What is Drip Marketing?
Drip Marketing is an efficient tool for generating sales through nurturing brand relationships, but how does it work exactly? This post will explain the breakdown of Drip Marketing in an easy-to-read manner and perhaps YOU can adapt it to your next business strategy.
Drip marketing involves sending out messages or content to prospective, current, or past customers at planned intervals. It is an important tool for lead nurturing, though it can also help with retaining new customers and bringing back the old ones. What drip marketing can do, is to guide the prospective consumer through the sales funnel with ease until he/she eventually reaches the point of purchase.
How does Drip Marketing help in Lead Nurturing?
A lead could refer to a prospective consumer. When a person comes into contact with your product/service, while he/she may have the intention to make a purchase, that person might not do so immediately due to the lack of time, information to make a sensible purchase, or because he/she simply have other things on hand.
To nurture leads into making them consumers of your product, one can engage in drip marketing – feeding the prospective consumers information little by little in intervals to entice them into purchasing the product. This is the process of nurturing Cold Leads into Warm Leads.
Process of Nurturing Cold Leads into Warm Leads
When a visitor does one of the following, he becomes a Lead.
- Register for a free trial, product demo or a webinar
- Fill up a form with name, and/or contact details
- Call your business phone number
- Send an email enquiry
At this beginning stage, the potential buyer is considered a Cold Lead. To translate lead generation into sales, one needs to transform this Cold Lead into a Warm Lead, and this can be done through lead nurturing – hand-holding and constant communication with the consumer to keep him/her interested.
Often, when lead nurturing is done well, many warm leads make purchases even without the need to speak directly to the salesperson. Since more leads convert into sales faster, overall sales cost is reduced. Conversion rates increase while Cost per Conversion drops.
Example of Lead Nurturing
One example of the lead nurturing technique is the sending of Behavioural Emails. Behavioural Emails could include welcoming and on-boarding drips.
(i) Welcoming Emails
Welcoming emails serve as an introduction to your company’s product or service. Suppose you’re running a retail company. A welcoming email could be an introduction to your top-selling products or perhaps an ongoing sale. This enables potential customers to learn more about your products. At the very least, a welcoming email definitely makes one noticed and feel appreciated.
Welcoming Email from Lazada SG
(ii) On-boarding Emails
On-boarding emails serve the purpose of sustaining or increasing one’s interest in the product/service by providing prospective customers with convincing information so that they will eventually recognise the value of the product and make a purchase.
An on-boarding drip can be broken down into 4 steps – Motivation, Removing Barriers, Adding Value, and The Ask.
Motivation
In this email, what you want to do, is to show your customer that you recognise their problem and demonstrate how your product can solve their issues. This could include case studies, articles, and testimonials that demonstrate how your product has solved similar problems.
Example of a case study Motivation Email from Instant
Removing Barriers
When a new user signs up, there are bound to be some queries on its functionality. Therefore, what you would want to do, is to pre-emptively answer these questions to ease any confusion they might have. Using the same example of a retail company, an example of Removing Barriers could be a video tutorial on how to make purchases online.
Adding Value
Giving a gift not only adds value to the product, but also helps to create a connection between the consumer and your business. When given a gift, most times consumers will psychologically feel a need to return the favour, increasing the likelihood of them turning into a paying customer. One example of adding value could be a 10% off gift voucher for new users.
Example of an Add Value On-boarding Email by UberEats
The Ask
Finally, this is the part where you attempt to convert prospective clients into actual paying consumers. Using the existing behavioural data you have on the user, send a personalised email, and remember to keep it time-bound! One example could be a ‘Your free voucher expires in 3 days!’ sort of message. It is an effective way to press users to convert by creating a sense of urgency.
Now to end off, here are a few good practices to keep in mind when considering to engage in Drip Marketing.
Drip Marketing Tips
- Personalisation is important in content marketing. Adapt and alter your campaigns such that they target each segment precisely with personalised messages according to their position in the sales funnel or other relevant demographics and purchase history etc.
- AB Testing – Different ads and marketing campaigns work differently for different people. It is always important to test and continually evaluate your campaigns. Review your campaign goals, click-throughs etc., to determine what is the most successful method.
- Make your drip campaigns easier and more convenient for you with Marketing Softwares. These online tools provide segmentation tools, social media connectors, analytics, CRM integration that could help you in the evaluation of your lead nurturing technique and in carrying out your campaigns.
There! I hope the above article does help you in some ways. If you have any further queries regarding drip marketing, feel free to contact us @ https://ambercreative.sg/contact/
