What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of a Drip Email Marketing Campaign?

Whether you have heard of the term or not, you have definitely come in contact with it.  You may have even employed it without even realizing it.  What we are talking about is drip email marketing, a tactic that is commonly employed in the real estate industry, but can be effective for professionals in any sector.  In simple terms, it is the practice of delivering scheduled automated messages to keep your brand in front of prospects, and maintain the relationships you have with existing customers.  Like many things marketing related, however, this type of campaign has its advantages and disadvantages.

Drip email marketing campaigns are driven by automated responses, a functionality that is mainly provided by auto-responders.  The automation aspect is perhaps the most significant advantage this type of marketing has to offer.  Instead of manually sending messages to keep your audience informed, you can schedule them in advance, and automatically send them every other day, every week, every month, or whatever interval you have decided on.  The added benefit is being able to target customers and potential customers with messages that trigger direct actions such as leaving feedback, or actually making a purchase.  

One of biggest disadvantages of drip email marketing is the often impersonal manner of the communications.  Because your message is automated, it could cause you to miss out an opportunity to build relationships with your audience.  Naturally, campaigns that rely solely on this method usually have lower response rates than those that employ a more personal approach. While some companies are able to justify these lower rates with higher conversions and sales, others are not.  To be on the safe side, it would be a smart move to mix in a few personal messages every now and then to show that your marketing campaign does indeed have a human pulse. 

Another disadvantage of email drip marketing relates to frequency.  For some prospects, the schedule you have created for staying in touch may not be sufficient.  And if you are not communicating with your subscribers frequently enough, they may forget that they even signed up for your list, or simply lose interest.  The next time they hear from you, they might view your message as spam, and as we all know, this has the potential to open up the door to a whole new world of problems.  Keeping in touch with your audience is important, but if frequency becomes an issue, drip marketing could leave you with undesirables results as well as other dilemmas to deal with. 

Although we only briefly touched on the pros of drip email marketing, we can say that they  outweigh the cons, but this only when your strategy is executed with precision.  The  disadvantages are most often experienced by those who invest all their efforts in this method and overlook the proven best practices.  When planning your drip email marketing campaign, don’t forget that relevance, a personal touch, and timing are important elements that should be included.