People new to content marketing often confuse two terms; autoresponders and drip marketing.
While the two terms are often interchanged, they do not mean the same thing.
Drip Marketing
Drip marketing is a marketing philosphy. The term comes from a leaky faucet that drips continuously. At it’s core, drip marketing is all about persistence. By constantly dripping content to your clients and prospects you keep top of mind. If you’re always there, when that prospect has a need they should think of your solution.
Drip marketing can be as simple as a monthly newsletter or as complicated as walking your prospect through the intracies of your product over time.
Autoresponders
Autoresponders are merely a tool to help you create a drip marketing campaign.
Drip marketing could be accomplished any number of ways. You could actually hand write a postcard and mail it to your prospect each week. That is a version of drip marketing.
The invention of email autoresponders has made drip marketing affordable and easy.
Writing a series of emails about your product/service and programming them to be sent to your prospects over a time period is a great way to leverage your time. Every time I write a new email I just add it to the end of my email autoresponder. Over time I am building a mountain of content. New subscribers to my list don’t know (or care) that I wrote their first couple of emails months or years ago. But I sure do! If I needed to sit down and create a new series of emails every time someone signed up for my list, I would never get anything done!
Autoresponders allow me to keep “fresh” content in front of my prospects while working on other things.
Targeted Drip Marketing
One of the best ways to use drip marketing is to segment your list and build autoresonder series that speak to each segment.
A pre-programmed sequence that is specific for a single product or service in your business is great for a prospect who is looking for that product/service. While they may be interested in Product ‘A,’ they might not be interested in Product ‘B.’ Sending them messages ONLY about Product ‘A’ keeps them engaged and moving through your sales funnel.
Building in real-world systems along with your email autoresponders only makes your message stronger. Your system might include a physical mailing or a phone call. All of these can be part of a drip marketing plan.
