Boosting productivity
As a busy professional, you’re undoubtedly on the lookout for new ways to save time and increase your professional productivity. Drip marketing, if done right, has the potential to free up some of your precious time and even boost the effectiveness of your marketing, helping you to achieve key goals you’ve set for yourself.
You want to make sure that you’re keeping in touch with clients over time. If you’re a real estate agent, you need to stay “top of mind” so clients don’t forget you next time they’re asked to refer a great REALTOR® or the minute their looking to buy or sell a property. You also want to ensure that you’re doing the best you can to convert all of your leads into clients.
This often involves staying in touch with them over the long term and “nurturing” them until they’re ready to use your services.
Now, in order to execute these vital “keep in touch” activities, a tremendous time commitment is involved in manually sending out individual emails, one at a time, at different points in time, for everyone in your database.
This is where drip marketing comes into play
Drip marketing involves using a software system, such as a CRM, to automate some of your communications.
Creating a drip marketing campaign for email involves pre-writing a number of emails ahead of time and specifying when they should be sent out. You’ll have a series (or a number of series) of emails written for leads and another series written for keeping in touch with clients.
Most good CRM systems come with drip marketing campaigns already designed for you which means that you don’t have to take the time to write the emails (you can simply customize them to your liking) or worry about what to say in each email.
Although drip marketing means that emails are automatically sent out when you assign contacts to drip campaigns, it doesn’t mean the recipients will ever know that you didn’t sit down at your computer a couple of hours ago and compose the email.
Each email should sound like it’s coming from you and should contain content that your prospects and clients would enjoy or find useful.
And if down the road and an email (or two, or three) in one of your drip campaigns is no longer relevant, all you have to do is go into your CRM and change the content of the email.
Or, perhaps a prospect has become a client and your prospect nurture drip campaign is no longer applicable – one click in your CRM and you’ve cancelled that campaign.
Low commitment, exceptional results
You likely fit into one of two categories. You’re either keeping in touch using emails and other methods that drain your time and energy or you’re not keeping in touch effectively at all. Whichever one of these categories you do happen to fit in, drip marketing is likely right for you.
Drip marketing involves a very little commitment in terms of time and money yet can produce exceptional results. If you feel like you have no time or are not keeping in touch with your database like you should (you can’t blame Jane for using the Realtor down the road), it’s up to you to say hello to drip.
Matthew Collis is part of the Sales and Marketing Team at IXACT Contact Solutions Inc., a leading North American real estate CRM firm. In addition to overseeing many of IXACT Contact’s key sales and marketing programs, Matthew works with REALTORS® to help them achieve their real estate goals through effective contact management and relationship marketing. IXACT Contact is a web-based real estate contact management and marketing system that helps REALTORS® better manage and grow their business. The system includes powerful email marketing capabilities and a professionally designed and written monthly e-Newsletter.

Margaret Powell
February 29, 2012 at 9:14 pm
I use realty juggler for CRM. Haven’t tried the drip email campaign feature that it offers. Has anyone had success with it or found it to be user friendly?
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