Understanding Drip Marketing

What is it?

Drip Marketing is sending reminder messages ie email or text messages to prospective customers or clients based on their actions or activities.

This is primarily utilized in the ecommerce industry where a shopper comes to the a site and begins the checkout process and abandons it mid-process. In this instance the site will send emails to the prospective shopper to complete the transaction or offer them additional discounts to foster completion of the transaction.

They coined the name “drip” because this process is of attempting to engaging a customer to perform a specific action is done slowly and consistently. The reminders might be sent over time to the customer.

Is drip marketing effective?

To answer this question think of scenario. You are considering buying an item but the price is just a little higher than what you would pay for. Next day you get an email saying there is 30% discount on the item you badly want. Will that make you reconsider? Most likely you will. So yes it is very effective.

The fact that drip marketing is so targeted makes it even more effective. Most users and shoppers receive a lot of email and messages that is considered spam & is a shot in the dark by companies to make a sale. However, with drip marketing, the company knows you are interested in the product they are selling, that increases the chances of a successful sale significantly.

Studies show at least 60% of customers who received a drip marketing campaign responded positively towards it.

Examples of drip marketing.

• A subscription email list for customers. A welcome email is sent to a new customer upon her first purchase. Once that person becomes part of the database they are sent regular reminders to do more shopping.
• Suggestions to shoppers or clients of products that they can buy that other similar shoppers bought. While a shopper is adding her items to a cart the site progressively provides nudges towards other products that the client might like.
• Incomplete customer transactions. Sending reminders to customers who have abandoned their carts and giving incentives for completion.

Setting up drip marketing

Most platforms such as wordpress and shopify have in-built drip marketing features. One has to set up the triggers for actions to be taken by the platform. For instance, if check out cart has been dormant for an hour send an email or popup reminder. Send a discount coupon to a customer that is part of the subscription list on their birthday etc.

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