Drip Marketing, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the (email) Bomb
by Denis A. Baldwin

There's so much taboo when it comes to marketing your business over e-mail. Over a decade has passed now since spammers began polluting our communication streams with tales of penile virility, get rich quick schemes, weight loss miracles and other garbage. As avid email readers, all of us have learned to sift through this mess to get to the authentic communications below. How do you keep your own email marketing messages from getting caught up in the fray?

The answer is in Drip Marketing. Drip Marketing is a concept where a highly specific niche is created from your customer base and a steady stream of captive marketing materials are sent to fill that niche. This stream must have three elements:

• Content must be exactly what the customer is looking for. In the case of our energy conservation materials, we drip market to energy managers, engineers that work at power companies and those who deal with energy for large manufacturing firms. Sure, a few emails get out to others that may only have a mild interest in energy conservation, but for the most part our market niche is precisely the kind of customer base we desire.
• Content must be captivating and information, not just ad space. The niche you've chosen has hundreds if not thousands of potential market suitors to deal with on a daily basis. They will stick by information providers that give them what they need in a no-frills package that is informative, intuitive and straight forward. So create your drips with this in mind. Content, content, content, sales pitch, content, content, content, ad space, content, content. If you're not giving them a reason to be involved, they won't be involved.
• Drip Marketing, like a drip in a faucet, must be regular, quick and small of quantity. There's a fine line here between "regular" and "overpowering". I set our drips to go out once every 2 to 3 weeks. They're done in plain text (no HTML) and I rarely embed pictures or include attachments. I've found that you'll get a much better view rate and response rate out of a paragraph or bullet points coupled with a link than you will a full color ad with effects.