Drip Marketing: Slow and Steady Wins the Customer

Drip marketing is the rather inelegant term for a marketing campaign that relies on repeated contact, or "touches," with a potential customer.

Unlike a leaky faucet, drip marketing is no accident. Successful drip marketing involves a carefully planned and thoughtfully targeted series of communications to get your message across to customers and keep your company's name in their minds. As prospects move through the early stages of the cell cycle, drip marketing helps ensure that those potential customers become your actual customers.

Building awareness is one of the essential advantages of drip marketing. It fixes your company name and message in the potential customer's mind.

Education is another vital function. Drip marketing can inform prospects about your products and industry by giving helpful information while building trust in your company.

Drip marketing is ideal for high-value products with a long sell cycle, especially high-ticket items purchased at infrequent intervals. For example, mortgage companies and real estate agencies using CRM focus on drip marketing. So are health and life insurance agents. IT vendors whose products are purchased at infrequent intervals are also a rich market for drip marketers.

Drip marketing is especially effective if you have some insight into the prospect's buying cycle. Some kinds of goods, such as business computers and automobiles, tend to have a definite lifespan and are replaced every few years.

Drip marketing needs careful planning for maximum effect. You must decide on a theme or theme your campaign wants to drive home.

But the same message endlessly needs to be more effective. Even though the themes remain the same, drip marketing requires variation in how you present the news.

On a percentage basis, drip marketing could be more efficient. It requires you to contact several people several times to drive sales. This means drip marketing can generate many sales with lead-generation tools. Correctly done, it can turn up many good prospects. But it does mean that you need to focus your drip-marketing efforts carefully. Paradoxically, while drip marketing uses mass-marketing techniques like email and direct mail, it becomes most effective when the messages are customized for specific audiences for drip marketing.

Once you've decided on your basic themes, you need to analyze your prospect list to determine which presentations will likely be most effective with different groups. For example, a real estate agent will have some potential clients buying their first homes, some retiring and looking to downsize, and some are moving into the area. 

Each of these groups will benefit from a different approach. First-time buyers are likely to be interested in affordability. Older prospects looking to downsize will probably be more concerned about issues like tax implications and how to handle the sale of their existing home. By segmenting your prospects, you can send them the appropriate messages using drip marketing.

Fortunately, drip marketing lends itself to a high degree of automation. Fortunately, there are several tools to help you run a drip-marketing campaign or several companies that will run your campaign for you.

Many drip marketing products are specialized for particular industries. Beyond the industries they serve, drip products vary enormously in what they do. Drip marketing is more a buzzword than a product description. One must look beyond the term to see what a product offers.

But drip marketing can be much more than just email. It can also include direct mail contact, newsletters, telephone calls, or on-site visits. Any form of customer communication can be integrated into a drip marketing campaign. Some drip-marketing software will automatically remind you to call the lead or send mailings.

Some CRM programs, such as the Salesforce Salescloud have features that let you set up a drip-marketing program. In the case of ACT!, that includes a series of sample letters on various topics.

Finally, several companies specialize in running drip marketing campaigns, such as MyMarketingPartner Inc. They can help you create your message, analyze your prospects, and provide you with prewritten or customizable materials for various target groups. You work out the basics, and they do the rest.

Poorly done drip marketing is Chinese water torture for prospects. They may remember you, but they're unlikely to deal with you. Bombarding prospects with uninteresting or irrelevant messages is a great way to avoid being ignored. In this day of spam filters and floods of junk mail, it's too easy to wind up as part of the background noise rather than a signal.

Email marketing is particularly tricky because of spam's current choke hold on email drip marketing campaigns. Most people who get a message from a company they're unfamiliar with are likely to assume it's spam.

Another problem with email marketing is that malicious emails have made people wary of opening attachments such as newsletters or reports.

The primary way around this problem is content combined with trust. To overcome the spam barrier, you need a compelling message. You have to say something in which your potential customers are likely to be interested. Often that means giving them tips or other helpful information.

Second, you need to build trust. Your prospects must trust you to give them something they want and not send them viruses. This is one limit for sending newsletters as attachments to emails to gradually grow your business.

Personalization also builds trust, both in your emails and in your company. As much as possible, include your prospects' names and other correct information showing that they're not just a name on a mailing list. Also include information about who you are. For example, an email signed by the sales rep who will handle the account is more effective, especially if the email is from that rep's email account.

The significant advantage of drip marketing is that it gives you a relatively low-cost, low-effort way of maintaining regular contact with leads who still need to make critical buying decisions. You can do this by other means, but drip marketing lets you touch many more people effectively without wasting much work. With drip marketing, you can have more contact with more prospects without overloading your sales force or breaking your budget.

Compare the best CRM software with drip marketing features to take your marketing campaigns to the next level.