Have you ever heard those “lifestyle stories” of entrepreneurs sitting on a beach drinking Mai Tais while their business is generating millions of dollars? You’re probably thinking they are living the good live because they’ve turned over the day-to-day operation of drumming up sales to an employee, but that’s not always the case. Find out more on today’s #WhatIsWednesday.
This secret weapon goes by a lot of names: drip email campaigns, marketing automation, life-cycle emails, auto responders and automated email campaign. For today, I’ll stick with my favorite, drip email campaign. I like “drip email” because it paints a nice picture of nurturing a lead by slowly feeding information until it blooms into a beautiful customer that is ready to be harvested.
The concept of a drip email campaign is simple. You schedule emails to go out to potential leads automatically and at specific points in the customer life-cycle. This “life-cycle” can be as simple as a lead requesting pricing information which is automatically sent, then 3 days later sending a follow up email with a testimonial about the pricing information they received. Drip email campaigns that are even more potent are based on specific actions that leads will take. For example, maybe someone received one of your initial drip campaign emails and clicked on a link to view “purple products,” you can then set up your drip campaign to trigger a new cycle of emails telling users about all the purple products you have in stock and how awesome they are.
There are a ton of software products that will help you set up a drip email campaign; Constant Contact, 1shoppingcart and Infusionsoft are some of the most popular ones. A final note, when you decide that it’s time to set up your first drip email campaign, don’t get overwhelmed with all the possibilities. Start with one scenario, like following up each and every price quote with a sequence of nurturing emails, then you can add more drips over time. The important thing is to start automating your business so that you need less time to make the money, and have more time to spend it!
