Running an Effective Drip Campaign

Wondering how you can improve the odds that your previous customers and prospects will keep you at the top of the list when making a new purchase –  without developing mind control abilities or having your sales team behave like pushy used-car sales people?

Maybe you should consider implementing a drip campaign. They aren’t right for everyone, but they might be just the tool you need to win more customers.

Defining Drip Campaign

Drip marketing campaigns, or drip campaigns, as they are more commonly called, are like a tiny drip of water that eventually makes a hole through a mountain – a long continual effort with a potentially impressive outcome.

Drip campaigns are a sales and marketing strategy that promote a specific offering,  over time, through a carefully planned, targeted set of communications.  Executed properly, which means timely and relevant messages personalized for the audience, drip campaigns will keep your company, product, or service “top of mind”.

Is drip marketing more effective than sending a monthly newsletter or other generic message with no customer context? Yep. According to lead management best practices study by SilverPop, drip campaigns using email consistently outperform single-touch email marketing strategies.

source SilverPop

Effective Drip Campaigns

Automating drip campaigns is an important step in ensuring the campaign is executed as efficiently and cost effectively as possible. Relying on your sales and/or marketing team to perform a drip campaign manually would be time-consuming, error prone, and unlikely to achieve the desired results.

In addition, automation helps ensure that you gather measurable results to feed back into (and continuously improve) your sales and marketing cycle.

Other things that make a drip campaign effective include:

• Define a theme or small set of themes for the campaign. Although the campaign may only have one theme, you can’t send the same message over and over. It is critical to vary the message or it will be ignored.
• Define success criteria and measure. measure, measure.
• Personalize your message for the audience. Personalized messages are much more effective than general blanket emails. For example, sending a consulting services email to a client that purchased a software product could be effective for cross-selling, but needs to be related to the previous interaction you’ve had with that customer.
• Have an interesting message. Constantly emailing with irrelevant boring content is more like water torture than a drip campaign.
• Give people a reason to respond.

How a CRM Help You Implement a Drip Campaign

Your CRM system is a valuable source of information in determining  who you should target and crafting appropriate messages. Many CRM solutions, like SageCRM, supports the creation of drip campaigns. The latest release of Sage’s CRM supports a number of drip campaign best practices like:

• Using data from previous steps in your drip campaign to better target messages. For example, only sending additional messages to individuals that opened and clicked on a link in the previous communication.
• Scheduling messages for a specific time and date
• Automatically collecting data in the CRM to measure effectiveness

Successful drip marketing campaigns can also be achieved by activating the eMarketing feature in Sage ACT!. In fact, Sage CRM products, Salesforce.com, MS CRM, SugarCRM, or any other major CRM system should be the backbone of any drip campaign system you initiate. Segmenting data begins and ends with customer relationship management.