Email Segmentation vs. Drip Marketing

It’s no secret that customizing your marketing emails to an appropriate audience is a powerful way to improve effectiveness.  There are two distinct ways of delivering customized emails, email segmentation and drip marketing. Clearly defining your list segmentation and drip campaigns helps assign a purpose for each strategy and creates clarity for both you and your audience.

Many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches either confuse or intermix elements from the two in an inefficient way. This is often a result of trying to include too much into a single communication or over complicating the relationship between a segmented list and a drip campaign.

For clarity’s sake, there is one element that differentiates segmentation from drip marketing, communication assignment vs. triggered event.

List segmentation is achieved through communication assignment.  That can be done by the digital marketer breaking their list into categories based on data in their database.  For instance many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches have separate communication for clients and prospects. List segmentation can also be determined by the user.  For instance, many opt in forms let a user pick communication preferences or select industry topics they want to receive.  Whether determined by the digital marketer or the user, segmentation is pre-determined by the assigned category.

Drip marketing is a workflow determined by a triggering event.  That event is typically an action on a website or via the email marketing platform.  It can be as simple as a confirmation email after someone opts in to an email list or as sophisticated as a series of emails to someone that started a purchase but did not complete it.

Confusing or intermixing the two strategies often results in a breakdown in the campaign.  This happens either because the parameters become so restricted that the communications don’t launch or the technical requirements are so complex that they frequently run into errors.

 

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