Drip Marketing Best Practices

Put this powerful sales cycle tool to work for you

Today we are going to talk about drip marketing and how to put it to work for your own company. We employ drip marketing for prospect generation and have done a lot of testing to develop what we think is the perfect system.

The first step of drip marketing is determining the best software solution to manage your campaigns. We tried quite a few and ended up settling on Drip. If you’re not familiar with the software, Rob Walling, a popular Fresno based serial entrepreneur and marketer, founded Drip.

What is drip marketing? Simply put, it is the automation of the sales cycle. A good drip marketing campaign will automatically send relevant content to a prospect at the right time in the sales cycle. By sending it at just the right time, prospects will value and appreciate it.

Some try to go with manual drip marketing campaigns, which can be a time consuming nightmare. Using a dedicated solution built just for drip marketing makes the process so much easier.

Benefits of Drip Marketing

➡︎ Reduces marketing costs

➡︎ It is non-intrusive

➡︎ Engages prospects

➡︎ Helps your brand stay at the top of mind of prospects

➡︎ Standardizes and streamlines sales cycle

➡︎ Shortens sales cycle

➡︎ Eliminates need for expensive marketing tools

➡︎ Communicates with prospects in a way that is easily tracked

➡︎ Reduces stress on your sales team

Types of Drip Campaigns

There are different types of drip marketing campaigns to achieve different objectives.

Educational Drip Campaigns: This is a form of lead nurturing where you educate your prospects using the information they require to drive them toward purchasing your product or service.

Training Drip Campaigns: Prove your prospects with tutorials and how-to’s.

Competitive Drip Campaigns: These drip campaigns are tailored to prospects that are doing business with your competitors. They are a great way to differentiate your brand.

Promotional Drip Campaigns: These drip campaigns provide your leads with discounts and special promotions.

Re-engagement Drip Campaigns: These campaigns are a great way to reconnect with prospects and ex-customers. Re-engagement campaigns are the best way to turn cold leads warm again.

Top-of-mind Drip Campaigns: These are particularly helpful in longer sales cycles. Stay on top of your prospects mind by using these campaigns.

Drip Marketing Tips

A good drip marketing solution will allow you to choose the dates and times that emails are sent. We recommend testing the sending of messages at different times of the day. Pay close attention to the open rates and adjust to the time of day that proves most effective. We’ve found this to be Monday through Friday, right before lunchtime. Your own times may be different, which is why it is important to test.

While it may be tempting to do so, try not to spam your lists. We have found that providing relevant information that the prospects value is more beneficial than trying to sell our services. Prospects in need of our services will make the association on their own. We do include a link to our site in each email, as well as one brief blurb at the end of our own educational drip campaign mentioning that we offer marketing services, but it is in no way the main message throughout the emails.

If you are trying to sell a product or service, use suggestive selling rather than a hard sales technique.

Be mindful of the length of each email. It is important to remember that a lot of people will be receiving these emails on a mobile device. Too much text will make the email appear overwhelming and possibly turn your prospects off. Do not be afraid to link to things to shorten the length of the email. One way to accomplish this is to include blurbs in your emails with links for further reading (e.g., case studies, brochures, etc.).

The more you can segment your lists the better. Finer segmentation allows your emails to become more personal.

Do not be afraid to solicit feedback from recipients. Worried you’re sending too many emails or not including the information your prospects want? Ask them. Using Drip allows a prospect to hit reply to the email and send a message back to us. This is a great feature for not only feedback, but also to allow your prospects to easily ask and receive answers to questions.

Test, test and test some more. I cannot stress this enough. Good drip marketing software will have built-in analytics to let you test your assumptions and optimize your campaigns to their maximum effectiveness. The built-in analytics of Drip was one of the main factors in deciding to use it for our own drip marketing campaigns.

Now that you know the best practices for drip marketing, there is no reason to not employ it for your own brand. We highly recommend that you use Drip for campaign management. It will make the process so much easier and they offer a free trial so that you can get a feel for all that it can do for you.

If you found value in this article, it would mean a lot to us if you hit the green recommend button below! ☺