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Drip Marketing: Why Automate? A Tale of Two Campaigns

by Dan Ogdon

You've taken the time to design a multi-step marketing plan targeting your new leads, informing them about your business and pitch them on your services. You can execute your campaign the easy way or the hard way as both deliver messages to your new leads, but what might suffer as result of using the hard way?

Campaign A - The Hard Way (Manual Marketing)

For everyone who signs up for "more information" on your website you want to send two emails and a postcard to those that did not open the emails. You also want to have your sales staff place a closing call over the course of the next 45 days. This is your process:

1. Create the messages for the emails
2. Create the message for the postcard
3. Create and place a form on your website for people to fill out to receive "more information"
4. Check the form every few days and begin to compile a growing list of leads
5. Periodically add this list to your database
6. Send the first email blast to the initial list once you feel it is big enough
7. Continue to add new leads to your database from the form
8. Try to remember who you have sent Email 1 to and who you haven't
9. Send Email 2 to those who have received Email 1
10. Send Email 1 to those who did not receive Email 1
11. Look-up who did not open Email 1 or Email 2
12. Export that list and send to your printer to send the postcards
13. Create Call List from Email 1 and 2 results
14. Assign to sales staff

Repeat process over and over and over.A lot of work huh? You can see the possibility of error in this process and how you could easily make the mistake of sending the wrong message to the wrong lead.

Campaign B - The Easy Way (Automated)

Same situation as above, for everyone that signs-up for "more information" on your website you want to send two emails and a postcard to those that did not open the emails. You also want to have your sales staff place a closing call over the course of the next 45 days. Here is your process:

1. Create the messages for the email
2. Create the message for the postcard
3. Place a form on your website for people to fill out to receive more information
4. Let your sales staff start closing sales that are delivered to them

That's it?! So when and how do the emails and postcards get delivered? How does my sales staff receive Call Lists? Take a look behind the scenes:

• A lead fills out their information in a survey form on your website and hits submit
• They automatically receive a text-based email from you thanking them
• They are automatically loaded into your database environment
• They are automatically added to a Drip Marketing campaign
• In the Drip Marketing Campaign they receive Email 1 one day after they are added
• They receive Email 2 fifteen days after they were added
• If they didn't open Email 1 or Email 2, their name will automatically be sent to your printer to be sent a postcard
• Your sales staff will automatically be created and delivered a Call List based on the results of the email blasts

This is true for every new lead that fills out the form on your website. You don't have to think about a thing besides running your business and turning hot leads into prospects, then eventually into customers. An automated environment eliminates the headache, hassle and most importantly the time it takes to manage a multi-touch campaign as described.

Oh yeah, an automated solution like this starts at $29.95 per month, what are you waiting for? Swiftpage emarketing .com/dripmarketing