Drip Campaigns: Lead Nurturing Made Simple

Lead nurturing focuses on educating qualified sales leads who are not yet ready to buy your product or services. They key to this is keeping your audience engaged through something called a “drip campaign”.
It sounds like a marketing tactic that Starbucks would use, but let me assure you that drip campaigns have little to do with coffee. A drip campaign is an automated process that sends out marketing content in strategic intervals, and it can work wonders for lead nurturing.
Benefits of a Drip Campaign
A drip campaign can deliver the right information exactly when your users need it. The delivery of content coincides with how users are interacting with your brand and where they are in the sales cycle. This allows you to stay relevant with your audience at all times.
A drip campaign is used to nurture early stages of leads until they are ready to buy your product or commit to using your services. The best part about this is that it all happens automatically, which frees up valuable marketing and sales resources.
How Does a Drip Campaign Work?
Since drip campaigns are automated, you don’t have to worry about slaving over your computer for hours on end sending emails to hundreds (or thousands!) of contacts. You can also rest easy knowing that you will never have to personally keep track of where each lead is in your sales cycle. Remember: work smarter, not harder.
Drip campaigns are set up through online email tools such as Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, or Mad Mimi. Email contacts collected through forms on your website are then funneled through these services. All you really need to do is make sure that you create relevant content for your audience to be sent at each stage of engagement.
Types of Drip Campaigns
Believe it or not, there are several types of drip campaigns that can be used in online marketing. Here is a breakdown of some of the most popular kinds. But remember, drip campaigns can be customized to any user. The possibilities are endless.

• Top-of-Mind Drips- Top-of-Mind Drips keep your leads engaged with your company trough the sales process through constant contact.
• Educational Drips- Educational Drips will provide relevant product information to prospects to help them make a purchasing decision.
• Re-Engagement Drips-Like their name suggests, Re-Engagement drips are designed to win back the interest of older leads.
• Competitive Drips- These are geared mostly towards your competitor’s customers and contain information about the benefits of switching to your product or service.
• Promotional Drips- Entice your audience with promotions and special pricing offers.
• Training Drips- Once the product has been purchased, Training Drips can be used to provide how-to information on your product.

Measure Your Results
We can’t say it enough. “If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.”
Make sure that you’re constantly testing your campaign’s effectiveness. In order for effective lead nurturing to take place, you need to know what aspects of your marketing efforts are the most successful.
Pay attention to things like your open-rates, click-through rates, and bounces. With the power of metrics, it’s easy enough to adjust something if you catch it early on.
With the abundance of affordable online email marketing tools, it’s easier than ever to create your own personalized drip campaign to target your ideal audience.