How and why you need to use drip campaigns in your marketing
One of the biggest challenges sales professionals have with actually making or closing sales is following up with people who have shown interest in their product or service.
And when they do happen to follow up, it is sporadic at best.
I was just reading Missy Caulk’s article on the value of drip campaigns as one tool to automate the follow-up process. She illustrates how it saves time, allows you to consistently offer people value, and it’s a great way to enhance the marketing you’re already doing.
Do you use drip campains in your system of staying in touch with prospects and potential clients?
Some who are reluctant to employ drip marketing offer the criticism that it feels spammy, as Missy Caulk notes in her article.
We should all be conscious that we are not spamming anyone, but we’re not talking about sending a bunch of unsolicited emails to people indiscriminately. Every drip marketing email campaign should be opt-in. In other words, each recipient of your emails should have given explicit permission to receive the communications from you.
James Kimmons of About.com Guide to Real Estate Business wrote an article about what to do to create effective email drip campaigns — or, better said, what not to do to create effective drip campaigns.
I’m not keen on the word “drip” to describe them (Who wants to be dripped on?!), but essentially a drip email campaign is a pre-determined series of emails that you send a prospect after getting their permission to email them. Usually they sign up on your web site to receive a special report or a free audio or the like and then they are automatically added to the e-mail series you have created in order to regularly stay in contact with them.
Setting up a system like this early on allows you to communicate regularly without manually composing sequential emails to everyone in your prospect database.
Can you imagine having just 10 prospects sign up for your free report at different times and trying to manage that through reminders in Outlook? What if it were 25 prospects? Or even more?
The power of autoresponders eliminates all of that.
James Kimmons offers an easy-to-follow 6-step tutorial about how to set up a drip campaign. I found it very informative and generally very helpful.
The only thing that I would caution about is in Step #2 when he mentions how some email services designed for real estate agents have canned messages that you can use to get started on an email campaign right away. Kimmons advises not to use the generic messages longer than necessary.
What I say to that is that, at the very least, you should re-word or in some way customize these messages to reflect you and your voice. Even a ghost writer worth her salt seriously gets to know her client’s style and voice before authoring a single word.
As for content, Kimmons illustrates the difference between “drip” and “drivel” and rightly advises to focus on giving value to clients and prospects as opposed to tired, canned messages that everyone else is passing off as “quality” content.
So, get out there and create some drip campaigns!
What? Don’t think you have anything to say?
Sure, you do:
“Just write about what you know, and what your clients and prospects ask you in the course of business,” says Kimmons.
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Flickr image by Tim Collins (AKA “tico24“), used under an Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License.
