What is Drip Marketing?
Drip Marketing is an automated system of running your marketing campaign wherein all you need to do is to ‘push a button’ to activate a predesigned and preplanned marketing campaign to be administered to a predefined audience.
As a part of a drip email campaign, for example, the first email is sent to the prospect on the day 1, the second email is sent, after say, a predefined gap of 3 days and the next email, the third in the series is sent after a gap of seven days. Once you’ve set up such a campaign, all you can do about it is to turn it on or off based on your need.
How does it help?
It is definitely an advancement over those email blasting systems wherein you need to be sending emails to a list of prospects as an ‘email blast’, setting it up manually each time.
What does it NOT do?
It does not customize its content according to the reaction of your prospect to your email. If we try to imagine this in the real life, this kind of an approach can be really disappointing wherein you keep on telling something to someone at predefined intervals regardless of the kind of reaction you get from them. This is precisely the kind of an effect; a drip marketing campaign can have on your prospects too.
What does a Lead Nurturing campaign do?
An intelligent lead nurturing system takes care of the prospects’ reactions to the email campaign they receive and customizes the email content accordingly. This means that with such a system, as a digital marketer, I get the freedom to perform a different action when my audience clicks the link in my email and perform yet different an action, when they simply do not. So, rather than just being an automated system, the lead nurturing system is intelligent and behavior-based as well. This infers real-life interaction to the email campaigns and leverages context and relevance into driving connections, conversions and leading to business growth.
Why should I care?
This is critical because clicking through the link in your email is not the only criteria to measure a lead’s interest in your offerings. One can easily say, for example, that the interest level of a lead that clicks through to your website to view 4-5 pages and spend ample time on it, is significantly higher than that of the lead who would just visit one page and bounce off from your website. Similarly, the prospect that spent over 10 seconds on your conversion page but somehow did not result in a conversion have a different level of engagement. In addition to that, you might want to prioritize some of those leads to target when you know that they are associated with opportunity of getting larger business.
How’s a sophisticated Marketing Automation tool different?
There can be numerous tools available in the market that help you up to the point where you manage to set up a drip marketing campaign according to which the emails are being sent to the targeted audience at predefined intervals. However, a sophisticated tool for lead nurturing is a step ahead in the sense that it allows you to segregate and treat your leads differently based on their reaction, level of interest and their degree of qualification. So, with the usage of such a sophisticated tool the actions taken by the leads such as looking at 4-5 or more pages on your website or only one page or only the pricing page for 10 seconds and more, are all to be triggers for Emails specific to the performance of these actions. This allows your marketing campaign to run smoothly & be conducive of a meaningful interaction with the prospects.
So, the best approach to conduct a lead nurture program is to create one campaign with a sophisticated marketing automation tool that lets you segregate your campaign at points where you need, based on the conditions you apply. This helps you appeal to your target audience with hard-hitting content that is relevant to them with respect to the stage of interaction that they are in, with your brand.
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