Lead Nurturing vs Drip Email Marketing Campaigns

A guy walks into a bar. He spots his quarry. Comes groovin’ up slowly. He pulls out his best line and in a dark brown voice says to her (or him, whatever you’re into)… “Come here often“?
Pause
In real life what he says next is going to depend on how he/she reacts to the question. But this isn’t real life. This is Marketing. And our lascivious lothario is using the new hammer being hawked to him by every marketing software dealer on the block: Drip Email Marketing.
“Drip marketing is way cool!” they tell you. “It’s automated man, all you have to do is push this button”. And so it is.
Drip marketing is named after the infamous Automatic Drip Coffee Maker. No matter what you do it just keeps dripping regularly (like certain parts of our friend from the bar if doesn’t stay away from Lola). All you can do is turn it on and off.
A drip email campaign sends email one then waits some amount of time – let’s say three days – and then sends email number two. Seven days later it sends email number three. And so on.
What it doesn’t do is react based on how any of your emails is received by your prospect. How useful would that approach be when wooing the opposite sex? No matter how they react you just keep going, saying predetermined things at predetermined intervals with no regard for the other person’s reactions. Good luck with that.
“But wait! My marketing automation system lets me do one thing if they click my link and another if they don’t. That’s behavior based – it’s not just basic”.
Well then riddle me this: Out of every 100 individuals that click through from an email in your drip campaign, how many of them look at only page before they hit the highway?
How many – better yet, which prospects – looked at several pages and spent at least 2 minutes browsing your site? Are they no more qualified than those one-page-and-out bouncers?
What about the prospects that checked out your conversion page for at least 10 seconds but still didn’t convert? Are some of those prospects associated with large opportunities in your CRM system? Can your drip campaign react or branch based on that? Automatically?
Or does your drip marketing software force you to treat all of these prospects the same? I assure you, not all click-throughs are created equal.

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There are a lot of marketing tools out there that do things that weren’t possible a while back, like sending a series of emails on a timed schedule automatically. This is drip marketing. But sending a predetermined set of emails to each prospect – no matter their reaction – can produce disappointing results.
Just as if you walked into the bar having pre-determined exactly what you’d say and when you’d say it – no matter what reaction your (rousing I’m sure) efforts elicited.
You’ve made – or are working on making – the move away from homogeneous, one-time email blasts to drip email campaigns. Congratulations are in order. If you’re ready to take your ROI to the next level then step up from drip marketing to true Lead Nurturing.
Capable lead nurturing systems allow you to build campaigns that treat prospects differently based on different levels of qualification – as indicated by, for example, looking at more than 5 pages after clicking through vs. only one page. Or being associated in CRM with an opportunity of greater than $50k and having looked at your pricing page for at least 10 seconds.

The moral of the story: use protection. And make sure your marketing automation system is capable of paying real attention to your prospects and how they react to your communications. You’ll be getting some on a regular basis. Customers that is.