You may have heard of drip marketing or drip campaigns. You may have even heard that drip campaigns automate the sales cycle but if that all sounds like a bunch of corporate jargon to you, allow me to break down into plain English what an email drip campaign is and why you should have one.
How well do you follow up with prospects?
Imagine this scenario: you go to a conference or networking event and you come home with a stack of business cards. Out of 20 cards, let’s say there are three people you think are strong leads, four that you think could be potential connections and the rest you’re not sure about.
You reach out to the strong leads and then your work blows up in your face, so the other follow-ups go out the window.
Maybe the strong leads write you back; maybe they don’t. But unless they specifically say they want to buy from you, do you do much additional follow up?
If not, you’ve spent time, and possibly money, to attend the event and have little to show from it. If you’re anything like me, you end up hating “sales” and think the whole process sucks.
This is where email drip campaigns come into play.
Drip campaigns follow up with 100% of prospects
Unlike us, automated marketing systems don’t get distracted by an office crisis or weigh the pros and cons of reaching out to a specific contact. They simply run. This means that when you attend an event and load your 20 contacts into a follow up campaign, your marketing system will reach out to each and every one of those contacts.
What’s more is that your system will not get discouraged if the contact doesn’t reply to your first email. It simply sends another one. How often would you do this yourself? Be honest.
Why a drip campaign is so magical is because you set it up once and then it just runs. It follows up with each contact and will send the information you’ve put together on a specific schedule, every time.
This automated process is what people are referring to when they talk about putting people through the sales funnel or sealing the leaks in your sales pipeline.
Integrate drip campaigns into your website
While drip campaigns could certainly help out after events, let’s take things up a notch. Imagine all the people that come to your website. How many of those people do convert to a sale and how many simply go on their way?
Would it make a difference to your business if you were able to get in touch with even a portion of those people? Imagine if you could send them a series of emails to help them learn more about your services in order to help convince them to purchase from you.
This is called a lead-nurturing drip campaign. Generally it’s triggered by actions such as an eBook download, webinar sign up, newsletter subscription, or any other method through which you collect contact information.
I won’t lie and tell you that drip campaigns are a “set it and forget it” activity. To be a useful sales tool, you must test, tweak and test again. But if you are a small business owner like I am, I can’t tell you how helpful it is to have a system that helps nurture casual visitors into warm leads.
Keep your eye out for additional posts to take a deeper dive into drip campaigns and their best practices. If you can’t wait that long and want to talk about how to get a drip campaign started for your business, let’s chat!
