Last week, we talked about the reasons for implementing a lead nurturing program, and for automating it. Today, we’ll discuss the difference between drip marketing and lead nurturing, and how to effectively message leads.
What’s the difference between a drip marketing campaign and a nurturing campaign?
Drip marketing usually comes before lead nurturing. It’s when you send regular, generic emails to a group of prospects (such as anyone who registered for your webinar), offering quality content.
You move from a drip campaign to a nurturing campaign with those prospects that respond to your drip campaign, gradually personalizing and responding to prospects’ activity and actions, accelerating your communications as they move along from the first inquiry to becoming sales-ready.
So typically, when you run a drip campaign, you wouldn’t want to send emails more often than every 2 weeks or so. Then, for those leads who have shown interest, you can get in touch every week, with more personalized content, and then gradually accelerate according to their activity. You can set up your marketing automation system to keep moving prospects ahead in the process whenever they respond to an email.
Effectively targeting your message
This means not just targeting your message to the company’s needs, but also to the individual you’re talking with and their title and role within the organization. The CEO, CFO and IT manager will each have different concerns, and you should appeal to each of them by highlighting different capabilities of your solution. Sales can have great insight on what would be of interest to each individual, so do engage with them when you work to determine your exact messaging.
The great thing about automation is that once a lead has moved from a drip campaign into the nurturing process, marketing automation allows you to further customize your emails to them according to their titles, so you can effectively segment your audience.
At some point, when a prospect achieves a high lead score, he can exit the campaign and move on to a different campaign, or if he’s advanced enough to be considered sales-ready, the system will send an alert to the sales team. Marketing automation creates an easy flow through different campaigns – drip, then nurturing, and within the nurturing you can move leads between campaigns according to their engagement level and activity. So you can make sure prospects are on the right campaigns at the right time.
Google+Tags: drip marketing, lead nurturing tips, lead segmentation
