Automated drip nurturing is often one of the most alluring features of marketing automation for potential buyers, and understandably so. The concept of allowing cold leads that may otherwise have been lost to gradually educate themselves to a sales-ready state — well, it’s the perfect meeting place for email and inbound marketing.
But as we’ve talked about before, the drip marketing capabilities that marketing automation offers can be utilized for far more than just nurturing cold leads. Let’s take a look at a few ways that you can use drips to enhance the experience of your current customers.
Using Drips for Client Retention
One of the best approaches to customer retention is to show your clients that you are making a continual effort to help them see a higher return on their investment.
A few weeks or months (depending on the nature of your product) after a client has purchased your product, they’ve probably gotten comfortable with its basic functionality — comfortable enough where they’ve stopped looking for new ways to get more out of it. Don’t let this happen! Place your clients on a best practices drip nurturing track and gradually introduce them to the more advanced nuances of your product. Include content with basic hints and tips, new and innovative uses for your product, and timesaving shortcuts along the way. You can even include case studies, and feature creative ways that other clients are using your product.
Using Drips for Upselling
In the never-ending quest for new leads, the prospect of upselling current clients is one that too often gets overlooked. But upselling is a worthwhile endeavor (after all, if you can increase revenue while saving on training and implementation costs, that’s worth a second look), and drip nurturing can help.
We’ve talked briefly about creating content that can help your customers see more value from an upsell — why not turn that content into a drip campaign? Create a drip nurturing track that will gradually get your current clients thinking about a more advanced version of your product, and specifically target companies that are growing quickly and could benefit from increased functionality. Consider showcasing case studies of more advanced client usage to show everything that your product is capable of, and be sure to include tracked links that can provide additional insight into your clients’ interests. Having this information can help you gauge which features they might be interested in next.
Using Drips for Cross Selling
You probably have a handful of partners with products that serve as great complements to your own — why not use your drip marketing to help out their cause? For one thing, this gesture goes a long way towards establishing a stronger relationship with your partners. And furthermore, suggesting products to your customers that will help them see more value from their purchase without directly benefitting you conveys the message that your motives are in the right place.
But there’s one thing you should never forget in creating drip nurturing tracks for your clients: always make sure your emails are providing value. Your clients have already bought into your initial sales pitch, and the worst way to show your appreciation is to hit them with a slew of self-promotional content. Furthermore, your drip emails can never fully replace human communication, so it’s important to have a client advocate or account manager assigned to the case who is aware of what drip nurturing tracks a client is on and can follow up with additional information. And of course, as with all emails, make sure your clients can easily opt out of your drips if they don’t wish to receive this additional communication.
Have you found other ways to enhance your customers’ experience with drip nurturing? We’d love to hear from you in our comments section.