Make email truly work for you through the power of automation. With it, you can set up and deploy a multitude of microcampaigns comprised of one-off messages sent in response to predetermined triggers like purchases being made, anniversary dates being reached, or sign ups getting generated. No more hovering over the SEND button and waiting for such events to turn up. Nope. The campaigns just run themselves and they hit SEND for you.
DEEPENING RELATIONSHIPS BY DRIPS AND DRABS
While you’re at it, though, you could also reap the benefits of a deepened relationship with your readership through the vehicle of email marketing automation. With a carefully crafted drip campaign, you can reach out to your audience via multiple messages delivered over an extended period. If you continue to engage your subscribers with well-timed, relevant messaging throughout the life of their journey with your brand, you’ll see an increase in opens, clicks, and, ultimately, conversions. And with drip campaigns combined with dynamic content and personalization, you can accomplish this highly targeted approach with little effort.
Multi-touch drip campaigns such as these give email marketers opportunities to:
- Introduce welcome campaigns without overwhelming subscribers with too much information while also keeping the company top of mind
- Warm new customers up to programs they’ve just enrolled in, increasing awareness of future emails while imparting intelligence in manageable chunks
- Guide email recipients through next steps as subscribers, setting up expectations while communicating the process they are currently undergoing
And think about it—having your email marketing platform automate the processes involved in prolonged communication is just plain old practical. You don’t have to pay individual attention to the sending off of discrete messages disbursed over a period of days or weeks for each and every entry on your mailing list. Automation does it for you. It saves you time. It saves you effort. And, really, what it comes down to is email marketing automation just saves you a whole lot of worry.
Say you have a webinar that you successfully promoted and folks have begun signing up for it. Congrats. Now, the best thing you can do at this point is to keep these attendees engaged and maintain their interest as the event date draws nearer. So, rather than having to be on top of sending out individual one-off emails per calendar milestone per attendee in an attempt to stay top of mind, set up a drip campaign to do so for you.
Do something simple like a campaign consisting of five customer service emails that are triggered by the very registration of the attendee to the webinar. Then simply continue to maintain engagement by delivering sequential messages thereafter. And given that the campaign is solely based on an event that interests them, content relevancy is high and stays high. The campaign could very well look like this:
As you can see in the infographic above, each phase of the campaign is as follows:
- An immediate confirmation message
- A two-week reminder
- A three-day reminder
- A survey immediately following the event
- A final email consisting of the materials presented at the webinar (as well as content promoting yet another webinar)
It’s exactly these sorts of drip campaigns that make great first impressions on new subscribers and new customers. In such cases as these, engagement begins early and continues along as you provide several more touches throughout their first forays with your brand, products and services.
A DYNAMIC KIND OF ENGAGEMENT
Besides letting timing dictate the progression of your drip campaigns, email marketing automation can also be set up in such a way that the messaging of subsequent emails sent are adjusted as a consequence of your subscribers’ behavior. What your recipients do or don’t do determines what message they receive next.
In particular, you can automate a campaign where you send promotional and/or engagement material to a subscriber that is wholly contingent on whether or not they opened your previous message and took action. If they did, automation sends them a confirmation or thank you message, wrapping up the campaign. If they did not, a sequential mailing could be set up to re-engage them some time later, perhaps with a compelling incentive or possibly with a different subject line, thereby continuing the campaign another step. How the recipient interacts (or doesn’t) with this message determines what happens next.
It’s pretty clear that this sort of lifecycle marketing approach opens the door to numerous opportunities to further engage those subscribers who open your emails, click on your links, and visit your website. But more importantly, though, this approach opens the door to opportunities to engage those subscribers who fail to do any of the above. They’re just as (and sometimes even more) important as those who did.
Email marketing automation makes it cost-effective for companies to continually reach out to their subscribers either in direct response to an event or via regular communications over set intervals of time. Automation also allows companies the opportunity to implement behavioral targeting to more effectively communicate with their subscribers and draw them further into the sales funnel with relevant touches along the way. However way you use drip campaigns, you will no doubt increase relevancy and increase engagement by sending the right message at just the right time.
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