Drip Marketing versus Closed Loop Marketing

For casual observers, closed loop and drip marketing are much the same technique. Both involve keeping in contact with leads, mainly via email and able to foster customer loyalty and generate return sales. On closer study, though, you'll see that one technique has a decided advantage over the other.

Closed Loops and Drips: What They're All About

Drip Marketing

Drip marketing has been with us for a while. Using drip marketing, your marketing message is distributed in a series of 'touches', usually in the form of emails but increasingly in other media as well.

It's called drip marketing because you schedule a steady slow flow (much like a dripping tap) of communication with your list. This method can be automated, which often improves the productivity of busy marketing teams.

Ideally your messages are tailored to your specific target market so that they appear highly personalised when they are generic; this naturally leads to an increase in efficacy. Either way, the strategy is a fairly straightforward series of messages.

Closed Loop Marketing

Closed Loop Marketing is more sophisticated because it enables complex workflow logic to be crafted into the steady flow of communications. It also enables the tracking of your subscribers across all messages over the entire period of active engagement.

Being able to measure how subscribers respond to your messages also allows you to infer or deduce information about them based on either a single event (such as clicking on a link in an email) or across a series of activities (responses to questions from a phone call to visiting a particular webpage and clicking on a link).

Closed Loop Marketing enables your business to collect profile rich data about your prospects, leads and customers to give your sales team more information with which to assess 'readiness to close'.

Information collected with this approach to marketing engagement also enables other types of business decisions to be made such as popular new features for products, issues with pricing and the impact to sales volumes, where to increase pre-sales activities and what marketing campaigns will give you the 'biggest bang for your buck'.

Not only does Closed Loop Marketing give you more insight into your database, as mentioned earlier it also provides you the ability to create complete communication workflows. Capable of handling the most complex scenarios and decision making strategies, a well strategised campaign feels very personalised to the recipient.

Increasingly tools that support Closed Loop Marketing enable automation that moves people from campaign to campaign based on their expressed interests so that your contact list is nurtured and remains actively engaged in your communications, whether that's direct through email, social networks, phone calls, SMS messaging, face-to-face and any combination of all of these including traditional marketing channels such as radio and television too.

The Pros and Cons

It's easy to comprehend that the drip method takes up less time and budget than a closed loop approach. Drip marketing, by virtue of its simplicity, is relatively easy to set up in an automatic system. If you attempt to close the loop with drip marketing tools, it has to be monitored, though some of these aspects can be automated.

It is the complex process of the closed loop strategy that makes it worthwhile for many companies. While drip marketing simply sends messages out there, a closed loop is reactive, tracking which pages and messages get a response from the recipient and replying with the most effective next step. Closed loops may take more effort, but they're not passive – they edge leads and prospects ever closer toward your conversion goal. The return on investment can be impressive.

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