While email marketing takes the lion’s share of many business’ marketing efforts, statistics project a typical mailing list loses a third of its members every year without proper engagement. This means that 25% to 80% of your mailing list may become inactive unless you provide subscribers with consistent and quality content. Sending relevant and timely emails is highly essential to target your audience and repeat customers.

Let’s look at an example. Say Jane runs a store for apparel and accessories. She finds a decline in the number of repeat buyers and tries to figure out the reason. She realizes that her email campaigns have reached out to her purchasers only occasionally. She wants to entice them, and even plans for promotional offers and a special sale. Unfortunately, she isn’t sure of how to convey this to her customers.

Are you in the same situation as Jane? Do you still wonder how you can keep your subscribers or customers engaged? Drip marketing can help you resolve these challenges.

How does drip marketing work?

With drip marketing, you set a series of follow-up emails to send to your subscribers automatically. These messages analyze customer behavior so they are highly relevant and help you improve your relationship with customers in three ways. These three perks include:

• Save effort and time: Because drip marketing is automated, you no longer have to spend long hours sending follow-up messages.
• Show how much you care: Your customers are the life blood of your business, so never let them feel lost. Instead, make them feel good about choosing your product.
• Simplify the lead-to-customer journey: Drip marketing makes it simple to convert a lead to a customer by sending relevant content, wherever they are in the sales cycle.

Having said these, how well can you use drip marketing for realizing your needs? Here are seven effective ways:

1. Target the right people the right way.

A product becomes a brand only if it connects with the right audience in a relevant way. Maintaining proper and healthy mailing lists lets you keep your finger on the pulse of your audience’s thoughts. Understand what each group or segment of your audience needs and send emails accordingly.

2. Give a personal touch to the masses.

According to Experian, personalized emails have 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rates than non-personalized emails. Address each customer individually and create personalized subject lines to improve the performance of your emails.

3. Boost your sales through holiday offers and promotions.

One of the easiest ways to improve your sales is by providing offers and holding promotional events. According to a 2015 survey from Deloitte, nearly 67% of the people buy items on sale and 47% of the people use store coupons. Send emails informing your buyers about the latest happenings and deals. Use coupons, discount cards, and other promotions to make your customers want to buy your product.

4. Send reminders and well wishes.

Even though you have a long list of recipients, you can still remind each of them about renewals and important events. Make your customers happy by sending birthday and anniversary wishes, as well as seasonal greetings.

5. Understand your audience’s needs.

Before sending any email, you have to know your audience. Learn what their interests are and take action to appeal to those interests. Track their activities and behavior, and send appropriate emails based on that.

6. Don’t forget the call-to-action (CTA).

In many instances, your customers don’t know what product or service you provide until you show it to them. The best way to engage your audience is to send out informative emails that are specific and urge your recipients to act. Provide them links for books, white papers, articles, and guides so they get to know your product in detail.

7. Nurture your leads from the very beginning.

If you want a smooth lead-to-customer journey, you have to take the right steps. This means taking care of your leads from the initial interaction and during every step along the path before converting them into loyal customers.

Try out Drip Marketing for your campaigns today, and grow your leads and business profits. Share your experience with us for we would love to hear it.