Are you Drip Marketing? Not Yet? 

Drip marketing is like drip irrigation. You use less water to grow your crop by irrigating frequently but in small doses. Drip marketing keeps you in touch with your customers regularly through frequent and shorter messages. 

Keeping in touch (KIT) is the most effective way to ensure that you reap the full benefit of your customer relationship over their life cycle. This exercise starts at the acquisition stage and continues through the development phase and the longer maintenance period. 

Acquisition Stage 

When acquiring a new customer, drip marketing techniques allow you to navigate the customer’s journey successfully from initial interest to deal conversion. You continuously monitor the customer’s involvement and engagement and provide the necessary messages to deepen their interest. The messages change as the customer traverses the upward path from prospect to customer. The flow of messages with their content and frequency follows the customer’s decision tree culminating into an order. 

The content of the messages must be visually compelling to move the prospect to a higher level of interest. A series of experiments will help to fine-tune the messages and the frequency of delivery. 

Development Stage 

Once a prospect turns into a customer you need to keep the interest alive while making the relationship deeper. The goal is to make inroads into the organization by introducing new products while maintaining the flow of the initial orders. Reaching out to other stakeholders in the system will spread the influence and strengthen the relationship.  

The messages must respect the ongoing business and gently introduce new products that meet the other needs of the customer.  The sequence of new product suggestions is to be synchronized with the new orders and scheduled wisely to reduce information overlap. 

Maintenance Stage 

Customers that have gone dormant or have gone to competition cannot be neglected. They need to be kept in the drip marketing cycle at a lower rate of interaction. The goal is to stay in touch without appearing too eager. Over time many customers may enter the maintenance stage and the thrust is always to move them back to the development stage. 

The content of the messages is more personal in nature and company updates other than product promotion. Greetings, newsletters, and occasional product updates are good ways to keep the communication going.  

Conclusion 

Automating drip marketing is possible with email and that could be the preferred mode of execution. However, visits, phone calls, and SMS/WhatsApp are additional channels necessary depending on the customer’s business potential and the depth of the relationship. 

Drip marketing is a long-term and cost-effective investment. You can exploit this technique by institutionalizing it.  Many tools are available, and my team can help you select and configure the one that suits your needs. 

Mohammed Sutarwala, Managing Director, emQube