Five Must-Try Email Drip Campaigns
By Megan Ouellet, Director of Marketing for Listrak
October 23, 2009
Marketing budgets in 2009 saw a shift away from traditional advertising channels as the recession has forced marketers to do more with less. Budgets for passive advertising in television, print, direct mail, and radio have been shifted towards engaging, interactive, and cheaper media such as email and social media marketing as organizations focused less on branding and more on lead generation and customer loyalty.
Figure 1 - Marketing channels measured by audience engagement and message relevancy
As the economy recovers in 2010, marketing budgets will remain lean the first half of the year. A recent study by Marketing Charts found that email marketing will remain the number one medium in 2010. More emphasis will be placed in areas that are not only easily measured, but are also flexible and controllable so changes can be made quickly in reaction to market trends.
Marketers will also continue to move away from generic, one-to-many messages and will fine-tune their strategies to focus on targeted one-to-one messaging. The diagram on the right shows that the audience is most engaged when campaigns are targeted and relevant, and email drip campaigns top the chart.
Social media is still getting a lot of attention and many marketers are looking to increase their spends in this area next year. However, the diagram shows that social media campaigns have high levels of engagement but low levels of relevancy as the audience is broad, not targeted. That's the danger of one-to-many messaging. Social media also falls short as a promotional channel so marketers are struggling to generate revenue from these initiatives. In 2010, email will still deliver the highest ROI and response of any marketing channel as long as the campaigns are targeted and delivered at the right time.
Listrak, a premier provider of enterprise engagement marketing solutions and services, has published the following white paper discussing how you can automate email drip campaigns to engage your audience in the most relevant, highest returning campaigns possible. You can use drip campaigns to create specific paths for your subscribers to follow as they move through the sales process. You'll shorten your sales cycle while increasing the quality of each lead that gets passed to your sales team.