Regular email campaigns, or personalized and frequency optimized drip emails?

Before we begin answering this question, let’s take a short look at the numbers. Email Statistics Report shows that people will send and receive about 306.4 billion emails per day in 2021. This number is predicted to grow at an alarming speed, touching almost 333 billion emails in the next five years.

Well, that is huge. Emails are the most used communication tool – be it to make a business deal or as a brand-customer relationship building. There is no doubt that emails are in no way fading away.

But what kind of campaigns are winning hearts. Is it the regular email campaign or is it the modern drip email marketing automation which is personalized and hyper-targeted?

Data shows us that personalized emails receive up to 18 times more open rates. Get higher engagement and contribute to the overall increase in marketing ROI.

Let’s see why.

Regular email campaigns Vs. Drip (modern) email marketing

It’s been over 45 years since the first network mail was sent on ARPANET. 

Fascinating fact: Here’s a record of the first words Internet spoke, very carefully preserved at The University of California. It is a hand-written entry with the date and the time, going back to 1969!

Image Source: The University of California

Since then, emails have grown and developed into a powerful marketing tool. They’re becoming more relevant and personalized to every single customer. We all know that consumers hate unsolicited emails, irrespective of whether they have subscribed to your brand or not.

A poor subject line, an irrelevant content, flashy emails, and forced selling emails turn off your customers instantly, making them either unsubscribe from your email list or report your emails as spam.

Email marketers today pay great attention to their email templates and email automation campaign performances.

Marketers want to monitor customers’ lifecycle journey, tie together all of the information in their database, and segment them based on behavior, lifecycle stage, browsing patterns, and any other data that is saved in their contact database.

This, in turn, helps them in crafting an email that is relevant to a specific customer and can urge engagement on their side.

What is a regular email campaign?

The concept of one way regular emails has taken a backseat as brands are continuously optimizing their emails to trigger engagement.

Regular email campaigns are usually devoid of any advanced segmentation. In fact, these emails are very often far from being relevant in any way.

A regular one way email campaign means sending the same email to the entire customer base, irrespective of what they want to hear from you.

It is more like sending an email just for the sake of it. There is no sync between what the customers want and what the email says. I’d say sending such campaigns is like throwing arrows blindly in the air hoping to hit the target at some point [Which happens rarely].

Why are brands avoiding irrelevant regular email campaigns?

It is not just customer nurturing factor that is driving brands away from regular and unoptimised email campaigns’ concept. There are some basic defects in this approach to marketing.

1. The risk of getting spammed is high.

If you are sending irrelevant emails time and again, there is a good chance that the majority of your subscribers will mark your messages as SPAM. This will ensure that your emails never again reach their inbox.

All mailbox providers have strict email sending rules. The need to maintain consumer privacy is a high priority.

Hence, when a majority of your subscribers start marking your emails as SPAM (or even block you), it is a direct indication to the mailbox providers that you are sending unsolicited emails.

As a result, the mailbox providers will block or blacklist your email sending address, affecting your email sending reputation badly.

2. You can lose your subscribers.

An email that has no relevance to what the recipient wants or needs can and will trigger high unsubscription rates.

Your email list health starts deteriorating the very minute your ideal subscribers choose to opt out of it and those who are still subscribed can become completely dormant.

As a result, over time, these accounts tend to become invalid for multiple reasons, the most common one is that the recipients eventually stop using the email address. By sending the same email multiple times to your entire mailing list, you are directly hurting your brand image.

The chances of losing subscribers and hurting email reputations push most brands to make a transition to personalized automation campaigns.

For instance, Jeanswest, a leading fashion brand in Australia, was badly stuck with their regular email campaigns which were not properly targeted.

In order to survive and engage local customers, they understood that they would need to change and adopt a more dynamic approach by providing their consumers with relevant content and offers.

Hence, they switched to highly targeted drip emails. Multiple segments were made based on customer buying patterns, feedback, buyers’ stage, age, gender, and more. All of this data was used to segmented and divide their customers into specialized categories carefully.

The results of their new campaign were positively overwhelming:

• 400% higher ROI with targeted and automated emails.
• 200% higher ROI from product-targeted emails.
• Up to 150% higher open rates and click-throughs.

In short, what they practiced here is DRIP EMAIL MARKETING. Lets dig in deeper to understand why drip email campaigns work for businesses (including Jeanswest).

What are drip emails?

Drip emails are a series of emails scheduled to be sent based on customer behavior, interests, buying stage, browsing patterns, and many such factors.

These emails are highly personalized and targeted which helps in increasing email engagements and also boost the overall conversions.

It is quite the opposite of what regular email campaigns are. Drip emails need advanced segmentation that can help in sending out relevant emails. Segmentations based on website behavior, email engagements, buying stage, demographics, and other such factors come into play for an effective drip email campaign.

Unlike regular email campaigns, drip emails are essentially relevant and are meant to trigger a brand-customer relationship. These are aligned to customer interests and are finite series of emails (because over-doing or under-doing email marketing is not good for your brand).

Drip emails can be of various types, serving multiple purposes, like:

• Welcome email drips
• Onboarding email drips
• Educational drips
• Customer activation drips
• Re-engagement drips

Additional Resource: Use automated drip campaigns to trigger conversions

EasySendy Pro lets you create all these drip email sequences pretty easily with the drag and drop flexible email editor. However, I suggest you use drip emails only after you have built a genuine email list.

EasySendy is a consent-based platform, and third-party email lists are automatically rejected. Hence, building an email list using popup forms and content marketing efforts is the recommended method.

If you have an email list ready to use, then export it into EasySendy and get started with the simple campaign builder. Include actions, conditions, and decisions, to trigger drip emails.

Below is an example of a welcome drip series, which is initiated once a customer submits the popup form and joins your email list.

EasySendy also lets you create SMS drip campaigns and Facebook Messenger Drip campaigns for your customers to help you engage with your customers across multiple channels. Advantage? Well, you never miss out on engaging any of your potential customers!! That’s a win-win situation.

If you are yet to build an email list from scratch, you are in gain here. The easy-to-embed web popup forms with social subscribe buttons in it can solve your problem.

EasySendy hosts a wide range of popup templates (over 200) for you to customize and use depending on your business needs.

[su_button url=”https://easysendy.com/features/email-drip/” target=”blank” style=”flat” background=”#2B8DD6″ size=”7″ center=”yes” radius=”5″]Try EasySendy Pro for free[/su_button]

Are regular emails completely dead?

According to the Smart Insights article, it can definitely work, but only when you spend enough time to research and optimize the emails: the design, sending time, CTA copy.

The article also suggests that a regular email campaign (also referred to as batch and blast email campaigns) can give you higher ROI, but only when you have tried and tested the copy and the design, and you have the control to moderate the number of times you send out an email.

This will help you attain an optimal email volume number that won’t be affecting your brand negatively, or at least it will be kept at a bare minimum.

The concept of irrelevant emails does have its place in the modern marketing world, but like all things, it has to adapt and develop to satisfy the today’s high standards.

One example of regular email campaigns is the newsletter campaigns that all brands do. As Megan Mosley, the Marketing and Operations Specialist at ReferralRock, says

“Marketers send a variety of email blasts like a company newsletter to subscribers. The trick is finding a tool that meets all your needs as a business but helps you create an engaging email for readers. Fortunately, we live in an age where there are plenty of email automation tools out there, to fit businesses of every shape and size.”

ReferralRock,

Mosley talks about the frequent blast email campaigns that every marketing team does in her article on email blast examples, which makes it more clear that regular emails are not dead. The new thought is: Regular emails have evolved to suit all business needs.

All email campaigns MUST be optimized and you need to discover that optimal volume figure that will help your brand see a spike in its ROI.

In conclusion, I’d agree that everyone does mass emailing at some point in their lives. The catch is to do it in a way that does not backfire. Otherwise, my vote continues to be with dynamic segmentation, targeted automation campaigns, and 360-degree lead profiling for effective email campaigns.