Email drip campaigns are one of the best ways to introduce new products to your subscribers. Giving your readers a little bit of information over time gets them excited about your new product without overwhelming them.
Now, drip campaigns can be a bit tricky. Because the nature of a drip campaign involves sending multiple emails with a similar topic (e.g. your new product) there are some common pitfalls your need to watch out for to make sure that your campaign is successful. Here are a few of them.
Sending Emails Too Close Together
When your are getting your email drip campaign together it can be easy to get a bit overzealous. The whole point is to get the word out about your products and services, right?
But you have to be careful. If you send your emails too close together you run the risk of coming across as spammy or annoying to the people you are trying to market to. Keep your emails generously spaced to make sure that they are welcomed in your subscriber’s inbox.
Oversending
Oversending emails is just as bad as sending them too close together. You want people to open your emails and digest the information. Sending too many emails, just like sending emails too close together, can seem pushy, annoying and too close to spam for people to actually take interest. You have to trust in the content of your email and in the value of the product you are offering. More emails don’t equal higher sales. A great way to avoid this is to create your drip campaign with pre-programmed autoresponders that send on a schedule.
Not Developing an Overall Theme
The best email drip campaigns have a natural progression, not unlike a television series. They need a beginning, middle and end. If you are trying to market a new product, the first email in your drip campaign should be an introductory email that shows off the product for the very first time. Follow this up by an email full of tips on how to use the product and places it could come in handy. Your third email could be a video showing the product in action. Finish your campaign with some product testimonials from actual customers and, finally, throw in a coupon.
Inappropriate Subject Lines
In any email newsletter campaign, drip or otherwise, the subject line holds the most weight. As the first thing your newsletter subscriber sees, the subject line may be the most important part of your email. Subject lines have to be short, concise and (this is the hard part) directly related to the content of your email.
Lack of Tracking
If you really want to measure the success of your email marketing campaigns, you have to track the successes and the failures of your email. You have to see where they are strong and where they are lacking. Everyone that markets their business via email should be using Google Analytics to track the open and click-through rates as well as where people are going after they read your emails or visit your website. The more information you have about how people are responding to your emails, the more you can tailor your emails to your target audience. This is why Benchmark provides a comprehensive email metrics report for every campaign you send, complete with open rates, clicks, social stats, bounces and opens by location, all updated in real-time.
If you wonder whether you are sending your emails too often, or sending too many, the best thing you can do is put yourself in the shoes of your subscribers. If you think you are sending too much, you are probably sending too much. Trust your instincts and you can’t go wrong.
