Drip Marketing: Nurturing Businesses One Lead at a Time

Ever heard about drip irrigation in agriculture and farming? Drip irrigation is a process in which a watering system makes use of pipes to provide plants with water, drop-wise, after specified time intervals. Drip marketing is based on this agricultural irrigation method. And now that the concept of drip irrigation is clear, one may be able to guess what drip marketing is about.

What Is Drip Marketing?

Drip marketing is the marketing equivalent of drip irrigation. In this marketing method, the target audience is considered as the plants, and essential pieces of information are the water droplets. In drip marketing, the relevant information is sent to the target audience over a period of time to nurture leads and add to sales.

Brands schedule the moments when the business reaches out to the target, either through emails or other such online platforms. Drip marketing is a direct marketing strategy that involves the sending of promotional messages and content to prospects.

When Is Drip Marketing Used?

Drip marketing is typically used by brands according to the prospect’s sales funnel progress and should be used in the following scenarios.

• Welcoming new customers
• Educating customers and prospects
• Directing to specific content
• Nurturing leads
• Reminders about unattended shopping carts
• Rewarding customer loyalty
• Engaging users with new product launches

Essential Features

Marketers leverage via the following features that it possesses.

• Highly Relevant
• Uber Personalized
• Based on User Behavior
• Pre-Decided Content
• Automated with Scheduled Send

Critical Elements

Drip marketing comprises pre-decided content that goes with every email that is sent to the prospect. Drip marketing elements determine the efficiency of an automated campaign. Brands make use of drip marketing software to automate the process, and each software may term these elements differently, despite the end-function being the same. Successful drip marketing must consist of the following key elements.

• Triggers

A trigger is an event that causes a lead to enter into a drip processor causes a lead to progress through the sales funnel. Triggers can range from registrations to subscriptions, and even unpurchased items in shopping carts, among others.

• Conditions

Triggers start a drip campaign, whereas conditions may be required to be met for engagement actions to commence.

• Actions

The engagement elements in drip campaigns are known as elements. Actions are initiated once prospects express an interest and can range from cart abandonment emails to sales funnel progress, and customer review emails, among others.

Nurturing Leads

A lead nurturing campaign is one that businesses of all sizes can run to cultivate their connections with their leads through every step of the customer journey and sales funnel. Nurturing leads helps boost conversion rates and is commonly used by brands and marketers. With leaders being continuously added to sales funnels, and customer attention spans shrinking, even more, the need for qualified lead nurturing campaigns intensifies.

Lead nurturing must be adaptive, highly personalized, and enable marketers to respond to customer behavior in real-time. Lead nurturing requires brands to impart and increase trust, relevance, utilize multi-channel strategies, and, lastly, measure success. For brands that do not nurture leads, they should know that their competitors are, which may result in sales and revenue losses.

Creating an Efficient Drip Marketing Strategy

Well, now we know the key elements and important features of drip marketing. What’s keeping you from developing an effective drip marketing strategy? The following steps help create and perfect drip marketing.

• Know Your Audience

To send across messages that matter and get the prospect to take the desired action, marketers must know the very niche interests and dislikes of their target audiences. Brands must figure out exactly which triggers they must use for every individual in their drip strategy.

• Develop Your Message

Once brands know their audience, they need to craft their message according to the preferences of the prospect. Marketers must generate the message such that it is viewed by the prospect as useful or grabs their attention. Marketers must also ensure message clarity while keeping in mind brand image and values.

• Plan Your Campaign

Marketers need to set out a comprehensive plan that lists out every detail of the drip marketing process. They need to know how many emails should be sent when they will be sent, and in what order, they are to be sent. Brands need to ensure that the content of the message is relevant to the triggers.

• Kick Start Your Campaign

Upon establishing the plan of the drip campaign, start sending out emails and messages. Most brands make use of drip marketing software to ease the sending of emails, which may be impractical to send manually.

• Evaluation and Campaign Perfection

Supervising the drip campaign is crucial to increase efficiency and maximize revenue. Make the necessary adjustments to the campaign to improve outcomes. Nothing is perfect, and brands must think their drip marketing campaign isn’t. Keep evaluating, adjusting, and repeating to edge closer to perfection.
 

Benefits

Benefits with brands can have numerous advantages. Brands can leverage marketing to enjoy the following benefits.

• Establishes brand as a frontrunner in the market
• Increases brand awareness
• Increases the number of conversions
• Increases the number of sales leads generated
• Low investment costs provide a higher ROI
• Preserves marketing message quality and integrity
• Relevance improves relationships with target audiences

Example

Now that the concept of drip marketing and its functioning are clear, let’s see some examples of drip marketing in practice.

• Amazon

The emails Amazon sends its users when they view items but haven’t bought them as yet.

• Coursera

The emails Coursera sends its customers when they subscribe to a course, which includes quizzes and videos, among others.

Conclusion

The key to creating a highly efficient drip campaign is to take subscribers on a journey. While dealing with leads and nurturing them, send them educational emails, sales call sign-up invites and case studies. This is dependent on their position in the sales funnel. In the case of an onboarding sequence, brands can send emails that assure them of their decision to sign up. These leads can later be advanced through the process by leading them to actions that result in their conversion to a paid customer.