Lead Nurturing vs Drip Marketing: Which One Is Right for Your Business?

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We marketers live in wonderful times. Everything is so automated. We love our marketing tools like Eloqua, Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, and Silverpop. They make it easy for us to reach out to thousands of people with the press of a few buttons.

Marketing software helps us design our newsletters, maintain our mailing lists, and some can even predict the ideal email delivery time based on a recipient’s previous behaviour.

After a campaign, we peruse the mountain of behavioural data we just acquired from our customers and prospects. At a minimum, we will analyze the open rate, clickthrough rate, check the unsubscribe numbers. All simple measures of email engagement.

But there’s more.

A proper marketing automation system will also tell you who clicked on what and when, what they shared, how long they stayed on each landing page, and whether they got to the Contact Us or Shopping Cart page. A wealth of relevant audience data.

What you do with that behavioural data is the difference between lead nurturing and drip marketing.

Drip Marketing Is a Part of Lead Nurturing

We all get product offers or newsletters in our inbox, those fast-food coupons in the mailbox, that tweet or LinkedIn share you read while at the doctor’s office, even that potentially annoying “just checking in” call you get every 30 days – these are all forms of drip marketing.

They are messages or tactics designed to stay in touch, to keep you in the customer’s top-of-mind, the persistent friendly reminder to place that order.

Pros and Cons of Drip Marketing

Drip marketing is pervasive, unsophisticated but useful.

While limited in what it can accomplish, it is the first touchpoint in the customer journey. They are basically timed, one size fits all communications sent to a wide audience to build credibility, awareness, and gauge interest.

Easy and inexpensive to roll out, if you can afford to do one marketing thing, drip marketing is it.

Lead Nurturing Is About Responding to Targeted Behaviour With Relevant Follow-Up Messages

While drip marketing campaigns ignore recipient behaviour, lead nurturing campaigns cultivate it.

With today’s advanced marketing automation tools, we can preprogram the next touchpoint based on specific behavioural criteria.

These criteria-triggered messages are related to something the recipient has done that shows interest in your product or service. They are highly personalized communications aimed at informing, educating, assuring or convincing the potential customer via a variety of channels into making a positive buying decision.

Pros and Cons of Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is about providing relevant content through the appropriate medium at the right time to guide the prospect through the marketing funnel and into becoming a sales-ready lead.

According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost.

Research suggests that there is potentially more money to be made when you employ a lead nurturing strategy but there is also more work to be done before you implement one.

Compared to drip marketing, more time and resources are required to establish all the integral elements of a successful and complex lead nurturing program, such as defining your prospects’ buying personas then mapping content to those personas and buying stages.

What your arsenal of content contains, what it looks like, when and how often that content will be sent are all crucial factors in the success or failure of any lead nurturing program.

Walking that fine line between responding to customer behaviour and appearing invasive is also key.