5 Reasons Why Prospects Won’t Love Your Email Campaign

Drip email marketing campaigns are the genius child that marketing automation introduced to the marketing world. It has proven to be one of the best ways to warm up your leads and introduce prospects to your brand.

 If you use a marketing automation platform or sales enablement tool, you’re probably using drip campaigns already. But while implementing drip campaigns, make sure not to go overboard or else it can backfire and affect your brand.

Here are five things NOT to do in a drip campaign (Remember:  the “NOT“is key here):

Sending emails too soon/ too far- The effectiveness of a drip can be seen only when the emails are evenly spaced out. Sending too many emails is always a strict no-no. If you are planning an event campaign, a typical drip must contain 5-7 pre-event emails. At least maintain a space of 2 days betweentwo consecutive emails. On the downside, if you are irregular or having a lot of gap between two emails, your prospect is mostly going to lose out on your message.

Too many offers/no offers- The common practice is to send some kind of incentive with your email so that your prospect finds some value proposition and regards your emails important. However, it is not necessary to always attach an offer with you emails. Sometimes, your email can just be about how someone profited from working with you or some news about your company (this works better with existing customer drips). On the other hand, too many emails without any value proposition can be bad too. Strike the right balance or better still strike a ratio like 5:1 where 5 are incentive based emails and 1 is a casual camaraderie striking email.

Asking contact details every time- Asking prospects for contact details in every email is going to rub them the wrong way. Instead, opt for progressive profiling wherein, you ask for an element of their contact detail on a progressive basis. You can also send special emails where you ask them to follow you on twitter or LinkedIn; this way you get their details without asking them.

Email un-subscribers-You surely have the unsubscribe option for your leads. And if your leads or prospects have decided to unsubscribe your emails, you need to respect that. Not just for moral reasons but also for the fact that emailing these “un-subscribers” can land you in their spam box or even worse, black list your server.

Bombard your leads/ prospects- This is a sure-shot way to drive your prospects and leads away. If you don’t want to do that, automate your campaigns wisely. Mindmatrix lets you create highly adaptable drips; for instance if a prospect hasn’t opened or clicked the links of 4 consecutive emails, she doesn’t receive the next one. This ensure that you aren’t bombarding them and hence don’t prompt them to spam you.

Indulging in best practices for drip campaigns and other lead nurturing methods will surely make your brand more lovable. These tips are just to stop you from trying too hard.

For more information on sales enablement and how marketing automation can complement your efforts, visit the Mindmatrix website