When you think of a bandaid, what do you think of?

Something that…

* Protects a weak spot on your body
* Holds everything together until a final solution can be found
* Hurts like the dickens when you remove it

Are bandaids keeping you from getting down to real marketing? How many sales prospecting letters do you have written and waiting in your email marketing software? Have you created a customer surveys to send to your customer base? Did you connect an online form to an autoresponder yet? Do you have any drip marketing campaigns developed?

What is stopping you? Daily fires? Afraid you aren’t creative enough? Not enough time? Don’t know how to get the messages into the marketing automation software? All good excuses, but they’re only bandaids!

Is it possible for you to block out just 1 day on your calendar to focus on your marketing and get several sales letters written and added to a drip marketing campaign?

Stop using bandaid excuses (the ones that are protecting you from getting anything done). You must work on a final marketing solution.

Just rip off the bandaid! Block out 1 day on your calendar right now to work on your marketing. Really… can you think of anything more important for your business? Rememberd, “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree long ago!”

BTW, to shortcut the whole copywriting component of getting your drip marketing campaigns written and launched, consider investing in one of our DripMarketingLetter packages. At less than $10/letter, they’re a steal–and worth at least 2 ripped-off bandaids!

Today let’s talk about the good stuff. Let’s find out who was interested in what you sent. Who opened your e-mail? Who clicked on which links?

Doing drip marketing properly gives you the ability to monitor your results… there are reports that show you if you’ve been effective with your campaigns.

If you are using Swiftpage, then you can easily find out all of that and more. Access your Swiftpage account (by clicking the icon in your Contact Manager). In the Results tab, click Reports, select the campaign or single email you want results for, and click View Report. You can learn all kinds of things. Check out the dashboard options for one of my recent sends.

Have you signed up for Swiftpage yet? It is a monthly service and there are no long term commitments. If you have ACT2010, then the Swiftpage software is built in and all you need to do is click on the icon to activate your account. BUT you don’t need to upgrade to the latest version of ACT to take advantage of all these cool features. Even if you have ACT 2005-ACT2009, you can take advantage of the EXACT same capabilities by downloading Swiftpage here. If you have ACT 6, you can also download and use Swiftpage for mailing out your emails, but some of the more advanced features like Drip Marketing campaigns are not available for use with this older version of ACT. 

Hey… it’s a trial… sign up and see what you can do with this… or better yet… join our DripMarketingCamp.

Really, just do it. Done is better than perfect. Send out your messages.

p.s. Need help? Stuck in the process somewhere? Need to a coach to get you going and staying focused. Call our office (646-402-5907) to set up a time to work with you one-on-one or to sign up for our next Online Drip Marketing Camp (no travel required).

If 60% of the success of your marketing campaign is due to your list, and 30% is due to your offer, then that leaves us with the 10% attributable to the design. It always seems to us like the layout and design is what most people want to consider first–yet it has the least impact on the success of your campaign.

However, if you have made it this far, then consider these…

Marketing Automation Message Considerations

• Will you use graphics? While header graphic can certainly make an email look professional, some drip campaigns would definitely suffer from graphics (e.g. such as the Proposal Follow-up series). Most of the time, you want the e-mail to look as though you are sending it only to one person….and that’s not conducive to graphics. However, if you want to present more of a marketing face, by all means, add a graphic to the top of the e-mail.
• Would the message benefit by breaking some of it into bullet points? Bullets can make a longer e-mail easier to read.
• Do you have a complete signature included on the e-mail? OK, this is a pet peeve of ours. Your signature should include your phone number and an e-mail address. Read more about our recommendations here.
• Want to add a p.s. near your signature? Who can resist reading a p.s.? We usually add it just above the signature.
• Does the email message pass CAN-SPAM requirements? Send your emails to a test site to check for any potential problems. If you use Swiftpage, send the email to SpamCheck@swiftpage.com and preface the subject line with spTest (all one word).
• Don’t forget to do a test send to yourself and a friend to verify that all the mail merge fields work, the links are correct, and that there are no spelling/grammar errors. 

This is more of the technical side of getting your drip campaign going. Give us a shout if you would like to set up an appointment for any marketing automation coaching at this point. You might also want to sign up for our next Drip Marketing Camp… to help you get up and running.

In a previous post, we discussed how 60% of your success in any marketing campaign is attributed to the list. (So hopefully you have spent some time in cleaning up your database and figuring out new ways to collect even better names.) The principle also states that 30% is because of the offer you make in your message. Notice that it wasn’t how well you write (though certainly there is a factor in that).

Today we’ll talk about your ”offer,” the written equivalent of the call to action sales close. Your sales letter can occasionally contain only helpful information, but ultimately, you are in business to get the order. If your sales letters do not lead to a close, then you’re writing merely for vanity, not commerce.

As you create the sales offer, keep these 5 points in mind…

1. Your offer should be very clear and easy to understand. If you say “call me” be sure to include the phone number… don’t make them search for it. For example, “Call me at 646-402-5907.”
2. Your readers must to be able to immediately understand what’s in it for them. You must show a clear benefit so they can see why they should bother taking the time or spending the money with you. For example, “If you have trouble getting your drip campaign created and out the door, and follow-up opportunities are slipping through the cracks, call me at 646-402-5907 to get on the list for the next Drip Marketing Camp.”
3. Your offer should include a discount or a bonus. For example, “We’ll include your choice of a Drip Marketing Letter Blueprint to help you get started (a $57 value).”
4. There should be a reason or incentive for immediate action – expiration dates, limited availability, special bonuses, or a bonus for fast response.  For example,  “If you sign-up within the next 7 days, we’ll throw in your choice of a Drip Marketing Letter Blueprint to help you get started (a $57 value). “Give the person a reason not to procrastinate (and forget about your offer).
5. Consider mentioning or even emphasizing your guarantee. Guarantees are still important to people and they work. For example, “And if you don’t feel like you’ve made 10X your investment in this camp, then we offer a money-back guarantee… with no questions asked.”

Show a lot of value with minimal risk, and a good reason to act now. If you were in the market for help with your drip marketing campaigns, how could you resist?

A big mistake many marketers make with their drip marketing campaigns is to think that adding their contact information is enough of ”a call to action.” Wrong. Make readers an offer they can’t refuse.

But, there’s a laundry list of considerations that contribute to the right answer, such as…

1. Are you targeting prospects or customers (are you known or unknown?)
2. What’s your message’s purpose: Website visit, opt-in or sign-up, download, take an order?
3. Is your message urgent (to your reader), important (to your reader) or educational?
4. Is your story new or original or familiar with a twist? (I truly hope you’re not just spewing product features and leaving it to your readers to see the value.)
5. Is your business transactional or a considered purchase?

(Did you ever notice how marketing consultants answer a question with a question? Doesn’t that drive you crazy? )

Long vs. Short Prospecting Letter Strategy

Using drip marketing to send prospecting letters is a long-term strategy that leverages your one-to-one selling time. Every email address in your database is precious–it represents a future buyer. When someone does opt-out, it’s a cause for a follow-up to find out why. Opt-outs should never be given up without a fight!

Opt outs are one way to gauge whether your messages resonate. We’ve had success with both short (1-2 sentence) and long (like this one) prospecting letters. But we know before we sit down at the keyboard which kind we’re going to write. We’re deliberate. And consistently, over many years now, our opt-out rate has been under 1%.

If you’re like most people, your biggest challenges to getting a drip marketing campaign off the ground are:

1. What to write about
2. How to write long vs short sales letters or emails
3. Finding time to write when you don’t know how to do 1 and 2

1. Nothing
2. Continued sales harassment of their customers
3. Rambling on with no point or purpose (we call it barf prose)

(Just last month we got a new client out of the blue who said, “OK, I’ve been on your list for 4 years, reading your stuff, and I finally decided, ‘I’m never going to do this on my own.’” We had to go look her up in our database to remember who she was. 

We never would’ve followed up with her in our regular course of phone-call follow ups. She was too remote a prospect. But it cost us nothing in time or money to keep her on our drip marketing program all these years. And–note–she never opted out in all that time!)

How To Write Sales Letters

Do you know about the 60-30-10 rule in database marketing? It says that the success in any marketing campaign is predicated on 3 things.

Only 10% is based on the creative elements of the campaign…yet that is what holds many of us up. We want to make it look good with great graphics.

Thirty percent of a campaign’s success is attributed to the offer…what you say in your messages.

List Hygiene

But a whopping 60% of your campaign success is tied to targeting the right audience. So I think it’s best to start by getting your database in order.

I’m hoping that you have done a good job of keeping your database up to date.

• Are people’s names entered in “Proper Case,” not in ALL CAPS, or in the sloppy… I don’t care about my contacts… all lower case? (e.g. Jane Doe, JANE DOE or jane doe)?
• Do you have complete information ( e-mail addresses or mailing addresses)? You can create groups to keep you in-the-know about which contacts still need to be updated.
• Do you have your contacts coded properly as customers, prospects, vendors… active, inactive… which campaign they should receive…. which products they have purchased from you…etc? While you can send something to everyone in your database… it is much more effective to segment your database and send relevant messages to each segment.
• Will you use any fields for mail merging? (e.g. “Your inside sales rep is [[Inside Rep]].”) If so, make sure they are completed and up to date
• Do you have a field for recording Opt Outs? You could plan to delete the record, but sometimes contacts want to work with you… they just don’t want to be on your mailing list. So you will need a field to mark your contacts’ preferences accordingly.

E-mail Bounces

Once your database is up-to-date (or at least on its way), you can start writing your content  (the part that accounts for 30% of your success). Stay tuned. We’ve got some thoughts on that as well.

You know the cliche, “Truth is stranger than fiction”? Well, we could not have scripted the surprise ending to this story any better than it happened in real life.

Here we are, Susan and Lori, drip marketing experts, in Denver a few weeks ago to present a session on “generating a continuous flow of revenue to your business using drip marketing.” All of a sudden, Ginger Ney, Susan’s senior technician and our videographer, starts waving her hands wildly for Susan to call on her.

Susan ignored her, figuring she’d get to Q&A at the end of our talk. Finally, Ginger jumps up and runs from the room, yelling, “Oh my gosh! Drip marketing works!” (Lori thought she had to pee, and couldn’t understand why a grown woman was raising her hand for permission.)

Designing an Inactive Customer Campaign

Susan continued talking about her drip marketing example of how to design an Inactive Customer campaign (one of the top selling drip marketing campaigns we sell on this site.) Basically, the steps are…

1. Go back 3 years and find your biggest customers who’ve stopped calling and/or buying
2. Write your messages with more of a “what happened to you” than a “discount for coming back” approach

Then she outlined the 6-8 messages we recommend in our drip marketing blueprint. Mark Mondo, one of our DripMarketingCamp graduates who was in our audience, also weighed in with feedback about the inactive campaign we helped him launch. He shared how just a few days into the campaign, he’d already gotten some nice replies from clients he hadn’t spoken to in awhile.

But, back to the punchline of our story. Our session ends, and Ginger comes running up to Susan. “WE JUST SOLD A 45-SEAT LICENSE DEAL FROM YOUR DRIP CAMPAIGN!”

Drip Marketing Works for Drip Marketing Experts!

Apparently, a former customer, upon receiving one of Susan’s inactive customer campaign messages, replied, “We’re ready to upgrade!”  Needless to say, this is a very nice-sized deal for Susan’s company. So, yes, fellow drippers, Susan and I do “eat our own dogfood!” And it really, really works!

The famous Travis Campbell, who was also in our audience, was similarily impressed with the surreal timing of Susan’s great news. Being the video guru that he is, he captured our story for YouTube posterity. Hope you enjoy it! And, oh, BTW…

Have we told you today how much we love drip marketing?

We had a client call this week and say they were sweating just thinking about all of this. We hope you are not feeling the same way. Really you can do this. Don’t focus on all the drips that you need to do. Just pick a trigger in your business and write one letter… then another. One step at a time.

Sales Follow Up Letter

A sales follow up letter template makes it easier to follow-up the next time. Multiple letter templates are even better. Yes, you should be calling all of these people… but a nice sales follow up letter in-between those calls is much more effective and productive in building relationships.

So, we hope you have already started writing those sales follow up letters. Of course you can get a jump start by purchasing a pre-templated drip marketing letter series  (there’s nothing worse than staring at a blank page sometimes… these will give you a great start.)

Or consider signing up for the next Drip Marketing Camp, where we coach you on creating your own customized campaign started.

(OK… the flood is over… you can get out of the ark ;-) )

And now for the last step in the series.

9. Analyze the results. There’s no such thing as a “perfect” campaign. None of us is smart enough to know what our contacts think or how they’ll behave. If you engineered a feedback mechanism into your messages, you’ll get questions or suggestions that may make you rethink your drip strategy. The campaign reports are also valuable for showing you disconnects in your thought process. Tweak messages, stages, sequencing. Don’t be afraid to incorporate direct and indirect feedback.

Once you’ve finished your first drip campaign, you’ll see how much easier it is to build and integrate the next one (and the next one, and the next one) until all your business’ black holes are plugged up.

Was this checklist helpful? (Feedback loop!)

P.S. Besides the Drip Marketing Camp, we work with our clients privately to set up their drips. If that’s something you’d like to talk to us about, just reply to this message.