Lots of people in sales nowadays talk about drip marketing and how important it is, but what is drip marketing? Simply speaking, drip marketing is a method of maintaining constant contact with potential buyers. Have you ever received a birthday card from your dentist? That was an effort at drip marketing. The dentist was trying to make sure you don’t forget him next time you need a checkup. There are a few forms of drip marketing, some of them are not very effective.
Based on a research study with Omniture performed by Insidesales.com the most successful media campaigns involve multiple angles of marketing. What I mean by this, is an email, call, email campaign, or a call, direct mail, email, call campaign, etc. Leads know that if you are taking the effort to get a hold of them by various methods that you a serious company. Furthermore, it is important that you do not try to hard sell on every contact of a drip marketing campaign, offer useful information to the customer, as a public service. Your goal is to build a relationship with the lead. Generally speaking, if your drip marketing campaign only calls a lead every couple of months to see if they are ready to buy your product yet, you are no closer this month then you were two months ago to selling the lead. If the lead has more interest in your company then they were last month because you’ve been building a relationship, then they are much closer to buying.
Let’s look at an example of a good drip marketing campaign:
1. You receive your lead and send them a direct mail piece introducing yourself and your service or product. in the mail piece also let them know that you will be trying to contact them about your offer.
2. A week later after they’ve looked at your mail piece try to make an initial contact them via a dialer. Even if they just glanced at the mail piece before throwing it away with their junk mail, they’ll remember the name of your company. This in and of itself will make your initial call more successful, because it is no longer a cold call.
3. If they don’t pick up, leave them a voice mail in which you state that you’ll try to call them back(or send them an email), be specific about when you’ll try to call.
4. Call again or email them at the specified time.
Such a process may not turn a cold lead into a hot lead (although it may), but it will more than likely turn a cold lead into a warm lead which is half of the way there! Marketing Software or a complete Lead Response Management system is a great was to automate this process. I’ll speak about some more tips in developing a drip marketing campaign in my next article.
1 comment:
Great post! :) However, I want to add something. It's very important that those who want to do drip marketing should ask permission first from their sales leads. Otherwise, they may place you in Junk Mail or consider you as spam. One way to do it is to set up a mailing list, where you can exchange their e-mail addresses with a freebie such as a report or an e-book or a discount. You can read more of my own tips at my blog.
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