Drip Marketing, Sales and CRM

Bina Limbu, 12 September 2011

With drip marketing you can continuously drip out information to your prospects and customers. You can apply drip marketing to send emails, newsletters, direct mail and postcards etc.  Drip marketing is the commercial way of saying hello, I’m thinking of you and I care. It helps business to stay in touch with clients with less effort and in a non – evasive manner.  Drip marketing can be used for your lead nurturing programme and keeps you on top of your customers mind.

How can drip marketing help in increasing sales?

Drip marketing can be automated and allows the sales/marketing people to keep their focus on important initiatives rather than worrying about contacting hundreds of prospects and leads.  It saves both time and money while feeding your prospects with consistent message and or relevant information. For example when a prospect sign up for our free Microsoft Dynamics CRM trial, we start our drip marketing plan that consists of consecutive emails which will be sent automatically per pre planned time schedule. We don’t have to worry about scheduling our emails.

Let’s take a closer look at what drip marketing achieves

1. Builds relationships with your customers and prospects.
2. Educates the prospects about your products and when they are ready to purchase they will think of you.
3. You will able to use combination of email, postcards, direct mail, social media and present effective mixture of follow up strategy.
4. You will be considered as an expert and leader in your industry.
5. You can have steady stream of sales from automated communications reaching clients continuously.
6. You can up-sell or cross-sell your products to the existing customers.

What can be included in your drip marketing messages?                            **

• News, tips or articles of interest
• New product/service features
• Information about associated products or services
• White papers
• Invitation to events
• Reminders of important dates 

What do I need to start automated drip marketing?

You must have a customer database to start automated drip marketing. You need to have all of the relevant client information at your fingertips. Using the database, you can segment your market and personalize the messages for each subset.  Most of the businesses use Customer Relationship Management System (CRM).  We recommend Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.

In my next blogs, I will talk about two different ways of creating drip marketing which I have been using in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.

Image* http://pearsonschool.com/index.cfm?locator=PSZoXt
Image** http://www.onegeology.org/extra/showcase/education.html