SafetyDetectives spoke with Kenneth Chinedu, product manager at MailDrip, about the services his company offers, the cycbersecurity threats that affect automated emails, and the challenges of creating n automated email marketing campaign.
Thank you for taking some time for us today. Can you start by talking about about your professional background?
I enjoy adventures in product development, as well as experience in coordinating marketing activities and team to drive product adoption and growth using a data-driven approach.
So far, I have served as CMO & product lead in an African Fintech, Saas & logistics company.
With MailDrip, I work with an amazing creative team that are committed to building sustainable solutions and nothing satisfies me than solving product and business problems for our clients and communities.
What motivated you to start MailDrip?
MailDrip was started out of a need one of our clients had. We observed that most of our clients needed email automation with landing pages but didn’t want to pay the huge monthly cost the existing solutions in the market were offering. After meeting the needs of the first client, we researched the market and found an opening, a blue ocean. Most users were getting charged for premium features when they only used one of the premium features of email marketing solutions. We stripped down our solution to target those who need drip, sequence and segmentation. It’s been a journey of learning and pivoting but quite rewarding.
What are some of the main services of MailDrip, and what makes it unique?
The heart of MailDrip is helping African businesses, marketers and creators grow their business with marketing automation. Many African businesses are far from utilizing the power of automation, the idea is yet to resonate well with them, hence a large number of them rely on being available before a customer’s request or need can be attended to.
With MailDrip, we will empower African businesses to harness the power of automation in creating good customer experience for their product and growing business revenue.
MailDrip offers services such as:
- Email marketing
- Email automation
- Customer Onboarding
- Automated transactional emails
- SMS marketing
What are some of the cybersecurity concerns with automating business emails?
With over 333 billion emails sent out daily globally, it’s no surprise that so many people are now using email marketing as an avenue for cyber crimes. There tend to be security risks that come with it.
Actually, there are different email security threats that can potentially be harmful to businesses, such as proof; where the bad guys send fake emails using a company’s brand identity to a large number of people.
And people fall for this quickly, sometimes, they go ahead to create landing pages in the name of these brands to fake purchases and so many cybercrime activities.
Malware is also a big concern in email marketing; it can hurt businesses and consumers very badly.
There are measures to handle this issues, by making sure;
- Their email lists are verified
- Enable firewall and other cyber security measures
- Educate people on how to recognize and handle potential threats
What are some of the challenges of automating an email marketing strategy?
I think the first challenge is figuring out what your customers need at every moment. At every stage in the customer cycle, a type of message and engagement is needed to get them closer to pushing the “Buy” button. You can’t automate what you don’t understand and how it works one step at a time, to get the best out of automation, you need to know your business and customers as much as you can.
Second is the complexity of the tool, and this is a major concern. Some tools make automation difficult, and this is the problem we are also trying to solve for a lot of people.
Also the cost of setting up great marketing automation for large businesses is growing daily; you need to be a premium user in most tools to leverage automation massively.
How can MailDrip drive growth and help improve sales?
It’s not a difficult concept; it’s quite easy.
MailDrip helps you do a lot of things without lifting a finger. From auto-responding to a customer’s email and messages, to providing personalized onboarding experiences to new customers.
And all of these activities are data-driven and can be tracked. You can look at your data and see what is not working and what needs to be improved.
So, for example, a user signs up for your application today. With Maildrip, you can personalize their engagement, sending them automated messages based on activities they personally performed with your campaigns. You can send an email to that customer even while you are asleep, and get them from sign-ups to becoming paying customers with automation.