99% of consumers check their email daily, with some checking up to 20 times a day. The email inbox is valuable for brands, especially when contacts want to hear from them.
Using drip campaigns with an inbound audience can fuel your funnel by helping to move leads from one stage to the next.
Today, Forge Apollo’s email marketing specialist, Abby Roy, is breaking down why inbound drip campaigns are essential and how they can benefit your business.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing attracts, engages, and delights contacts with helpful, personalized content to build valuable relationships that bring success to both the contact and the business. While outbound marketing disrupts audiences with content they might not want, inbound marketing builds deeper value by resulting in repeat customers and referral business.
Inbound email marketing involves using emails to engage and delight the contacts a business has already attracted through other channels.
What is a Drip Campaign?
Drip campaigns (a.k.a. lead nurturing campaigns) target an organization’s existing contacts (leads, prospects, customers, etc.) with emails personalized to where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Through a series of automated emails, a drip email campaign nurtures contacts towards desired actions, like scheduling a meeting with sales or re-purchasing a product.
The secret to success with drip campaigns is all about the inbound marketing methodology. At Forge Apollo, we find the most success when email recipients are people who have already had some voluntary contact with the brand. That could be sharing their email address to download a guidebook, attend a webinar, or even converse with sales.
Drip campaigns offer the opportunity to engage and delight these contacts with relevant, helpful content. That engagement builds on the relationship with your brand to motivate valuable action.
What are the Benefits of Drip Campaigns?
Drip campaigns help businesses meet their objectives with the following benefits.
Move Leads Through the Funnel
Drip campaigns are also called lead nurturing campaigns because they target contacts in various funnel stages to help them move from one step to the next. For example, content can nurture leads into MQLs and then MQLs into SQLs.
Save Opportunities that Went Cold
From initially getting a potential customer’s contact information to closing the deal, there are a lot of points at which the conversation can go cold.
Lead nurturing campaigns help businesses warm contacts back up with content relevant to their stage in the buyer’s journey. HubSpot does this automatically after you set up the campaign, so the sales team never has to lift a finger.
For example, Forge Apollo set up a campaign for Futures Recovery Healthcare that helped them recover over $95,000 in cold deals.
Run Automatically After Set Up
When organizations run these campaigns in automated software, like HubSpot, the campaign only needs to be set up once to provide long-lasting value.
Rather than manually pulling a list of contacts, these drip campaigns use a list of “enrollment criteria.” When someone meets that criteria, the software enrolls them automatically.
For example, an organization could create a campaign to warm up leads who haven’t responded to communication in over 30 days. When they turn on the campaign, contacts will continue to enroll moving forward when they meet the criteria. So, if a lead stops responding after launching the campaign, the software will enroll them without additional work from the organization.
This allows marketers to take the “set it and forget it” approach, setting up the campaign once and then reaping the rewards for years.
More Personalized Content
Automatic enrollment criteria helps brands provide relevant, personalized content to contacts. According to HubSpot research, segmented audiences, message personalization, and email automation are the top three most effective strategies for email campaigns.
Lead nurturing campaigns deliver this by sharing relevant content with contacts when it’s relevant to them.
For example, if a contact downloads a guide for first-time home buyers from a home builder, a lead nurturing campaign from the builder could automatically share information on how the purchase process differs between existing and new construction houses.
Why Should You Work With a Professional?
There are several opportunities through your marketing and sales process in which lead nurturing campaigns can be beneficial. Partnering with an email marketing agency like Forge Apollo in Philadelphia can help you identify where those opportunities exist and the best messaging to reach contacts at that stage.
Turn to Forge Apollo for Inbound Drip Campaigns
The right inbound drip email campaign can help your business engage and delight contacts you’ve attracted to close more sales. The right partner can help you unlock where these opportunities exist in your existing process.
Forge Apollo is a top choice when considering email marketing companies in Philadelphia. Contact us today to discuss your next campaign.
