Drip Marketing

Drip Marketing is a modern marketing strategy that was popularized by online mailing lists. In principle, the strategy states that when a potential customer registers an interest in a product/service and subscribes to a mailing list, then the customer receives a stream of different messages over time to keep him/her involved and invested in the product and try to convince them to return and ultimately buy.
 
While drip marketing was design as a concept to suit email lists, it was later popularized as a full marketing strategy that involves following up with customers with various means including phone calls, brochures, and printed newsletters.

Example on a Drip Marketing Email Campaign

Take a sample campaign for an online store selling books. A potential drip campaign can work like this: Potential customer sees the landing page with book title and description and registers her email, then she receives email #1 after 1 day offering her further description on the book and its features, and how to buy it online. Email # 2 then follows three days later, with a 10% off coupon and shows the description on the book in a different composition. Finally comes email # 3 a week later, offering 15% off the book with some added value offers that the customer might like.

How Drip Marketing works

Understanding drip marketing requires an understanding on how funneling works. Funneling customers is a method of transforming target audience to paying customers, where we want to have our avatar become a repeated customer at the end of the funnel.

Drip marketing helps "Target customers" become "leads" and then become "customers".
 
To differentiate drip marketing from normal standard email newsletters and other forms of marketing communications, we look at some features here:

• Consistency and followup: Normal newsletters often go unnoticed if they are not sent on set scheduled times and in a regular consistency. Drip marketing emails on the other hand focus on sending a series of messages with different content depending on the stage of each message, trying to hook the potential customer to make a purchase.
• Personalization: A critical feature of drip marketing is personalization, such as addressing the potential customer with their needs and wants in particular, not sending a generic email to all the mailing list. The other consideration is the differentiation of content for each message sent to the potential customer.
   
  Looking at the example above, it would mean little sense to make the contents of emails #1,2, and 3 the same. The key here is to differentiate the content to suit also the stage of communication.
   
  Here, you can start with warm easygoing paragraphs for the first emails, but need to raise the need to trigger an action more as more emails are sent. The above examples shows a " 15% off " sample to trigger action as opposed to standard price in email #1, and even the 10% in email 2.

Benefits of Drip Marketing

• Getting the attention from potential customers:

  Unlike cold calls or random emails, drip marketing helps to personalize the experience so that the customer has more familiarity with the brand.

• Automated efforts to nurture relations:

  Using Drip marketing can help automatize a significant part of the active marketing process and helps improve the relation with the potential customer

• Higher Relevance:

  Unlike mass communications that are sent on schedules and times that are not relevant to the consumer, a drip marketing campaign walks with the potential customer one step at a time to hook them more at their own pace

• Improved revenue?

  Some studies show that drip marketing can yield a much higher likelihood of than traditional standard marketing campaigns.

Where to use Drip Marketing at?

Drip marketing can be used in a number of scenarios online, such as:

• Collecting and nurturing leads
• Welcoming new subscribers
• Potential customers with abandoned shopping carts
• Buying customers who are up for renewal
• Launching a new product or service
• Unsubscribes