Drip Marketing – What’s the deal?

Trying to understand all the marketing buzzwords floating around can be a daunting task. It seems the list grows longer by the day, leaving many business owners on the sidelines, unsure of where to start.

Today we will shed light on the concept of drip marketing and how it can positively affect your company’s bottom line.

Imagine a leaky faucet, continually dripping water from its spout, landing on the silver stopper below. Each drop in a drip marketing campaign represents an email, direct mail piece or social media post sent to a targeted group of existing and potential customers.

While that is an oversimplified comparison, you can probably draw inferences as to what makes this tactic so effective. One of the main goals of a drip marketing campaign is to keep your company’s name top of mind with consumers. A person’s first interaction with a brand usually doesn’t stick and often never even enters the customer’s realm of consciousness. It takes multiple interactions, usually three, to gain a basic level of awareness from a customer. With drip marketing, multiple interactions can be planned and executed over a period of time, keeping your product or service top of mind.

By enlisting several different promotion strategies you can target customers with specific demographics or buying preferences. Maybe you want to narrow your focus to a younger demographic that prefers digital interactions for information gathering and purchases through social media and email marketing. Or, you may have a less computer-literate customer base that can be targeted through direct mail and telemarketing.

Not only can you target specific audiences with drip marketing, but you can also use these condensed lists to be more personal. While some mass marketing techniques can be impersonal due to the sheer numbers, drip marketing to targeted audiences allows you to use names and product or service preferences to be more effective. Putting someone’s name on an email or letter has proven to peak interest and makes the customer less likely to skip over your message.

Drip marketing is often used for lead management. It isn’t very costly to throw potential leads into a drip marketing campaign with one or two direct mail pieces and an email promotion. Imagine the positive ROI of a purchase versus a couple post cards and emails. Not to mention, this type of campaign can be as intensive or hands-off as you would like. The campaign can be planned and put into motion with little to no action required until you analyze your results when the campaign ends.

How do you use drip marketing to attract or maintain clients?