What is the Concept of Drip Marketing All About?

Drip Marketing is the concept of touching a consumer multiple times over a defined period of time to ensure your brand message stays relevant with a consumer, increasing the chances of closing a sale. Drip Marketing is not Lead Nurturing, but they share very similar tactics. So what are the differences?

Typically, Drip Marketing is comprised of a multi-channel marketing campaign including advertising, emails, remarketing, direct mail, social media, etc. to prospects and sales leads that you are hoping to attract into your sales pipeline. Drip Marketing is a tactic in Lead Generation.

The Drip Marketing campaign should include a targeted demographic and buyer personas to ensure your marketing messages are relevant to the consumer. Identifying where the consumer lives, works or engages in online communities will make your Drip Marketing more effective. Oftentimes, companies will purchase a list with target buyer names, addresses, places of work, etc. Even with all of this data, the consumer is largely an unknown target, meaning that the company creating the Drip Marketing campaign often does not have a relationship with the consumer and many times does not even know the consumer exists yet. The company is hoping that if they drip enough messages, eventually they will resonate with a consumer and the consumer will take action by either purchasing a product or engaging the company in dialogue.

What Makes a Drip Marketing Campaign Successful?

To ensure your Drip Marketing campaign is successful, it is recommended to ensure there is a strategy for capturing the personal information of interested consumers. By capturing the consumer data you can then disseminate and mine the data for effective sales action. Oftentimes, data capturing software is split into two categories: Marketing Automation software (HubSpot, Marketo, Act|On) or Customer Relationship Management software or CRM (SalesForce.com, Dynamics, Sugar). Combined, these software solutions offer a much stronger result, however it is not necessary to integrate them.

Additionally, a successful Drip Marketing campaign will incorporate tracking mechanisms like coupon codes or website URL links that are specific to the communication channel. This way you can track the effectiveness of each channel and make adjustments to your strategy for stronger future results. Marketing Automation software greatly helps in this scenario.

Lead Nurturing

While Lead Nurturing is very similar, the greatest difference from Drip Marketing is that the company now knows the consumer and has started to build a relationship. Whether it be an initial phone call or written communications on or offline, the company now knows the consumer’s name and that they do indeed have an interest in their product or service.

Once this happens, the communications channels are also narrowed as future messages should be much more specific when communicating to the prospect or lead. With Lead Nurturing, we often see that the primary communication channel is email. These emails are typically personalized to the individual or a smaller group of individuals that share the same interests, needs, etc. Marketing Automation and CRM both play an important role in Lead Nurturing as well.

For another post about drip marketing, check out:
Long Sales Cycle? Shorten it with Drip Marketing

Image credit: Email customized icon by Keri J via Creative Commons License Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0