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Email is a great tool to harness to reach your existing clients and prospects. Two things are necessary to deploy a proper campaign, a well organized email database and a drip email campaign. A drip email campaign is a communication strategy that sends, or "drips," a pre-written set of messages to your selected audience over the course of a set period of time. The time duration is completely up to you, a good rule of thumb we follow at Cardinal Fern is 6-8 weeks, and sending 6-32 emails depending on the client’s goals.
Before you structure your campaign, you must organize your database to best reach the audience. Each record should have at the minimum these elements separated into individual cell in a program like Excel:
First name
Last name
Email address
Date (this is the date they came first in contact with your brand)
Identification number (start with 1 and number each record)
The following elements are customizable to your business. This is a general idea of what to include in your database:
First touch (how did they come into contact with your brand? Set a few items to rotate through, for example -- friend, google, Facebook, mailer, etc)
Last interaction date (what was the last thing they physically did with your brand? Did they attend an event, a class, purchase something?)
Last interaction event (keep it simple, and set a few items to rotate through, for example -- purchase, launch event, class, etc)
Address 1
Address 2
City
State
Zip
By organizing your database you are able to segment your audience into different buckets. This allows you to reach your audience with customized language and understanding.
You do not have to segment your email list, but it is helpful to separate out those who are currently interacting with your brand and those who are new to your brand. Those who are new to your brand will need an introduction to who you are, whereas those who are familiar with your brand do not need this introduction. For new people your first few emails in your campaign should be an introduction to you and your brand to build their awareness of you.
Here are the top five tips in crafting your email drip campaign.
1. Pick three overarching goals to focus your plan on.
These goals can stay consistent throughout different email drip campaigns or be diverse as your campaigns. It is important to hone down to goals that are specific to your current plan.
2. Start on the last day of your plan, not day one.
If you don’t know where you are going to end it is very difficult to know where to start. Use your goals to plot your end point, and then work backwards to the start.
3. When creating your plan carefully space out your emails.
Use yourself as a litmus test, would you want to receive three emails from the same company within three days? Your emails should be spaced to allow your audience to understand your goals but not too frequent as to cause email fatigue, and for someone to unsubscribe from your emails.
4. Create a test group of different email domains, and send test emails.
When drafting an email in an email program it may look different in different email domains. Once you send out the test emails you may catch a typo or a mistake!
5. Think about your email messaging, from your subject line to your signature line.
This is your chance to communicate with your audience, and it is important to convey YOUR brand from top to bottom. Your subject line grabs the audience, the body conveys your message and your signature is your final goodbye. Think of the email as a conversation you are having with an audience member, what would you say to them?