Pros and Cons of Drip and Nurture Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around for a long time, but it still continues to be useful. After all, what could be better than an email sent directly to a potential customer’s inbox which they check every day?

Emails can be used for many things—to tell customers about new products and services, inform them about sales, welcome them to your website or get them to come back to a purchase they abandoned in their shopping cart. And there are essentially two types of email marketing campaigns—drip and nurture.

Drip Email Marketing

A drip marketing campaign is like a constant drip of emails to the customer’s inbox. It may or may not have a defined purpose. It could just be a mixed bag of emails that cover everything that’s going on at your company. Or it could be geared towards one particular thing, such as increasing traffic to the website or increasing sales of a particular line of products.

The thing that’s most convenient about this type of marketing campaign is that it can be completely automated. You just come up with various marketing emails that you want to send out and enter the dates you want them to go out on and the email addresses you want to send them to. And you’re done. Unless you decide that you want to make changes later, your drip campaign is all set up and ready to go.

Nurture Email Marketing

A nurture email marketing campaign is more personalized than a drip email marketing campaign. In order to come up with a nurture campaign, you need to consider customer behavior and send marketing emails accordingly.

So the first step in a nurture campaign is to figure out which stage of the customer journey the particular customer is at.

Have they just been browsing the website?
Have they chosen products and added them to the cart but then left the purchase halfway?
Have they already made one purchase?
Are they regular customers who have made many purchases in the past?

In a nurture campaign, you send marketing emails which will nurture the customer and get them to come back, no matter which stage of the customer journey they are at. You can send welcome emails or emails telling them about new products. Some companies even send “sorry to see you go” emails.

Since a nurture campaign is more personalized, it’s more likely to show immediate results. However, it does take more effort on the part of the marketing team because there are more steps involved.

Which Campaign Should You Choose?

Both, drip and nurture, campaigns can be effective, the former in a more generalized manner and the latter in a more personalized, nurturing manner. It’s up to you to decide how much effort you’d like to put into this particular component of digital marketing, depending on how effective it has been for you in the past. It’s also possible to do both—set up a general series of drip emails and add some nurture email marketing if you have more specific marketing goals.