What Makes a B2B Drip Campaign Really Successful?
Drip campaigns can be incredibly useful for B2B companies. While an email marketing strategy is the cornerstone of any lead generation campaign, without email drip, you are missing out on opportunities. In essence, an email drip campaign helps you build and nurture strong relationships with customers over time.
We all know that keeping existing customers loyal is far more efficient than acquiring new ones. Depending on your industry, the average cost per lead can be quite high. B2B marketers that know how to leverage drip campaigns reap the benefits of higher customer retention and more repeat purchases.
What Is an Email Drip Campaign?
The main goal of an email drip campaign is automate the sending of several emails over time. The goal is generally to send educational information that is designed to reinforce your brand and product or service. However, drip campaigns can also be used to send customers and prospects strategically timed emails as a means of furthering their engagement with your brand and encouraging them to respond to your call to action. Sending them newsletters or intermittent emails about topics they don’t really care about is not nearly as effective. In some cases, it might even backfire, so pay attention.
What you need to do is strike a balance between building your email list and keeping your existing subscribers engaged. This way, you stand a much higher chance of appeasing your target audience, including prospects and existing customers. To manage this balancing act, you will need to launch drip email campaigns.
What Are the Benefits of Drip Email?
Aside from all the other points made above, what makes drip email so successful as a B2B email marketing campaign is its versatility and range of applications. This is not a single-use strategy but something that can be implemented almost throughout the entire lead generation process.
You can use drip email for welcoming and onboarding leads or re-engaging and nurturing subscribers. It’s also great for dealing with abandoned shopping carts, recommendations, renewals, confirmations, unsubscribes, and so on.
To understand the effectiveness of this digital marketing strategy, consider the following statistics:
- Drip campaigns can generate 50% more sales-ready leads. Click To Tweet
- Open rates can increase by about 80%, and click-through rates can be three times higher
- Relevant and engaging content sent via drip emails generates 18 times more revenue than generic emails.
- Drip campaign experts can expect to see 80% more sales at 33% lower costs.
- Lead nurturing emails get up to 10 times the response rates than mass emails.
- Using drip campaigns to nurture leads can lead to a 20% increase in sales.
- Using a marketing automation platform for nurturing can generate over 450% more qualified leads. This can also lead to a 10% revenue increase in six to nine months.
Implementing an Email Drip Campaign
Given its applicability, drip campaigns are implemented using marketing automation. With this tool, you can set up different types of email and schedule them, selecting the when and how they will be sent to subscribers. You can also design email templates for different scenarios and have them at the ready.
The beauty of drip campaigns, as compared to other email marketing strategies, is that they allow you to build your subscriber list while sending people the information they signed up to receive. This may seem obvious, but email marketers know that it’s not always that easy to execute. When done right, you can get more sign-ups and fewer unsubscribes.
Email Drip Campaign Best Practices
While the benefits and success rates of a B2B drip campaign have been well documented, it’s not a guarantee that you’ll see the results, unless you follow the best practices.
Define Your Goals – What are you trying to achieve with this campaign? Whether it’s more sales, more subscribers, or more qualified leads, look to make your goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely).
Know Your Audience – To know what content to create, you’ll first need to know who your customers are. Every time someone opens an email, they need to receive content that’s relevant to them at that moment. To do this, you will need to develop detailed personas about your customers. Learn their likes, dislikes, wants, needs, pain points, and how your products and services are addressing these issues.
Understand the Customer Journey – Always be mindful of the customer journey and the sales lead process. Not everyone will be at the same stage and appreciate the same type of content. People who’ve only recently been made aware of your brand may be less likely to buy and less inclined to receiving product comparisons. Subscribers who’ve been watching your brand for a while, however, would likely appreciate sales-oriented content in the form of coupons, discounts, or free trials.
Provide Consistency – In the context of drip marketing, consistency refers to both email frequency and how well your emails tie into one another. Too many or too few emails in a set period of time may lower the campaign’s overall effectiveness. Similarly, if your emails don’t follow each other well, your subscribers may lose interest. Emails should be regular without being overwhelming and should follow each other in a logical succession.
Connect Your Drip Campaign – Drip campaigns should always be connected to other marketing channels, like social media, for example. Adding something like “Follow us on Twitter” at the end of your email, will let people know you’re also active on social media.
A/B Test – Regular testing is essential for the success of your campaign. Just because this is an automated email process, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be checking on it. A/B testing will allow you to compare the efficacy of different emblems, email templates, messages, etc., and decide which one works best. The wrong subject line or landing page, the wrong tone of voice, or a hard-to-see CTA can negatively influence your drip campaign’s performance.
Takeaway
When used effectively, email drip campaigns can breathe new life into your lead generation. Not only will they improve subscriber loyalty but they will also help build your email list at the same time.
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