By Rick Cook | September 23, 2008

Advantages

Building awareness is one of the most important advantages of drip marketing. It fixes your company name and message in the potential customer’s mind.

Education is another important function. Drip marketing can inform prospects about your products and your industry by giving useful information while building trust in your company.

Who It’s Good For

Drip marketing is ideal for high-value products with a long sell cycle, especially high-ticket items which are purchased at infrequent intervals. For example, mortgage companies and real estate agencies are big on drip marketing. So are health and life insurance agents. IT vendors whose products are purchased at infrequent intervals are also a rich market for drip marketers.

Drip marketing is especially effective if you have some insight into the prospect’s buying cycle. Some kinds of goods, such as business computers and automobiles, tend to have a definite lifespan and are replaced every few years.

Aim Your Drips

Drip marketing needs careful planning for maximum effect. You must decide on a basic theme or themes that you want your campaign to drive home.

But the same message endlessly repeated loses effectiveness. Even though the themes remain the same, drip marketing requires variation in the way you present the message.

Kissing the Minimum Number of Frogs

On a percentage basis, drip marketing is not very efficient. It requires you to contact a number of people a number of times to drive sales. This doesn’t mean drip marketing can’t generate a lot of sales. Properly done, it can turn up many good prospects. But it does mean that you need to carefully focus your drip-marketing efforts. Paradoxically, while drip marketing uses mass-marketing techniques like email and direct mail, it becomes most effective when the messages are customized for specific audiences.

Once you’ve decided on your basic themes, you need to analyze your prospect list to determine which presentations are likely to be most effective with different groups. For example, a real estate agency will have some potential clients who are buying their first homes, some who are retiring and looking to downsize and some who are moving into the area. Each of these groups will benefit from a different approach. First-time buyers are likely to be interested in affordability. Older prospects looking to downsize will probably be more concerned about issues like tax implications and how to handle the sale of their existing home. By segmenting your prospects, you can provide them with the appropriate series of messages.

Drip Systems

Fortunately, drip marketing lends itself to a high degree of automation. Equally fortunately, there are a number of tools to help you run a drip-marketing campaign, or alternatively a number of companies who will run your campaign for you.

Many drip-marketing products are specialized for particular industries. For example Norvax Inc.’s
LeadMiner is designed for insurance agencies selling health insurance. Agent 360 from RENWare Inc. is designed for real estate agents. Other software programs, such as Swiftpage, are more general and will work for many kinds of businesses.

Beyond the industries they serve, drip products vary enormously in what they do. In fact, drip marketing is more a buzzword than a product description. One must look beyond the term to see what a product actually offers.

The most basic drip marketing products are email auto-responders. These simply send a reply, or a series of replies, to queries emailed to your business. Even within this category there is variation. Some of these products, like Swiftpage, automatically assemble a leads database in addition to sending out email messages. Others, such as TriggerTouch, will start with visitor information from your Web site. Most of these programs will send a series of messages, spaced over a period of weeks or months, in response to an initial query. In effect, they automatically launch a drip marketing campaign aimed at the potential customer. The more sophisticated programs allow you to vary the content of the messages as well as their timing depending on your evaluation of the contact. Some of them even have advanced features: LeadMiner can automatically generate current quotes to be included in the emails.

But drip marketing can be much more than just email. It can also include direct mail contact, newsletters, telephone calls or on-site visits. In fact, just about any form of customer communication can be integrated into a drip-marketing campaign. Some drip-marketing software will also automatically remind you to call the lead or send out mailings.

Some CRM programs, such as ACT4Advisors, which is built on Sage Software Inc.’s ACT! CRM program, come with features that let you set up a drip-marketing program. In the case of ACT! that includes a series of sample letters on various topics.

Finally, there are a number of companies that specialize in running drip-marketing campaigns, such as MyMarketingPartner Inc. They can help you create your message and analyze your prospects, and can provide you with prewritten or customizable materials aimed at the various target groups. You work out the basics and they do the rest.

Avoid the Spam Trap

Badly done drip marketing is Chinese water torture for prospects. They may remember you, but they’re unlikely to deal with you. Bombarding prospects with uninteresting or irrelevant messages is a great way to end up being ignored. In this day of spam filters and floods of junk mail, it’s all too easy to wind up as part of the background noise rather than a signal.

Email marketing is a particularly tricky business because of spam’s current choke hold on email campaigns. In fact, most people who get a message from a company with whom they’re not familiar are likely to assume it’s spam.

Another problem with email marketing is that malicious emails have made people wary of opening attachments such as newsletters or reports.

The basic way around this problem is content combined with trust. To overcome the spam barrier you need an interesting message. You have to say something in which your potential customers are likely to be interested. Often that means giving them tips or other useful information.

Second, you need to build trust. Your prospects must trust you to give them something they want and not send them viruses. This is one limit for sending newsletters as attachments to emails.

Personalization also builds trust, both in your emails and in your company. As much as possible, include your prospects’ names and other information — correct information — showing that they’re not just a name on a mailing list. Also include information about who you are. For example, an email signed by the sales rep who will handle the account is more effective, especially if the email is from that rep’s own email account.

Customizing on the Cheap

The big advantage of drip marketing is that it gives you a relatively low-cost, low-effort way of maintaining regular contact with leads who haven’t yet made the critical buying decision. You can do this by other means, of course, but drip marketing lets you touch a lot more people effectively without wasting a lot of work. With drip marketing you can have more contact with more prospects without overloading your sales force or breaking your budget.

By Rich Harshaw

Everything you’ve ever learned about marketing and advertising is WRONG. Everything you’ve ever heard everything you’ve ever tried, everything you’ve ever done, it’s all WRONG.

Hello, my name is Rich Harshaw; I’m the CEO of Y2Marketing, the nation’s leading marketing consulting and fulfillment agency. What I want to do in this series of articles is teach you a system for innovating and marketing your company to a point that it’s instantly evident that you’re the obvious choice to do business with. I want to show you how to make those advantages of doing business with your company so obvious to your prospects and customers that they quickly and easily draw this one simple conclusion: “I would have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone else but you…regardless of price.”

Let’s say that you own a moving company… and you spend $3,000 a month in the Yellow Pages for a full-page ad, and that ad generates an average of 70 calls per month. Is that good? Is that bad? Well, it depends….but, let me ask you this: What if you could take that same full page ad that costs $3,000 a month, and by just changing what it says, and how it says it–now, instead of getting 70 calls a month, you could generate an average of 955 calls a month…and the average quality of the prospect was quantifiably BETTER? Let’s say you owned that moving company. Would you be excited about that? 955 better qualified calls a month instead of 70? If not, we need to take your pulse and see if you are ALIVE! That’s what’s called getting more results–making more money–for the same time, the same money, and the same effort spent.

Or let’s say you’re the CEO of an up and coming bank that is trying to get a stronger foothold into the small business loan market. Let’s say you’ve got 22 retail locations supported by $370,000 a month in total marketing and advertising expenses for the small business loan program, including heavy telemarketing, direct mail, newspaper, and some radio and television…. as well as various brochures and collateral at each sales office. What if you’re that CEO, and despite spending a fortune on advertising and marketing, your efforts to generate leads and subsequently close loans are losing money and is actually getting worse as time goes by?

What if you could change the message being communicated in your marketing and advertising and in all of those brochures and other collateral materials, and by doing so you could increase the number of leads generated by 465%, increase the quality of those leads, and therefore increase your closing ratio from a paltry 8% to a healthy 31%? Not by changing the amount of money being spent on the program, not by hiring some expensive celebrity to say he gets his loans from you, not by doing anything substantially different than you’re doing now…. Just by changing what you’re saying in your marketing so that it WORKS BETTER.

Whether you spend $3,000 a month, $370,000 a month, or $3,000,000 a month on marketing, I’m going to show you how to use the “Monopolize Your Marketplace” system to leverage what you’re already doing and get those kinds of results for YOUR business by changing the way you do all of your marketing and advertising, including advertisements in all media, brochures, websites, trade shows, signage and everything else. I’m not talking about radical changes that are “creative” or strange or weird or anything else.

The process for getting these kinds of results is very systematic, and anyone with a strong business background can figure it out. But simply put, my purpose is to show you how to change your marketing and advertising, and allow you to leverage your marketing momentum. Just like the moving company and the bank in the examples, and just like the dozens of examples I’m going to give you in this series of articles. The result is you make more money for the same time, money, and effort expended.

Most companies simply don’t know how to do this. Some companies know their marketing could use some help and that it’s under leveraged, and as a result, they’re looking for solutions. Maybe that’s you. But there’s a larger group, a group that doesn’t really understand the untapped potential that lies in their marketing. They spend some money on marketing or advertising, get some results, make some money, and then decide that whatever results they’re getting are probably about as good as it gets… and figure that there’s not much they can do about it.

They figure that the 70 calls a month on the $3,000 ad is about what you ought to get for a $3,000 ad; they never imagined that 955 calls were even possible. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you just understand what you’re going to learn on this program, if you understand how to run what we call the marketing equation on a consistent basis, then you’ll always get predictable, consistent, and inevitably huge results every time you do anything called “marketing.”

The system is based on unchanging principles of human nature that dictate that people always want to make the best buying decision possible and therefore marketing’s job–your job–is NOT to YAK incessantly about how great you are or how low your prices are–but rather, your job is to simply facilitate the prospect’s decision making process, and allow them to feel like they’re in CONTROL of the decision, based on having enough quantity and quality of information. The system is truly a breakthrough in marketing and advertising, yet it’s simple and easy to understand. We have thousands of client successes to prove that it works literally every time it’s implemented, regardless of what kind of business or industry you’re in.

We compete head to head with marketing consultancies and large traditional advertising agencies who grub money from their clients with no accountability for results. These agencies hate our guts because we expose their ineptitude and reveal our results-getting processes to our clients so they can evaluate for themselves… just like we’re going to do on this program… and then we show them step-by-step how to make more money every time they run an ad, produce a brochure, create a website, show up at a trade show, send a sales person out in the field, or any other sales-generating activities. The ad agencies hate us so bad because we threaten their very existence; they even call us the “anti-agency.”

So how can I say that everything you’ve ever learned is WRONG? How can I accuse you, without ever having met you, of leaving huge untapped profits on the table that are easily and readily available just by doing what I’m about to share with you? How can I say, in essence, that you don’t know what you’re talking about marketing-wise–even given the fact that there’s a good chance that you’ve been doing marketing for 10 or 20 or 40 years–and you’ve been getting what most people would consider good results that whole time?

Well, I’m not going to answer that question right now….in fact, I’m going to let you answer that question for yourself as you read this series of articles; If I do my job, then I think that answer will become self-evident. But I’ll make you a promise right now: This is not hype, it’s not the same old stuff you’ve heard a million times repackaged…even though that’s what all the so-called marketing gurus and ad agencies would like for you to think. And even if you do think it’s the same old stuff, I’m going to give you some evaluations later on to prove to you, quantifiably, that it isn’t. Anybody who’s claiming we’re using the same old formulas and processes should be producing marketing and advertising that looks like ours does, works like ours does, and most importantly, makes money like ours does. They should have a specified set of rules and formulas and strategies that can systematically be applied to any kind of business across the board. They should provide a set of evaluations that will allow anyone to instantly and objectively judge and rate their own marketing and predict the success of a marketing campaign before spending any money. And guess what? Nobody does. That’s right, nobody. This information is exactly what you’ve needed and been looking for to take your business to the next level of profitability and success.

Rich Harshaw is the founder of the Monopolize Your Marketplace system and CEO of Y2Marketing Business Marketing Strategies