You’ve probably already spent a considerable amount of time and money engaging prospective customers. How would you feel if you could have emails sent automatically to your prospects each week or each month, without you having to do much of anything? That’s exactly what drip campaigns are all about. Follow these steps to nurture leads with email marketing drip campaigns!
STEP 1 – Start Your Plan with a Specific Objective
What do you want to accomplish with your drip campaign? A thorough analysis of the marketing problem you want to solve will ensure you get your campaign started right. Be sure to gain a clear understanding of the overarching objective as well as any important details. For instance you need to know the length of your buying and sales cycle, because it will determine the number of messages to be sent and at what intervals. Your drip campaign could be as simple as two messages sent one week apart to remind your buyer of product features, or as complex as a dozen messages sent biweekly or monthly.
STEP 2 – Understand Your Customer
Businesses who build quality relationships with their leads, over a period of time, have the greatest potential of turning those leads into customers. We’ve said this again and again throughout this blog, but just in case you missed it…. YOU MUST GET TO KNOW YOUR TARGET MARKET! The only way to design a marketing campaign that is relevant and useful to your prospects is to know what is important to them, their patterns, and their problems. Are your prospects consumers or businesses? If they are businesses, are they B2B or B2C? Who within the organization (or family) is in charge of purchasing your products or services? Who are the decision makers and key influences? Do you need to market to the IT person, the CEO, or the Executive Assistant? Gather as much data as possible about your customers before you design your campaign. This will help you design a campaign that adds value to your prospects and focuses on solving a problem, instead of just reiterating that your product is great.
STEP 3 – Identify Micro-Conversions
Your sales staff knows that you can’t get prospects to buy, before they are absolutely ready. If prospects are still trying to define their requirements, or conducting research, they will not be able to fully engage with a product demo. It is also important to understand that not all prospects will move through the sales process at the same pace, or even in a straight line. Many times prospects must take a step backward or sideways before they are actually ready to move forward. By mapping the alternate paths your prospects take toward becoming paying customers, you will be able to identify stopping points or conversion points in the sales cycle. Develop email content around these conversion points, answering the right question at the right time to nurture your lead to the next step.
STEP 4 – Automate the Process
Once you have determined your target audience and have written your specific email messages, the entire drip campaign can be automated with an add-on to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. This solution not only allows you to automatically send emails at your established intervals, but it also allows you to measure and analyze the effectiveness of your campaign. At Predictive Response, we offer affordable solutions to ensure success from your very first email campaign. Our applications offer many professionally designed templates that you can customize to create highly effective, lead nurturing, drip campaigns. Contact us today and we will help you get your first campaign up and running!