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

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.

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.

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.

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.

But can it really help your email marketing program? Of course! Here are a couple of tactics for using Facebook to enhance your email marketing program – and vice versa. This post is part 1 of 2. More tactics will be posted this time next week.

Email sign-up forms in your business’s page
This is low-hanging fruit. If you have a Facebook page for your business, incorporate a sign-up form for your email marketing program into the page. Some email software providers (ESPs) have a means for users to build the form directly into your page. Otherwise, link to it from your welcome tab.

By doing this, you’ve converted a Facebook fan into an email subscriber and have an additional channel by which to communicate with them.

Make your email messages shareable
You’ve created a fantastic email campaign and want to enable your recipients to share this message on Facebook. (You’ll first need to create content that your recipients will want to share. What’s considered shareworthy will vary from sender to sender, and even recipient to recipient. That’s an entirely separate posting, but here’s a link with concepts for sharing B-to-B content. Some of the ideas could apply to B-to-C as well.)

To be able to share your content or message on Facebook, you need to use the share URL that Facebook has created. By doing this, it will create a preview of your content, which can then be posted to a Facebook profile or sent as a direct message.
The simplest way to give a subscriber the option to share your link is to add this code into your email:

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=URL

Just replace URL with the link you want to share. In the case of an email message, it would be the URL to view your message online. Don’t forget to include a call to action to “share this message”, preferably using a Facebook icon or linked text.

For example here is the link for the blog post of this message arranged so you can share it on Facebook.

Share this post on Facebook

When you create a link such as that, a preview window will open with optional image selections from the page URL provided. There will also be a place for your email recipient to include their thoughts as to why this link is worth viewing. Once they hit the “share” button in that window, the link is posted to their Facebook profile profile, their wall is updated and the URL will appear in the news feed of their friends with your recipients’ endorsement. Your message now has a personal referral to your recipient’s Facebook network!

Showing up in multiple news feeds is when you start to leverage your recipients’ entire friend list. This process has the potential to move virally as people leave comments or share the item with their friends and family – and so on and so on.

Got another idea (or two) for blending Facebook with your email marketing program? Leave a comment or post to my Facebook wall. Otherwise, stayed tuned next week for a couple more ways Facebook can enhance your email marketing program.

So how do you fight churn? At a higher level, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Keep messages relevant. Sending people what they want to receive, or melding what you want to say with what they want to hear, will go a long way in giving readers a positive experience with your email.
• Stick to promise you made when you asked readers to sign-up for your email. If you promised news and helpful hints, don’t beat them over the head with coupons.
• And there’s the frequency issue I mentioned above. If you’ve committed to weekly news, that means one email a week. Weekly doesn’t mean: “Send as many messages in a week as you can.”

Tactically speaking, Dan Zarrella of Hubspot recently hosted a Science of Email Marketing webinar (slides posted here) in which he analyzed 9.5 billion emails. (That billion with a b is not a typo.) A statistic he pointed out is that more the links a message has, the lower a message’s unsubscribe rate:

Effects of Number of Links on Unsub Rate

Thought to keep in mind: When your unsubscribe link is easier to find, the more likely someone is to click it and remove themselves from your list.

That said, don’t throw in links for the sake of having links. Burying your call to action is never a good idea. Do what’s right for your company’s branding and your campaign’s goals, but one link for a call to action and one to unsubscribe could lead to a higher unsubscribe rate for that campaign.

Dan’s research also found that people were less likely to unsubscribe to messages sent on a weekend. It’s not uncommon for retailers to send emails on weekends to spur online shopping, but these figures hold true for B2B senders as well.

Effect of Day of Week on Unsub Rate

Thought to keep in mind: Weekends work because people spend more time perusing their email. (This could also be why the research showed a higher click-through rate on weekends as well.) They’ve either filed it away during the week to read at their leisure or are just taking more time to read a message that comes in on a weekend.

But, there’s no single right day or time of day to send a message to guarantee an open or click-through. This behavior is specific to each list and can best be learned over time by tracking the behavior of multiple campaigns.

“I hope that social media will forge a way to lessen people’s anchor to their inbox.”

To put that comment in context, he thinks people will soon rely less on email and more on other channels to get their news. Is this foreshadowing for the end of email? Not necessarily, since according to this blog post from the DMA, email’s growth rate was greater than that of Facebook and Twitter in 2010. But to Hernandez’s point that there are multiple news sources consumers can use to get information and email is just one of them.

Since we’re in the email business, let’s talk about how we can apply the rules of Journalism to email marketing:

Know your audience: What are they expecting to hear from you? Stick to the promise made on your sign-up form in terms of frequency of communication and the content of the messages.

Don’t bury the lead: Just as a news story opens with the main point, an email should quickly make its purpose known. Don’t bury your call to action in the fine print.

A newspaper’s headline is akin to an email’s subject line: The same way a headline tells what’s to be expected of the story below, a subject line should do the same for an email’s contents. In just a few words, address what’s to be expected of the message being shared.

Tailor your writing for the medium: A TV reporter doesn’t write the copy for their story the same way a newspaper reporter would write theirs. Modify your content for the parameters of an email message. Not sure how to do that? Less is usually more.

(A disclaimer – all of these points could be expanded into blog/newsletter posts as individual topics, which may happen in the future.)

But, to go back to Hernandez’s comment, if people are relying less on their inbox as a source of information, how can you get the most out of your email program? We’re vested in our email program and want to get the most of this channel.

Improve relevancy: This chart shows some tactics to improve relevancy and the percentage of companies that responded to the survey who use them.

Think of email as the hub of your communications efforts: Use Twitter, Facebook and SEO in conjunction with your email campaigns. Toss out the idea that the channels are silos.

Your mailing list has (presumably) volunteered to receive email from you. Make the most of this consent by keeping these points in mind and your email program should continue to flourish. Feel free to comment on this post or send me an email if you want to add to or continue this dialogue.

I’m going to begin this year by highlighting a recent usability study the Norman Nielsen Group conducted of email newsletters across the U.S. and abroad. Given the highly emotional reactions consumers have to email newsletters, and a newsletter’s ability to generate consumer loyalty, I wanted to bring to your attention some findings from their study. These are items to keep in mind throughout the year as you manage your email campaigns. Also, this was a “newsletter” study, but the takeaways I’ve highlighted can be applied to all kinds of email.

The full executive summary can be found here, but below are some notes that I wanted to call out for your information:

• Above all, convenience rules. This applies to the subscribe/unsubscribe process as well as the benefit of receiving information via email vs. snail mail.
• Long-term nature: When it comes to customer relationships, newsletters work their magic over time. This is why it is best to emphasize value-added publishing instead of simply spamming too-frequent newsletters to anybody and everybody you can contact.
• It’s also critical to start a newsletter with the most important stuff, but the increased use of previews makes it even more important to focus on high-value content at the start of a message, since users are less likely now to look beyond it. (Note that “high-value” is judged based on what’s valuable to the recipients — not on what you feel like promoting today.)
• A predictable publication frequency that is not too aggressive is usually best, except for newsletters that report breaking news. A regular publication schedule lets users know when to look for the newsletter and reduces the probability that they’ll confuse it with spam and delete it. Set expectations for how often a message will be sent during the sign-up or subscription process.
• Just because they’re a subscriber doesn’t mean they want to be. They may have just neglected to unsubscribe once they lost interest or they feel bad about unsubscribing, even though they no longer read the newsletters.
• It’s not uncommon for subscribers to use their spam filters as a shortcut to eliminating newsletters they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users often view as too cumbersome, they simply flag a message as spam, which prevents it from hitting their inbox in the future. This is a compelling reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a subscriber than to be listed as spam.
• The number of new or unread messages is now 300% higher than it was just four years ago. In addition to competing with your competitors for subscribers, you’ll now need to compete with the rest of your subscribers’ inbox just get your message opened and read. Takeaway: use brief and informative subject lines to get your messages read while the information is fresh.

A newsletter doesn’t necessarily need to imply an email with a few article excerpts and links to more information on a landing page. Newsletters can also include emails that have a single piece of content that are sent on a consistent basis and follow a regular theme (i.e. coupons, tips for using a product, single news item).

The I Send Your Email Facebook page

I’ve taken the leap on Facebook to start a page for my consultancy. Blogging is great for long-form takes on an email topic, but I’m aiming to use this Facebook page as a place for quick thoughts on various email topics. Please “like” the page and join in on the discussions!

The Facebook page is also another way we can stay in touch. I’m on Twitter (@sandisolow) and of course, there’s always email!

Let’s start with email acquisition. Don’t trick people into signing up for your list. Be honest and up front with what you’ll be sending. The treat of this will be a receptive audience who’s more likely to respond to the calls to action in your message. It’s also a treat for your audience to get exactly what they were promised when they were told to expect it. If you said on your sign-up form that you’d be emailing once a week with special offers, don’t send an email once a month with company news.

Not getting your messages to render the way you want? One trick is to use alt tags with your images. This way, when your recipient has them turned off, they’ll still see something that tells them more about what they can’t see. Also, treat your recipients to relevant imagery. Don’t use clip art for the sake of having a picture in your message. Unnecessary images weigh down an email and take up valuable space.

Use landing pages wisely. Don’t trick your recipients into clicking a link for more information if the page you’ve directed them to has nothing to do with the call to action in your message. Treat those who click a link for more information with respect by having the promised information be the main focus of the landing page. Ask someone to hunt for what they’re expecting to be front and center on a web page will cause frustration and you’re sure to do harm to your brand or image.

As always, think of what your recipients would want to read when crafting a campaign. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that what’s important to you is necessarily important to them. Study results from past campaigns to determine future campaign components. Deliver on the promise made when your audience enrolled in your email program and you’ll be treated to an email marketing program that’s living up to expectations.