nurture campaign involves sending a series of e-mails to leads based solely on their behaviour. Unlike drip campaigns, nurture campaigns facilitate advanced tracking of leads attributes, affiliations and tastes. It enables a more detailed qualifying process to unfold.
Nurture e-mail marketing campaign can help you build a steady relationship with your buyer/lead. By providing them with what they are looking for, you can drive prospects into making decisions.
This method works on segments the user has defined, including demographic and behavioural conditions.
Advantages
- Nurture campaign is more personalized. It considers small behavioural histories of customers like the articles they have read and the number of times they visit your website.
- According to 99firms, e-mail marketing has favoured 47% of marketers to nurture in leads. Also, the e-mail list segmentation is the most productive way to optimize the process.
- Nurture campaign is dedicated to delivering useful information to users and avoids miscellaneous messages.
Different Types of Nurture Campaigns
- Post-Purchase: To follow up by seeking more reviews on your sale.
- New Customer Campaign: To introduce your brand to potential customers who are most likely to make a purchase.
- Re-Engagement: To nudge your inactive customers.
- Repeat Customer Campaign: To target your high-value segment of customers who are most likely to advertise your brand.
So how do we monitor the process of nurture campaign?
If you are seeking to adopt it for your business, find out how to channelize it here!
- When deciding the goals for your campaign, understand your target audience. Narrow down your prospects w.r.t. their behaviour and interest patterns. You are most likely to gain consistent customers from the more ideal client profiles.
- Understand your buyer’s journey and build a steady profile. Study their sale process from their need to purchase stages.
- Determine the channel through which you wish to communicate with them; newsletter, coupons, retargeting ads, mobile ads, etc.
- Enter this information into your automation strategy and watch the magic unfold.
Which Campaign Suits Your Business?
You need to understand your brand, the characteristic of your products/services and your target audience thoroughly. If confusion lingers over any of these factors, it would be difficult for you to pick a campaign.
Thing to remember while choosing to drip e-mais
Drip campaigns are time-oriented. They ensure that e-mails to be sent regularly. However, they do not endorse highly personalized e-mails.
In simple words, drip campaigns help interested customers through the purchasing lane. However, they do not determine which customer is interested since they do not track a buyer’s behavioural journey.
Smaller/Younger firms can depend on drip e-mail marketing strategy before they find their steady ground of buyers. It demands a lesser investment. You could start with an e-mail on a weekend offer.
Things to remember while choosing to nurture campaigns
Nurture campaigns are heavily customized to suit your target audience’s tastes. It works on a detailed study of a user’s every activity on the website.
This campaign method only sends e-mails to customers when they are most likely make a purchase. It’s like reading a customer’s mind. It nurtures not only leads but also their relationship with your brand.
Nurture campaigns need to set up with long term goals. They require better planning and analytics and of course, investment. If you want your business to run on a relationship-centred format, this one’s for you.
Merge The Two Strategies!
You read that correct! We have seen how similar/different drip and nurture campaigns are. If you are looking to hike up sales better, the best way to use them is to combine them.
By using both these campaigns strategically for your sales, you will easily make your brand a vernacular word among your targets. They will help prospects engage with your brand and coach them through the purchase journey by consistently keeping them on their toes.
If you are still doubtful over which e-mail marketing campaign suits your business better, leave us a query below. We will be happy to answer it.
