Drip VS. Nurture, What is The Difference

What is the difference between drip and nurture campaigns?

People usually use these two terms interchangeably, however they are different.

In this video, I explain how to use those differences to improve your marketing and sales strategy, by using one or the other, and scale up your engagement.

As a B2B Marketing Consultant, Author and Speaker, I focus on helping marketers to build marketing and sales alignment. I also help global companies tailor their marketing to a local audience. In addition to my YouTube Channel, I also write blog posts and own my podcast. Check out blog posts and podcast episodes and subscribe to Apple Podcast.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hi, this is Pam Didner here. Thank you so much for tuning in to B2B Marketing and More with me. This is a place I want to help you to become a better B2B marketer. I share templates and know how to help you think strategically and do your job better. Hopefully, by doing that, you can climb the corporate ladder faster. For today, I want to talk about the differences between drip and nurture campaigns. Can you use these two terms interchangeably and explain the importance of creating the workflow?

Before I do that, there’s a quick short story I want to share with you. I was hired to do a workshop by a new client of mine, and the whole marketing organization or tasks to support their Salesforce starting in 2020. So they hire me to do an educational workshop to share with them how they can work with their sales team. We talked about the content mapping between sales and marketing content, we talked about how to create nurturing campaigns, if the leads are rejected by sales, and what that nurturing campaigns will look like, based on the causes of rejection, and, you know, the whole workshop was supposed to be about education, but in the middle of it, we turned into a working session.

I pretty much had to improvise and work with them to actually create kind of a workflow.

We are working through some of the key workflows for nurturing campaigns seriously for the prospects that are rejected by the sales team. And then, at the end of the workshop, Sarah was like, This is great. But hey, you know what, Pam, I know that we’ve been using drip and nurturing these two terms.

Can you tell me if there are any differences between these two words on top of it? Do we need to tell that definition to the sales team and educate them so they can use the terms correctly? You know, that’s actually a great question. Many people use drip and nurture terminology interchangeably. And I told Sarah, so you know, you don’t really need to educate your sales team you, whatever they use, you kind of know what they mean. Anyway, however, within the marketing team is important to actually know the difference. But within a marketing organization, it’s probably good to know the differences between the two teams.

And this is what I share with Sarah for drip specifically; it is really about presenting buyers with information so they can get familiar with your brands and your product. So it’s really more focused on the top of the funnel.

The drip campaign tends to be a whole lot more general and targeted at a broader audience.

The example I shared with Sarah was, that’s a pic of a guy, and his name is Joe.

And he comes to say, my pet full e-commerce site, and sign up for the newsletter. And because he signed up for a newsletter within like 20 minutes, I immediately sent out a welcome email, basically welcoming him to come to my website and sign up for the newsletter. Here is a 25% coupon. You can buy anything for 25%, then five to seven days later, I send out an email, and I say, hey, don’t forget my e-commerce site; come back any time.

By the way, here are some of the tips and tricks that you can use to find relevant information about pet food. So that’s the second email. And then, several days later than that, I sent him an invitation to actually joined my exclusive Facebook community. Right, that’s a very typical drip campaign, very general. And the target for the first-time subscriber or the first-timer nurturing, on the other hand, is really an add the existing customers or prospects that are already inside of the purchasing cycle or are already fairly familiar with your products.

So it’s more kind of like on the middle of the purchase funnel and also the bottom of it. So let’s use Joe as an example again. Now he joined the Facebook community. And you notice that he posted two or three photos of his two cats. Now, you know, his two cats have a certain type of breed. And with that kind of information, you can start nurturing, right? You want to send out an email that’s very much targeted and personalize it to actually tell him what kind of pet food he probably should buy for that specific breed or what kind of pet care he needs to know how to take care of the cats have that kind of breed.

It is more personalized, more targeted, more segmented, and it’s about nurturing the person.

So he can come back to your website, buy more products, or keep the products and your brand’s top of their mind. So that’s the difference between the drip and the nurturing campaigns.

And I told Sarah many people use these two terms interchangeably as long as you know what they do. And that’s what matters. But the key thing is, it’s not about knowing the differences between the two terms. The most important thing is you actually spend time and effort to get to know your audiences, and your customers understand how they can interact with you. So when you create the workflow or the nurturing campaigns, that you actually select the content and pick the offering that’s most relevant to them at the stages of their purchase journey, that’s actually hard to do, to be honest with you, I’m still working and tweaking my own drip and nurturing campaigns.

I love working with my clients, and it’s so much fun. Well, it’s struggling and frustrating at the same time because you have to sift through a lot of data. And there are a lot of debates going back and forth with your clients on top of it. You know, you have to go through certain kinds of content audits to understand what kind of top content you can actually use for that kind of marketing automation or nurturing campaign communications. It’s a lot of work, but also, if you do it right is incredibly rewarding.

So that’s it for today. I hope you find the content useful. If you like it, subscribe below and share your comments. And if you have any specific questions, you can reach out to me anytime at pam@pamdinner.com love to hear from you.