The power of today’s email marketing is derived from the use of what some call drip marketing campaigns or email automation. You build your email marketing campaign one time, and then use it on an ongoing basis to reengage and nurture leads and customers. And because these emails are automatically triggered, they’re not resource intensive. With drip email campaigns you are in complete control over your information and how it’s relayed, and you’re able to build your case over time to help your leads becomes sales-ready and your customers become lifelong customers.
So, what does a successful drip marketing campaign look like? Let’s take a look at some examples.
1. PRWeb
PRWeb was getting a lot of visitors signing up for free accounts, but not many of these resulted in use of the service. Ultimately, they couldn’t generate revenue until the registrant used PRWeb to send a press release.
So, using their existing website content, they set up a drip campaign of 4 emails sent over a 4 week period to welcome new users with a goal of increasing the free sign-up to paying-customer conversion rate.
Drip Marketing Campaign Flow
Email 1: Key Features, Benefits, and Advantages.
Email 2: Overcoming Obstacles to Using Service and Determining Which Service Level Fit Their Needs
Email 3: Incentive – Significant upgrade on first press release send
Email 4: Urgency – Deadline to qualify for the upgrade
PRWeb saw an increase in attendance at their New User Orientation Webinars, an increase in traffic to previously hidden help pages, and a significant increase in the free-sign-up to paying-customer conversion rate.
2. XOsoft
XOsoft suddenly had 25% of their unique website visitors converting into leads, so they needed to find a cost-effective way to handle all these new leads. They put together a lead qualification system and a targeted drip marketing campaign based on prospect segmentation in order to convert a higher percentage of leads to genuine sales opportunities.
Lead Qualification System. XOsoft sales reps would contact all new leads and ask these four questions to determine whether or not a certain lead was qualified.
- Is there a real project in the works at the organization?
- Has a budget been allocated?
- Does the organization meet the technology requirements?
- Is the lead also considering our competitors?
Targeted Drip Marketing Campaign: Using a email drip decision tree, XOsoft set up their marketing automation to send out different communications via email based on these three criteria.
- Lead quality
- Source
- Title of prospect
Through their efforts with their new marketing automation and lead qualification system, XOsoft saw their qualified leads rise from 4% to 17%.
3. National Education Association
They wanted to use drip email campaigns to add relevance and respond to their members’ behavior, and they implemented an API to share information between their NEA database and their web analytics to incorporate into their drip email campaign.
Drip Marketing Campaign Flow
- Triggered with website registration
- Information pulled from database immediately
- Behavior monitored after each email sent
- Follow-up messages sent as fitting
In creating a drip marketing campaign that adds relevance and a greater degree of responsiveness to member behavior, the NEA was able to encourage members to add a beneficiary to their complementary life insurance plan, which was their overall goal.
4. Jaspersoft
Jaspersoft wanted to communicate more effectively with their many different customer constituent groups, so they developed a better way to segment the database and automatically provide relevant information to all their groups using drip emails.
Their email drip was triggered with a trial download, and then five emails were sent over the course of a month. Recipients were put into sub-campaigns based on behavior, with a total of 40 possible different paths based on how they interacted with the content that was sent to them (i.e. clicked or didn’t click a specific link)
Email 1: Thank you and welcome.
Email 2: Tools to help them use the software.
Email 3: Links to online documentation.
Email 4: Forums for support.
Email 5: Offer sales rep contact to discuss professional software edition.
Through the use of customer profiling, database segmentation, outbound promotions, and lead scoring within their marketing automation, Jaspersoft was able to communicate more effectively with their open source developers, customers using their open source software, and their paying customers using the professional edition.