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Email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to market your business from both a cost and a speed to ROI standpoint, but doing it right depends on how you set it up. There’s more to it than simply sending a blast or setting up your auto-responders and letting it go.

There should be a clear and comprehensive strategy if you want to do it right. Common methodologies include techniques such as drip marketing and batch emails and some of the more aggressive marketers have claimed good success with large blast emails. Advanced marketing automation tools, such as Infusionsoft, enable you to target very specific sub-lists or prospect/customer subsets and deliver laser-focused emails. Ultimately, your success at email marketing will depend greatly on your initial set up, tools or platforms used, and most importantly, your follow through.

For example, I have run across businesses where their entire email marketing strategy was to send out batch emails every once in a while offering their sale items or their discounted services. Many of these businesses would benefit greatly by expanding their email marketing strategy to include drip and nurture marketing.

If you are not familiar, drip marketing is where you intentionally “drip” on prospective customers at regular intervals, trying to develop a deeper relationship with them in an effort to convert them. These periodic but regular “drips” don’t need to be about sales or promotions but they should carry some value to the prospect. In the email marketing world, these “drips” are simply done by email.

Nurture marketing is more comprehensive in that it uses drip marketing but adds “trigger marketing” or trigger emails, into the overall email marketing strategy as well. Trigger emails are automated email replies with tripwire links sent out by an auto-responder and were discussed in “Tripwire Marketing.”

If you plan on using email marketing to fix your funnel, do yourself a favor and take the time necessary to think about not only the email marketing tool, but also your overall email marketing strategy. What do you believe would work best for your business, drip or nurture marketing? Perhaps both?