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Drip Marketing

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Drip marketing is the technique of sending a steady stream of automated messages to a set of recipients in order to educate, stay top-of-mind and possibly persuade them to increase engagement with the sender.

While drip marketing is often thought to be the same thing as lead nurturing, drip marketing is more general term that can include channels other than email such as direct mail, social media, tele-prospecting, etc. And while nurturing prospects throughout the sales cycle is one common way to take advantage of drip marketing, organizations also use drip marketing to drive successful customer on-boarding and renewal programs, employee communication programs, free trial and event communications and other programs where ongoing education and engagement are key.

Take the time to segment
Most drip marketing campaigns consist of an ordered set of email messages sent via marketing automation software to a set of contacts according to preference, need or interest. These campaigns may include branching or triggers to change the course of communications based on the engagement or response of the user. The key here is using targeting and segmentation and leveraging digital body language or online behavior to ensure the communications are relevant to the intended recipient. You may have a perfect set of email messages for SMB (small- to medium-sized business) buyers, but what about your Enterprise prospects? The two segments have very different goals and needs and should have separate paths in your drip marketing campaign. Sending both of these audiences the same set of messages is just asking for lower numbers on opens, click-throughs and conversions.

Create good content
All of the rules for designing and sending effective emails come into play with drip marketing, but the most important is to keep communications simple and engaging. To get started with basic lead nurturing, survey the content on your website and blog and re-package it into bite-sized morsels that can be consumed quickly and easily as you educate prospects. Also try talking with your most productive sales people and take a look at the emails that they send to prospects—you might find some drip marketing gold. Your content should map to where your prospects are in the buying cycle – an early stage buyer has different content requirements than someone who is ready to buy. Make sure your content is relevant to buyer need and stage. By keeping your content educational and engaging as well as targeted you can beat the number one enemy of drip marketing campaigns: the dreaded “unsubscribe”.

Think outside the email box
Finally, when you are mapping out the cadence of your drip marketing campaign, think about adding a few touches outside of the email channel. One scenario where automated voice messaging has been used effectively is political campaigning—reminding folks to turn out at the polls for their favored candidates. Try setting up an alert for sales to place a call after a particular touch or automate a text message if it’s relevant to your business. Even direct mail delivery can be automated as part of a multi-channel drip marketing campaign, giving you an opportunity to reach your prospect in several different ways.

Drip Marketing Resources

Balluff: Kelly Panko
Balluff's Kelly Panko explains how Eloqua enables lead routing, lead nurturing, forms, microsites, landing pages and web metrics.

3:03 minutes

CSO Insights: Optimizing Lead Generation
Looking for lead generation marketing services? Eloqua's lead generation software can help direct marketing teams produce a continuous flow of quality leads.

10 pages

Say Hello to Strangers
MarketingSherpa says that the first 30 days of meeting someone is the best time to give and get information, and this effort was going to help us leverage that time-sensitive opportunity.

What Your Love Life and Lead Nurturing Have in Common
Learn DemandGen’s best practices for building your nurturing strategy and then see examples of successful nurturing content from Taleo.

58 minutes

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