Is nurture marketing the same as drip marketing? My position is that the two techniques are fundamentally different.
Today it takes more than a drip—you need to let knowledge flow (photo credit: ©2009 Tim Escher, used with permission)
Get back to your roots
Jim Cecil uses both terms. He grew up on a Kentucky farm. His father had a successful business selling agricultural equipment and used postcards with tips that enabled customers to improve their harvests.
One of my chores as a young boy was to water the family garden. I used to carry water in a heavy metal bucket and dip it out with a hollow gourd to distribute it over the plants. That was my introduction to the notion of drip irrigation. It wasn’t easy work, but my father showed me that my continual, attentive care of those plants was directly responsible for a successful harvest.
Say what you mean
The drip-nurture confusion stems from a lack of specific definitions and use of multiple and competing terminologies. In A Cure for the Common Cold Call, Cecil writes, “Call it what you like; Nurture Marketing, Frequency Marketing, Loyalty Marketing or Intimacy Marketing.” Cecil also uses the term drip marketing (see Growing Customers with Drip-Marketing or Everything I Needed to Know about Business I Learned in My Garden). Other marketers define drip marketing as a process of automatically sending communications or as an acronym: Differentiate, Remind, Inform and Persuade.
I am convinced that publishers of marketing books do not allow concise definitions (because they fear people will pick up a book, read one sentence and put it back down without buying it). I define nurture marketing and will do my best to provide definitions of other marketing terms in order to compare their benefits.
Here is my definition of drip marketing:
- drip marketing (drip mär´kit´ing) n. the act of sending multiple, scheduled communications to contacts or prospects
Keep it relevant
Nurture marketing is about strategy. Drip marketing is about tactics. Sharing knowledge is increasingly important to differentiate your business, regardless of the tactics you use. To be fair to Cecil, I think that he overlays nurture strategies on drip tactics. His discussions of drip marketing emphasize relevant content (see Understanding the Difference Between Drip Irrigation and Drip Irritation). And that’s more than just a drop in the bucket.
How do you make a splash with your prospects?
