eMail Marketing is NOT a Drip Campaign

Guest Post by Drew Burks

As a Real Estate Agent I have used “drip” email marketing with just about every website that I purchased, because that’s what the sites come with when you purchase one.

A little more than two years ago I was introduced to email marketing when I began studying internet marketing.

Let me explain the difference (in my opinion) …

Drip Campaigns= pre-written canned messages all about real estate and included with every Realtor website you can purchase.

The problem with drip marketing is every real estate agent who purchased a website from the same company you bought your site from is sending out the same generic emails.

The drip emails are generic and are primarily about boring real estate information -they are anything but authentic and relevant to your audience.

Email Marketing= is a form of email communication that sends a targeted message to a target audience only after they have double opted-in to receive the message.

Don’t get me wrong, I am sure there are thousands of people using email marketing just like the “drip marketing” described above … but they aren’t getting great results either.

To be effective with email marketing you need to deliver quality content specific to the audience receiving it, and you should always have some sort of Call To Action (CTA) for your reader to take.

A few email marketing lessons I learned

1. Attention to detail! -emails should begin with “firstname” NOT “lastname”
2. My lack of attention to detail got me a .36% complaint 🙁
3. Aweber only tracks html version of your email if not links are included in plain text email
4. BUT Aweber does NOT guarantee click tracking in plain text, they ONLY guarantee click tracking in html version if you set the link up as a hyperlink with anchor text … no full URL’s
5. Use RSS feed from your blog to keep lists warm
6. You must always provide value to your lists or people will opt-out

Check out this screen shot below:

Email marketing works much better than drip marketing, because it employs “inbound marketing“. When you combine email marketing with social media and relationship marketing you start to reap the rewards of inbound marketing at its fullest.