Drip… Drip… Drip Marketing

Looking to build a flow of business for your pipeline? Drip marketing may be the best solution for your company. The term “drip marketing” refers to a deliberate, planned and sequenced system of deploying marketing messages over a period of time. Drip marketing is the opposite of a “marketing blitz,” where marketing efforts are compressed within a short time frame. As with drip irrigation (from which the term originates), the theory behind drip marketing is that the value of repetition — and a slow build — can be as powerful as a highly concentrated rush. 

Advocates of drip marketing cite statistics that show that between three and 30 repetitions are required for any message to “take hold” in the human consciousness. As you drip messages to various target audiences, your brand and messages settle in. You should vary your offers and messages, building as you go.       

Planning for drip marketing needs to be thoughtful, comprehensive and (if the target market is big or diverse enough) carefully segmented by customer category. See the sample drip marketing campaign in the table on page 26 for ideas on how to plan a campaign.        

Drip marketing can be an ideal approach for small business owners because it involves an outlay of expense and other resources over time. You learn as you go, refining your tactics and repositioning your marketing efforts to respond to results.        

Additionally, drip marketing is a powerful tactic for products and services that require a “right time” to buy. For example, realtors and financial services companies are good candidates for drip marketing. A prospect might not be considering renting new office space or starting his daughter’s college fund on a day when a full-page ad runs. But if the latest mailing in a sequence happens to hit before an office lease is up, the drip marketer has scored. Drip marketing works because awareness and recognition is built over time. Your target sees your brand repeatedly and, consciously or not, registers your messages.        

Some business owners and savvy marketers have been drip marketing for years. Jennifer Shaheen, founder of the Technology Therapy Group, started her company’s drip marketing program with sequenced e-marketing messages and then added direct mail and telemarketing. As she read results, she adjusted the frequency and content of her messages. Daily broadcast radio tips will soon be added to the mix. “We get an average of two to three leads per week,” says Shaheen.        

Conference developers often use drip marketing, starting months before their events and targeting discrete segments with a combination of direct mail, e-messaging, newsletters and other “reminders.” Steve Etzler, founder of the Business Development Institute, a N.Y.-based event marketing agency, believes technology has given the event business some great new, cost-effective ways to “drip.” “Blogs, podcasts and video clips have been merged into the multi-channel mix of e-mail, phone, direct mail and advertising as effective ways to get a message across,” says Etzler.        

Technologies have also expanded the use of drip marketing to those companies that might not have the budget for other types of marketing media. Postcards (especially if they can be produced in large quantities), e-newsletters and targeted online messages are all relatively low-cost media. Another cost-saving strategy is to reserve higher cost media for those market segments that have the highest revenue potential. A drip strategy is different for every company and type of business, depending on goals, budget, message, target market, product and a host of other features. Below are some general principles that hold true regardless of your particular business challenge. 

How to Drip 

There are four components of a highly effective drip marketing campaign: planning, persistence, pizzazz and powerful systems that support tracking and analysis.        

Planning: As with all good marketing, planning a drip campaign requires a thorough understanding of your target market and how to best reach it. Using the drip irrigation analogy, think about your prospect base as a field and consider which patches have the greatest chance of yielding profitable crops. Most of your effort should be directed to that part of the acreage. But be sure to direct your drip marketing efforts toward those less fertile patches too, perhaps contacting them with lower-cost media or less frequent drips.

Drip marketing can include any combination of printed materials, e-marketing and telemarketing, as well as variations on offers and messages. You may vary your messages to target different segments. Just be sure that whatever you’re planning is realistic to execute within your business constraints. Draw up a long-term schedule and figure out the total costs of your plan.