Drip email marketing is gaining in popularity and usage amongst b2b marketers. At SalesFUSION we continually track key words rigorously and drip marketing seems to be the top keyword month in and month out. IN daily discussions I have with b2b marketers the most common thing marketers are looking to do is implement a drip/nurture marketing approach to their lead gen efforts. I’ve talked about this a lot in webinars and other venues and there seems to be a very predictable pattern in growth of an individuals eMarketing Skill Set. Most b2b marketers generally understand the concept of executing an email blast. Email marketing has been around the block for some time and again, most marketers “get it”. There is no current eMarketing 101, 201 and 301 classes in most colleges these days however, and marketers, particularly on the b2b side, tend to incrementally learn their craft by trial and error. They use simple tools for a period of time, figure out what they can’t do, and then move up the ladder to more advanced functionality.
So when a marketer is ready to make the leap from say Constant Contact, iContact, Emma or Vertical Response (great tools that do what they’re designed to do very well), they usually show up on my doorstep and want to talk about doing more with email, integrating email into more nurture-style campaigns….etc. I always tell them the same thing…Start simple….get your feet wet in the easiest types of drip/nurture campaigns and then move on to more advanced functionality.
As i’ve written in many other papers, webinars and blogs, Nurture Marketing/Drip Marketing….whatever your choose to call it….is basically presenting the right content to the right people at the right time. So simple a caveman can do it? Not quite. A marketer needs to understand many components of eMarketing that they may not have had direct exposure to before. Segmentation, both dynamic and static, lead scoring, personalization, web tracking can all play a role in “nurture marketing”. I’ve seen companies go out and spend $50K on a solution because conceptually, it did exactly what they wanted it do….but they had no idea how to actually execute, what to measure, how to measure, how to integrate sales…..and on and on and on.
So, as the title of this blog states, simplicity pays off for marketers who are just beginning to wade into the Nurture Marketing pool. When I demo SalesFUSION software to people who’ve not been exposed to advanced demand generation tools, I always show them one simple drip email…the Subject Swap Email. A Subject swap email is so elegantly simple, easy to measure and gets you started down the right path in drip marketing.
What is it? You have an email blast that goes out to a segment or your entire database. You wait 3 days, then you send the same exact email with a slightly different style subject line on a different day at a different time of day. Whew….that’s a tough one…but guess what….when you’re dealing with a database of say 50,000 names..the average subject swap email adds 4-7% lift on opens and 1-5% on click throughs. Last time I checked…5% of 50K is 2500. I’ll take 2500 responses for what amounts to about 10 minutes of work. The only real trick to the email is the segment it goes out to is based on the prior email….everyone who didn’t open the first email. You want to be sure you’re not sending it to people who didn’t click…only those who did not open.
In many cases, especially in the summer during peak vacation, you’re catching folks on vacation. People may be away from their desk, be in and out of meetings and your initial email get’s buried below the email fold…never to be seen again. That second try will pay big dividends, is easy to do an again, gets you going down the path of drip email marketing and nurture marketing.
Why this is a good first step to nurture marketing? Because you ARE nurturing in this case! You’re modifying content and sending to a dynamic segment conditional upon behavior taken against the first campaign email.
Watch our webinar on Emailing Marketing or SalesFUSION360 to find out more!
So there you go. Step 1 to getting your head around drip/nurture marketing.
