Drip. Drip. Drip. That’s the sound of your email campaign making contact after contact with your target audience. 

In drip email marketing, you use marketing automation tools to send carefully-timed messages directly to your prospects. Over time, they gain familiarity with your brand and turn to you at the right moment when they need your products or services.

Here’s the best part: this type of email marketing automation shortens your sales cycle considerably. Let’s take a closer look at how it happens.

Fast Follow-Up

Email automation addresses one of the key aspects of lead development: speed. As the saying goes, time kills deals. Quick follow-up is one of the most important steps in the sales funnel, yet it also tends to be one of the least developed.

Research shows that if a company can respond to an inquiry within an hour, they’re seven times more likely to have a conversation with a decision-maker. Email automation allows you to do this by sending out a steady flow of timed emails, then quickly answering anyone who responds. 

This means you don’t waste time on people who might be interested and can focus on those who are definitely interested. Your staff can immediately open a productive conversation with a prospect and nurture them along the sales funnel.

That’s huge. It shortens your sales cycle and allows you to close more deals. One-fourth of all sales teams rate reducing the sales cycle as their #1 priority and view their sales cycle as overly long. Email automation finally offers a solution to this common problem.

Remove Guesswork and Gruntwork

Here’s another weakness in the sales funnel: gruntwork. It’s a time-consuming hassle to contact tons of prospects, especially if very few actually respond. Email marketing automation eases the burden and allows your staff to focus on their best and most engaged prospects. 

It also removes some of the guesswork from the equation. You can set a drip email marketing schedule that keeps your staff prepared for an influx of inquiries at certain established times. 

In addition to when you send them, you can also control who exactly is receiving your messages. So send previous B2B customer emails on Monday mornings when they’re focused on work. Reach out to your social site leads on Friday afternoons when they’re feeling a bit bored and ready to do some shopping.

As you can see, email automation allows customized messaging that not only shortens your sales cycle but also makes it more productive and predictable.

Build Better Relationships

This type of email marketing might be automated, but it’s not impersonal. In fact, drip emails offer you a great way to maintain a strong bond with your clients and remind them that you’re always there for them.

You’re not just blasting out emails - at least, ideally. Through frequent email contact, you’re building a type of professional friendship with your customers. They begin to remember and rely on you for a steady stream of helpful information.

The Key = Consistency

Finally, we’ll wrap up with a bit of great news. Right now, headed straight into the 2020s, despite persistent rumors that email could be dying, most people still welcome emails in their inbox. Email is alive and thriving!

A whopping 72% of people prefer to receive promotional emails from companies over all other forms of communication. Why? Because emails are nonintrusive, packed with information, and easy to save for later.

So for a company looking to improve its sales cycle, the best thing you can do is use email automation to connect with your customers on a regular basis. Show them you care.

If you need help maintaining email message consistency, 11outof11 can help. We know how to consistently produce high-quality email content that drives a healthy sales cycle.