Drip / Nurture Marketing
By: Bryan Johnson, President of Tango Marketing

We know that if you don't water your plants, your garden will dry up and die. Conversely, if you keep the hose running, you'll drown your plants and wash them away. The most effectively way to water your garden is to deliver a small and constant drip of water, individually to each plant.

Think of your clients and prospects as plants in your company’s garden of opportunity. Your time and resources in the form of marketing communications are the water for your garden. Too little communication, your customers forget you. Too much communication, they'll tune you out. Give your customers and prospects modest but regular attention and watch them flourish.

Drip Marketing refers to the practice of sending multiple promotional pieces and marketing communications over time to a subset of clients, prospects, employees, and stockholders. The term comes from the phrase “drip irrigation”, an agriculture technique where small amounts of water are fed to plants over a long period of time.

In this article, we’ll outline the informal “rules” of drip marketing, helping you to use this technique to its fullest advantage.

Who Should Receive Drip Marketing?
Direct your drip marketing campaigns at both customers and prospects, and to subsets within those groups. A customer who hasn't purchased from you in ages needs a different message than one who purchases regularly. Prospects in different stages of the pipeline or sales funnel might receive different messages, each targeted to their level of interest.

CRM software can help you segregate your database of customers and prospects. This allows you to target your drip marketing campaign geographically, by salesperson, by past purchases, by lead source, by probability of close, or by dozens of other attributes.

You want to give your prospects ample opportunity to enter and move within your pipeline. Your drip marketing efforts can serve as a tool to help you to gauge their interest level. For industries with complex sales cycles, it will take multiple contacts over a protracted period of time to even get a prospect to say, “I'm willing to talk to you again.” Many market researchers suggest it takes between 10 and 20 contacts to prompt a reaction in an audience.

Turning prospects into customers is important. Perhaps an even more crucial element in your company’s success is retaining the customers you have. Your current customers are your most cost-efficient source of new revenue. Typically, the cost of the sale is lower and the sales cycle is shortened. In many industries, particularly service industries, up to 70% of a company’s revenues come from existing customers. Drip marketing helps build customer loyalty and goodwill, and is an excellent way to introduce new products and services.

What Should I Say?
Calling just to say hello may work for communicating with your mom, but it won't work on your customers. Your drips need a message or a purpose. It doesn't have to be earth-shattering news, but the message needs to be worthy of repeating. Even though you may be delivering different messages targeted at different groups, consistency is important. Develop phrases or slogans that define your business and place them on each marketing piece. It's a wise idea to hire a professional copywriter to make your words count.

What Constitutes A Drip?
Several methods can be used in a drip marketing campaign. Choose one or more that fit your business style. Here are a few classic examples of drip marketing communications.

Email—Most CRM software lets you create dynamic, eye-catching HTML emails and personalize them with your contacts’ name and details. Make your message short; email is an instant form of communication and a long litany of points will go unread. Use color, but avoid cutesy unless you're selling cute. Use email to announce a new product or service offering, or advertise an upcoming sale. Email is also a perfect tool to promote your company’s Web or e-commerce site. Include links to take your reader to the desired location. Make certain you include an option for your recipients who wish to be removed from your solicitation list.

Newsletter—Newsletters are an excellent way to communicate information about your company’s products and services. Make them helpful and informative, offering tips, tricks, and news your customers can use, rather than simply advertising your wares. Newsletters can be expensive to produce, but may well be worth the time and expense, particularly if you're in a complex or constantly changing industry.

Postcard—There’s still no substitute for the tactile message. A message delivered to a customer’s mailbox is more likely to be noticed than is an unsolicited email. Here again, use color to grab attention. A postcard is an excellent way to announce a new service or product offering, acknowledge new customers, or to communicate with a customer who hasn't purchased from you recently.

Brochure—If you've updated your corporate brochure, or put together your first edition, don't neglect to send it to your customer base. It may promote products or services your customers are unfamiliar with, or better yet, it might get passed along with a referral to a colleague. While many customers’ first look at your capabilities may come from your Web site, a professional brochure continues to carry clout.

Catalog—Mail order companies have this one figured out. Catalogs are an effective way of getting your company and your products in front of customers and prospects.

Follow Up—Following up on any of the above contacts counts as a drip, and presents a great opportunity to make a personal phone call. “Did you receive our latest email/newsletter/catalog? I wanted to point out a product line you might be interested in.” Take the initiative and follow-up with your customers and prospects.

What Doesn't Count
As important as knowing what constitutes a drip, is knowing what does not. Answering the telephone when the customer calls with a question or problem does not count as a drip. Returning a technical support call doesn't count either. Collection calls don't qualify and that monthly statement may be important, but it's not a drip. A drip must be a targeted communication, delivering some bit of information right into the hands of your customers and prospects. Radio, television, and yellow page advertisements are certainly marketing efforts, but they lack the focused delivery required to qualify as a drip.

How Often Should I Drip Market?
Regular communication is the key to customer base marketing. It is important that your customers know all that your company has to offer, so they don't look elsewhere for a solution you may provide. Drip marketing keeps your name in front of customers and prospects, so they think of you when a need arises.

There's no magic interval that works for all businesses in all industries. A fresh produce business, for example, may benefit from weekly drips while a law firm might limit drips to just a few each year. A general rule of thumb is to manage a drip campaign with communications occurring every four to six weeks. Drips that are more frequent saturate your market, cause you to lose ground.

Anti-Spam Law

No fewer than eight bills to limit or control email solicitation are currently before Congress. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM) requires unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to be labeled (though not by a standard method) and to include opt-out instructions and the sender’s physical address. It prohibits the use of deceptive subject lines and false headers in such messages. The CAN-SPAM Act took effect on January 1, 2004.

The Harvest
The simple fact is, drip marketing works by keeping your name in front of decision makers thus increasing the awareness of your solutions, and increasing the chances that they will remember you upon when a need arises to solve a problem. Do it well, and harvest the benefits.

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