Cultivating your email drip campaign
Posted by George Palatine on May 5th, 2009
With spring in the air now, many people will begin their yearly routine of yard work and gardening. Just as it takes a proper (and variable) combination of elements to germinate a seed, your email marketing also requires the right mixture for success. I am referring to a strategy known as a drip campaign.
The theory of using a drip campaign in your email marketing efforts is not new. What is a developing trend, however, is the level of complexity that sophisticated email marketers are using in these type of programs today.
A drip campaign describes an email program that automatically delivers emails to customers or prospects on a predetermined and scheduled basis, basically a steady “drip”. In the past, these email events would continue though their pre-programmed linear series of deployments until reaching the end of the cycle. Perhaps this process of treating your prospects like lemmings (all behaving the same way) worked before but it does not with today’s sophisticated consumers; a more advanced drip campaign is required.
Today’s successful drip campaigns are neither linear nor simple. In fact, some of the most successful programs I have seen when all laid out look like a wiring diagram for the space shuttle. These programs are a massive system of triggered events that send pre-constructed messages based on a series of observed customer behaviors. The program will continue to change and deploy varying messages based on the last consumer action.
