Drip campaign

B2B purchases take weeks or months and involve several people, so most prospects who show interest are not ready to talk the day they download a guide. Interest fades quickly. Without a drip, a prospect goes quiet between first interest and the moment they are ready to buy, and by the time someone follows up by hand the moment has usually passed.

A drip does that follow-up consistently and at no extra cost per person. Sales time goes to people who raise a hand, and everyone else keeps hearing something useful.

It also produces signals. Opens, clicks and replies show who is warming up and who is not. Read opens with care, because many are automatic, and give more weight to clicks on pricing or case-study pages and to replies.

• Pick a trigger that fires when the person is receptive, such as a signup, a download or a visit to the pricing page.
• Leave a few days between emails so each one earns the next open.
• Branch the run. Someone who clicks should move faster or reach a person, and someone silent should get a shorter, gentler run.
• Personalise with fields that fill themselves, such as name, company or the page they viewed.
• Add a one-click unsubscribe to every email, and watch the unsubscribe rate as a warning that timing or relevance has slipped.

Few buyers decide after one email. A drip campaign spreads the conversation over weeks, "dripping" one message at a time. Someone downloads a guide, the system starts their run, and a welcome, a customer story, an answer to a common objection and an offer of a call follow at set gaps. Nobody sends anything manually, so the tenth person is treated exactly like the first.

A drip is longer and broader than an email sequence, which is a short run aimed at one specific action.

• Sending the same drip to everyone, whatever they did or need.
• Setting it up once and never reading the results.
• Continuing to send after the person has replied or booked.