Unlike the Queen and Coolio, email marketing is still alive. Many people think it’s dead, but we’re here to tell you they’re wrong. As wrong as paying for a Twitter checkmark and stuffing USD in your couch. Or having your national soccer team airlifted out of a bus.
Provided it’s implemented with a great strategy, email marketing can drive phenomenal results. Seriously, it’s 2023, and we’re seeing these results first hand. Yet according to a recent report, nearly 60 percent of B2B companies don’t use email marketing.
It’s insane. Especially if they’re not already leveraging an automated drip-marketing campaign. Email has the highest ROI over any other marketing method, and automated emails lead to 320 percent more revenue than manually sent emails.
What’s drip-marketing?
Unrelated to the shoe billboards, drip-marketing is an automated series of emails that mimics one-to-one communication. Drip marketing is sales outreach on autopilot, and the whole aim is to get someone to do something.
A drip campaign sequence is triggered based on the action someone takes. For example, if they place an order on your e-commerce store or sign up for a webinar. Or you can reach out to people, cold-call style via their inbox, and entice them to do something.
‘Drip’ just means that the series of emails isn’t sent all at once. Each mail in the sequence is strategically pre-written and sent out with a clear objective. You need to work out who you want to talk to, why you want to talk to them, and what you want them to do. Through automation and compelling content, your business can reach individuals that a single sales person is unable to.
And remember, you want that prospect to take an action. The first prize is for them to reply to you. As soon as that happens, they’re automatically removed from the sequence and genuine one-on-one communication begins.
The power of personalisation
An automated campaign takes email marketing to a new level. It gives your potential customers the perception that you have emailed them directly in a one-to-one conversation, and an effective campaign is all about personalisation.
The emails contain fields based on first-party data that you already have about each contact, like their name and surname, the company they work for, the position they hold, and the industry they work in. A recent drip campaign of ours performed exceptionally well not only because we agonised over the subject lines and the content, but we made the experience as personal as possible.
For example, we drilled down on industry niches and personalised on a granular level (without being weird). Through clever subject lines and provoking call-to-actions, we highlighted niche-specific pain points and offered a solution. That got attention, and triggered action.
Add value, right from the start
The whole idea is to create compelling emails so that someone wants to open them and engage with you. The subject line needs to pack a punch and the body needs to be filled with easy-to-read content with a positive sentiment. Most importantly, have an angle of trying to provide solutions to problems.
We find that having something to offer is priceless, and so is setting up a meeting with a purpose. Add value right from the start, instead of bulldozing in with a hard sell if someone has expressed interest.
The bottom line is that email is still a powerful marketing channel that's underutilised. It’s about getting attention that makes someone want to have a conversation – so that you get through the door to have that meeting.
Don’t be a B2B business that’s not taking advantage of email. Contact us; we do email drip marketing (and we do it REALLY well).
