Email Marketing Best Practices for Your Drip Campaign
You know the drip drip drip of the leaky faucet that keeps people up at night in comedy shows? Sometimes it’s not the faucet, it’s the email marketing drip campaign that’s keeping someone awake…usually a marketer!
Beyond the challenges of the offer, email design and email copywriting that all must be figured out (and tested!) for a successful email marketing drip campaign is the drip. Er, I mean the frequency. How many emails how often?
The answer is, as with so many email marketing best practices, it depends. You have to test to know.
Internally, we were running an email marketing drip campaign sending an email five days after a signup or download at our website, then again every five days. Admittedly, we weren’t getting much traction!
After attending a Marketo webinar suggesting seven to nine days after signup as ideal, we tried nine. According to what Marketo had discovered, three days after was too soon as was five days after. And waiting 11 days after meant people had forgotten they even signed up for something at your website. Nine days was ideal.
When we switched to nine days after signup, we immediately saw better results.
We’re sending a series of five emails, one sent every nine days. We also learned the number of days depends on the type of content too. People will respond differently to different types of content offered.
In our case as an email marketing vendor, we are either following up after someone downloads our 2011 guide to choosing an ESP or we’re following up after they’ve used the ESPinator tool to compare ESPs. We’re still testing (one of our email marketing best practices!) to determine the absolute best day to send the first drip campaign email for each, as we suspect it might differ between the ESP guide and the ESP tool.
About the Author: Sharon
