Drip emails are a series of emails that are sent to follow up with subscribers. They are linearly set up with different send times. Once the defined time arrives, based on the action of recipients, they’re automatically sent to the subscribers by your email marketing platform. To learn more about drip campaigns from a very general point of view, read our article that explains the 7 ways to maximize your drip marketing efforts.

Considered one of the most effective ways to engage subscribers, drip emails are a natural fit for the ecommerce industry given the time visitors often take to make a purchase. Today we’re going to take a look at some highly personalized types of drip emails you can create if you have some data about your visitors and subscribers. These emails will be a great way to boost sales during the post-holiday season.

Clearance sale

This is a type of email customers expect to see after the holidays, so it’s good to fulfill those expectations. You can sell your remaining products to the right customers simply by setting up drip campaigns that show them items they’ll be interested in that are on sale. One way to do this is to segment customers who were active during the holiday season and show them items based on their previous purchase patterns. Your email should also indicate that there are only limited quantities left. This will give the email a sense of urgency, hopefully inspiring some of your recipients to go ahead and purchase a few items.

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With the ongoing global health emergencies, home is becoming the headquarters for most of our work. The continued emphasis on working remotely is largely shaping the way teams digitally collaborate, coordinate, and comply on KPIs and outcomes.

So, what does this mean in the case of your email marketing campaigns—something that involves the contribution of cross-sectional teams? If you’re a marketer, sales person, designer, or a rep concerned deeply about the best way to realign your email marketing campaign goals owing to remote work, you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, we discuss the essence of shared responsibilities in tasks like setting up email design systems and running marketing campaigns, and we show how Zoho Campaigns can help you conveniently and steadily execute your email marketing functions in the advent of working from home and other remote places.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

Pundits have unanimously predicted that the popularity of email marketing will further soar in the coming years. 2019 has almost come to an end and we saw emails on mobile, personalization and AI (Artificial Intelligence) topping the marketing trends.

Digital Marketing expert Dharaneetharan GD feels that the key is to stick to the basics while being aware of the changes in the trends and smartly incorporating the two to execute effective campaigns.

He is the Director of Social Eagle, a digital marketing agency based in Chennai. Social Eagle handles over 80 clients that include Azus, Haagen Dazs, Ricola, Singapore Management University, Loyola College, Naturals salon and more.

Dharaneetharan sat down with us for our Expert diaries series to answer some of the most common email marketing questions asked to marketers.

1. How can businesses — including digital marketing agencies use email marketing to their advantage? 

To start with, email marketing is relatively easy, quick and inexpensive. While newsletters are the most popular form of email marketing, there are many ways for businesses to reach their target audience. After collecting the email addresses of their existing and potential customers, businesses can send them special promotions, holiday emails, sale coupons, new arrival notifications and so on. Consistent communication will help businesses develop a personal relationship with their clients.

For digital marketers, email has many uses. For instance, we can send out research material about social media trends that can make us come across as thought leaders. Furthermore, many digital marketing influencers use email marketing tools to promote and conduct online courses.  Agencies can also use tools to conduct surveys to understand social media trends.

2. How do you encourage your clients to invest in email marketing?

As a digital marketing agency, we run simultaneous promotional campaigns on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp, in addition to SMS and email marketing.

People often assume that a social media channel like Facebook is more viable, but that’s far from the truth. You might collect customer data like email addresses and phone numbers on Facebook, but it all falls under one segment. Email marketing, on the other hand, allows you to give each group of customers the right offer. This way, it comes across as a one-on-one personal conversation with your customer. This is largely impossible on social media platforms.

3. What are the features that marketers look for when choosing an email marketing tool?

First of all, we always look for a user-friendly tool that allows us to send more emails with less restrictions. A good email marketing tool should be able to send 5,000 – 10,000 emails at a time. We also look for tools that allow autoresponders for email customization. Most importantly, a tool must allow us to embed images and videos.

4. How much time does a brand or business need to spend on email marketing?

Again, email marketing is part of a larger digital media plan. Preparing content and images takes us a couple of hours, and sending emails through a campaign only takes a day. A brand can easily do four campaigns every month.

5. Is there a guideline that one must follow when sending out newsletters?

I follow three basic rules:  First, keep the content crisp and clear. People have hundreds of reasons to be distracted online. Keeping your newsletter to the point means that your content is more likely to register in the minds of your subscribers.

Second, keep your emails visually appealing and play with the color theme of the brand. A lot of science goes into choosing the colors of the brand, so stick to that.

Third, always have a call-to-action button. If anyone is interested in what you have to sell or say, they should immediately be redirected to your website or landing page.

6. Can you give us examples of brands that effectively use email marketing. 

I enjoy emails from Success Resources. They’re leading global providers of educational resources, seminars, and workshops. Both Jack Canfield—a self-help book author and motivational speaker—and Brian Tracy—a life coach and motivational speaker—have used email marketing to build a personal brand.

7. What are the challenges of email marketing?

First, we have to educate people about email marketing because they’re unaware of its advantages. Second, we need to ensure that people read marketing emails. They often land in folders other than inboxes and we still haven’t figured out a way to get around that.

Finally, clients sometimes expect us to send mail campaigns almost every day; however, that doesn’t work. There’s no hard-and-fast rule about how many email campaigns to send, but the number solely depends on the brand and the services they provide. As a digital marketing agency, we need to figure that out.

In this fast moving world, change is inevitable and this expert feels that the only way to move forward is to observe and learn.

Email marketing is seen as an integral element of engagement for most of today’s digital businesses. While sending emails still takes the primary focus for most of us, delivering emails successfully to recipients’ inboxes is catching up the top position too.

So it’s not just sending an email campaign that can ensure a place for it in a recipient’s mail folder. There are other methods to make your emails “smart” and “intelligent” in a way that they not only land safely but also don’t get lost in the long trail of other emails in your contacts’ inboxes.

With Zoho Campaigns, you can create and send emails that are personalized in both content and time of delivery, interactive, tested for open rates and clicks, spam-compliant, and extremely relevant and consumable to every contact who receives them.

Let’s look at some ways you can perform smarter email marketing and how Zoho Campaigns can make this process easy.

Testing that’s impact-driven and not imperfectly driven

It’s common wanting to run an experiment to test different versions of your email, but it’s important to list your reasons before you do. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do you want to run this experiment?

• What variables are you comparing?

• What is the end goal and which is this the winning version?

A/B testing for emails is the best way to find out which type of email has more impact on your audience. Where people get A/B testing wrong is by not running a test at all before sending an email (when it’s highly required) and running imperfect testing by comparing wrong attributes (when it’s not recommended). Don’t forget that A and B are just versions that need to differ by the same attribute. A meaningful result will only come when you try to compare relevant versions.

With A/B Testing from Zoho Campaigns, you’re able to test emails for different attributes like subject line, sender address, and email content. With the ability to pick your own decision criteria for selecting the winning version of the email, you can have the entire experiment run under your control without being data-blinded.

Sending emails when a recipient is most active

What if every email you send is opened instantly by your recipient? It sounds like magic, but it’s really just metrics! Understanding your recipients’ prime open times will help you deliver emails that get noticed.

Time calibration plays a key role in estimating the time during which a particular email that you send will be opened by a contact who receives it. Your contacts may have subscribed to multiple brands and are likely to receive a sizeable chunk of emails every day. What can differentiate your email from the rest is when you choose to make that email appear in their inboxes.

Using Zoho Campaigns’ Send Time Optimization, you can make sure to send emails to your mailing list contacts at the exact time each of them will be active. This time will be unique for each contact, so, in simple terms, you’re now able to personalize the time of email delivery!

Safeguarding your domain reputation with email splitting 

All of us are aware of this simple science—the more air filling a balloon, the more chances of it bursting. Imagine the same scenario but with your mail server in the place of the balloon. Sending bulk emails is fine, but what matters more is how you’re handling the bulk. The bulkier your email sending gets, the riskier your sender reputation becomes.

Sending too many emails at the same time can strain your server and make your domain look inauthentic. The best way to prevent this is by splitting your huge email numbers into smaller batches and sending each batch at periodic time intervals.

Zoho Campaigns’ Batch Send option helps you conveniently split your mailing list—and your emails—into multiple batches, as well as letting you define the time period between the delivery of each email batch. This also gives you room to study the performance of each set of emails and optimize them further for the next set.

Handling of bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints

The health of your mailing list and the overall performance of an email campaign depends on three primary metrics: bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints. These terms are as crucial as other performance measuring units like open and click rates.

A high bounce rate clearly indicates the inability to deliver your emails, which in turn shows that your mailing list is unhealthy and doesn’t contain contacts from authentic/trusted sources. Unsubscriptions happen due to a variety of reasons, the most common being a lack of interest in the brand, irrelevant engagement, spam experiences, change in reading preference, and so on.

Similar to unsubscribing from a list, people can also mark emails as spam. When the unsubscribe process is complicated, recipients tend to mark specific emails as spam with the expectation being they won’t receive any further emails from the sender. A holistic maintenance of all these three metrics is essential for smooth email delivery.

Zoho Campaigns provides automatic handling of bounces (soft and hard bounces), unsubscribes, and spam complaints so you don’t have to stress about managing these for every email campaign. Also, when a sender is exceeding their bounce rate or spam complaints, we automatically notify them in order to help them get back on track with some best practices.

Seeing emails the way your recipients would 

Today’s online buying process has been revolutionary, but it hasn’t given up on one thing—the catalogue. Buying decisions are still based on product images. Buyers still want a sneak-peek at what they can expect from the product.

It’s the same case with your emails. Previewing emails before sending them to recipients helps you not only proofread the various email elements, but also get an idea about how your email will look in the their inboxes. This will reduce human errors as well as help you seamlessly deliver emails across multiple email clients, devices, and browsing platforms.