4 Highly Effective Ways to Succeed in Drip Marketing

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Think of leads as seeds in a garden. You planted them because you believe they will grow well into your soil (which can be compared to your business). However, unless you’re going to water them, give them enough sunlight, and add fertilizers, they will soon die in due time.

That’s why it’s important for a businessperson to understand the concept of lead nurturing. The process of gathering leads is only the start, not the end. In fact, they are utterly useless unless you are able to convert them to customers, those with purchasing power and can perform repeat orders.

The Use of Drip Marketing

Drip marketing is one of the most suggested methods when it comes to lead nurturing. It is basically based on the drip irrigation system, where farmers would water their crops with small amounts of water over a period of time. The purpose is sustenance—to make sure that their crops would always have sources of nutrients.

Drip marketing is often used in businesses today, and here’s why: according to studies, it takes around 29 to 30 information campaigns before a human being is able to fully absorb your message, before everything starts to settle in, and he goes through the a-ha moment. It’s also comparable to eating your meals. It takes 20 minutes before your brain realizes that you’re full, so if you’re in a diet, you might as well make sure that you can eat your meals within that span of time.

How to Do Drip Marketing

Now that you have a good idea of what drip marketing is, it’s time for you to learn the ways. Drip marketing is usually composed of three stages: planning, modifying, and tracking.

Planning Your Marketing Strategy. Keep in mind that drip marketing happens over a long period of time. This means you need to have a calendar where you can map all the marketing campaigns that you’re going to do in the next few months or even years. It’s highly important that you have a good grip of your target market, since they will determine which drip marketing ploy would best work for your business. You also need to combine both offline and online marketing materials to ensure greater success and wider reach of information.

Modifying the Plan. One of the greatest rewards—or challenges—of drip marketing is modification. Since you are not going to show your cards right away, you will always have something interesting to offer in every drip. Nevertheless, ensure that every drip will always be better than the first. After all, your purpose in doing drip marketing is to build up momentum.

Tracking the Changes. Your marketing strategies need to be measured. Otherwise, you will never know if it’s going to be a success or not. The best way to do it is to use a lead nurturing software that will help you keep track the movements of your leads. It will basically tell you which of them have been responding positively after every a call from your sales agent, while you are in the middle of your drip marketing campaign.

The Use of Market Automation Tools

There are actually some market automation tools that you can utilize during your drip marketing campaign. One of these is a mailing list, which will generate a list of names and e-mail addresses to whom you’re going to send out your newsletters and other online marketing materials. You may also make use of an autoresponder. There are also programs that will allow you to create a newsletter and send them to your sales leads in just one click, helping you save some of your time.
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Lead Nurturing and Drip Marketing: Maintaining Your Hard-earned Leads

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It all begins with getting a lead and making that lead work for your company. Once you have that lead working for you, the next step is in making that lead keep on working for you. This can be done with something called lead nurturing. When you nurture a lead, you are essentially trying to maintain a customer, or basically, you are trying to get a present revenue-creating lead to keep on creating revenues for you. Also called relationship selling, lead nurturing can help create a lasting and lucrative relationship between your company and the customer.

Nurturing leads often begins with an automated marketing strategy that slowly inundates your prospective, and even present, clients with information on your current and up-and-coming services and products. The second step, the actual sales call and closing of sales, is actually handled by sales agents and representatives. The marketing phase of the whole process is often done automatically, and when a lead is turned into a prospect, that is when real people or sales personnel step in and help keep the customers satisfied and buying from the company.

When you create a lasting relationship with your leads, you will find that your business will have a constant stream of revenue coming in the door. This relationship can be started with what is called drip marketing. Somewhat similar to lead nurturing, drip marketing is a strategy where you get your prospective clients to become familiar with your products and services over a certain period of time. This strategy can actually be pretty effective and has proven to be a good marketing ploy that keeps customers coming back to your company. This kind of a marketing strategy basically works on a customer’s saturation point. When a prospective customer, or a prospect, keeps on getting subtle yet useful information on what your company provides, they will eventually find themselves wanting to know more about what you can do for them.

You can liken this marketing strategy with its agricultural namesake, drip irrigation, where plants are watered little by little over a period of time. After a while, these plants do blossom or produce and will constantly do so with the same kind of minimal yet regular “feeding.”

The same can be said of people and drip marketing. You can slowly get people to become familiar with your products and services through regular “feeding” of information, and this can be done via the many mediums available to you. You can send them these dripped marketing items via e-mail, newsletters, postcards, and other advertising materials. This constant flow of marketing mediums to your target clients can produce results over time and can even prove to be the source of regular revenue for your company.

When you decide to go into lead nurturing and drip marketing, you might want to consider marketing automation to optimize such a marketing strategy. With the use of marketing automation, you actually get your e-mails, brochures, and other such paraphernalia out to your nurtured prospects and clients in a regular and organized fashion. This can be done with software or a specialty company that helps keep track of the many marketing tools you have for your campaigns. Since these tools can be quite difficult to keep track of manually, using an automated process to distribute as well as track them can help you and your company analyze which marketing tools work best for your drip marketing and lead nurturing programs. Automation can also help you save money on having to get your people to do the marketing of your products over time and have them concentrate on closing the sales that these marketing ploys generate.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com