Despite their status as two separate departments, sales and marketing professionals have similar goals and can work together to leverage their unique insights and expertise to benefit the entire company. One project that can certainly use both a sales and marketing perspective is an email drip campaign.
Often considered the purview of the marketing department, a drip campaign seeks to build a relationship with prospects and move them to act. Who understands a prospect’s motivations or how to create an emotional connection with them better than a salesperson? Your deep knowledge of the habits, motivations, and areas of greatest resistance in prospects can help your company’s marketing team design a stronger, better-targeted email drip campaign. That could mean more relevant and higher quality leads for you with much less work.
It’s time for salespeople to pull up a chair at the marketing table and lend their expertise. When sales and marketing work together on email drip campaigns, the gap between marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) closes.
The Persistent Persuasion of Email Drip Campaigns
- Drip campaigns are automated messaging to leads triggered by a lead’s:
- Timing
- Actions
- Location in the sales funnel
- Drip campaigns allow you to consistently “touch” leads with relevant information that’s designed to help them move through the funnel.
Why Work on an Email Drip Campaign at all?
You’ve got calls to make, demos to perform, and quotas to meet. Why should you spend your precious time holed up in a conference room (or on a call) brainstorming emails with your marketing team? The reason is that a well-designed email drip campaign that can save you loads of time, make your job easier, and give you buckets of well-prepped leads.
An email drip campaign—also sometimes called drip marketing, autoresponders, and automated email campaigns—is a series of pre-written emails that are scheduled to “drip” over time to a recipient. According to B2B marketing automation expert Pardot, “Drip campaigns allow you to consistently ‘touch’ leads with relevant information based on time intervals, actions taken by prospects on your website, or other parameters, freeing up valuable marketing and sales resources without neglecting your prospects.”
What Can Sales Do To Help?
Here’s how you can help your marketing team make your company’s email drip campaigns even better.
Join in on the brainstorming
Be a part of the planning process from the very beginning. You know your customer base better than your marketing team; the latter rarely gets to interact directly with your customers. Help them determine which customer segments to target, how to reach out to them, and how to define reasonable goals for the campaign.
Break out the steps
A well-devised drip campaign takes its recipients on a carefully curated journey to an end point. Each individual email should be compelling and useful on its own, while moving the recipient one step closer to the goal. You, better than anyone, know how to guide a prospect on this journey.
Use your experience to help your marketing team understand how to address prospects’ concerns and points of resistance. Teach them how to effectively educate customers, as well as how to showcase the benefits of your products in a way that will resonate with them.
Find the right language
You spend hours a day speaking to or communicating directly with your customers. Marketing teams sometimes get caught up in corporate lingo and buzzwords, but that doesn’t always translate well with prospects. Help your marketing team create personalized language that builds trust and loyalty with potential customers.
Improve the results
When the drip campaign goes live, you may be tempted to sit back and let the leads roll in. However, even a good drip campaign can be improved. Your marketing team will look at analytics to see how many prospects opened an email and clicked on a link, and they’ll glean valuable quantitative insights from their email marketing software, but they can’t know whether a prospect laughed at the right joke or if they felt that your free eBook was truly valuable.
You can asks these sorts of questions when you follow up with prospects who come from the email drip campaign funnel. These direct insights will be incredibly valuable to your marketing team and will allow them to continually improve the drip campaign so that even more leads come your way.
Together You Succeed
Sales and marketing rise and fall together, and when these departments bridge the divide in their communication and goals, everyone benefits. Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Suj Krishnaswamy write in an article in the Harvard Business Review that “there is no question that, when sales and marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.”
The more insight you can give your marketing team and the more you participate in the creation of an email drip campaign, the better the drip campaign will perform and the more highly primed prospects who will be awaiting your contact. The drip campaign will save you time, freeing you up to focus on closing all of your new leads.
For additional tips on how to convert more leads to customers, read our eBook, “How to Close More Deals, Starting Today.”
