4-Step Guide to a Successful Drip Marketing Campaign

With drip marketing, slow and steady wins the race

By Matt Alderton

Anyone who’s had a leaky roof during a rainstorm knows all too well: What begins as a drip eventually becomes a deluge. It starts as a single drop of water falling into an empty bucket. It doesn’t look like much … until suddenly it is. Slowly but surely, the bucket fills—then spills.

Drip marketing applies the same “leaky roof” principle to promoting your business. But instead of water, what drips is awareness into prospective clients’ consciousness.

“Drip marketing is exactly what it sounds like,” explains Sunny Lake Hahn, a former real estate broker who now is a partner in her own firm, 7DS Associates, which provides marketing and management consulting to real estate professionals. “It’s not pouring a lot of information on people all at once; it’s giving them small, consistent doses of information over time.”

Drip marketing can be especially powerful for residential REALTORS®. “A home is the largest purchase most people are going to make in their lifetime, so it isn’t an easy, quick sell,” explains Brandyn Morelli, CEO of digital marketing agency BrightLab, who says REALTORS® must devise ways to stay top-of-mind with consumers since it might be months or even years before they’re ready to pull the trigger on a real estate transaction. “Drip marketing is a way to nurture prospects and leads who aren’t ready to buy, so you’re top-of-mind when they are.”

Whatever your preferred medium—email, social media or direct mail—here are four best practices that will land your drips in prospects’ buckets instead of down the drain:

1. Create value.

Successful drip campaigns provide content that’s relevant to recipients, according to Hahn. Instead of using self-promotional content about new listings and recent closings, she suggests sharing information about new restaurants and businesses opening in your area, community events, home maintenance or the impact of local elections on property taxes.

REALTOR® Craig Della Penna, CRS, has mastered this approach. An associate broker at The Murphys Realtors in Northampton, Massachusetts, he specializes in selling homes that are located near bikeways, greenways and rail trails. He therefore publishes a monthly email newsletter that includes news about rail-trail developments in the Northeast, which attracts people who share his passion and eventually want to work with him because of it.

“It’s not overly in-your-face about real estate, but it’s enough that people know I’m a REALTOR®,” explains Della Penna, who says the newsletter is 90 percent rail-trail news and 10 percent real estate listings and advice. “It keeps me top-of-mind without me having to say, ‘Let me sell your house.’”

That’s not to say a harder sell can’t succeed. For Coldwell Banker HPW REALTOR® Christine Khoury, CRS, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, it works wonders. Her campaign of choice is a direct mail campaign; whenever she makes a sale, she mails postcards that say, “The Christine Khoury Team Did It Again!”

“People will come up to me in the grocery store and say, ‘Christine, you did it again!’” Khoury says. “I want people to know I take this business very seriously. When they see again and again that I’ve listed and sold, they know I’m someone they can trust to sell their home.”

2. Be consistent.

Whether you take a hard or soft approach to sales, the most important ingredient in any drip campaign is consistency, according to REALTOR® Liza King, CRS, of Keller Williams Legacy in San Antonio.

“You have to be consistent. That’s the No. 1 thing,” says King, who sends a monthly email to her contacts in which she shares information about life in San Antonio. “If you say you’re going to do something every month, do it every month. That’s how you grow trust.”

When you acquire a new lead, Morelli recommends emailing them once every few days for the first week to create an initial connection and establish name recognition. After that, he suggests sending a follow-up email a week later, then another two weeks later. Finally, after 30 days, move to a monthly email to keep your name on the tip of prospects’ tongues without making them feel spammed.

3. Plan ahead.

Being consistent is difficult when you produce content on the fly. For that reason, Hahn recommends planning your content for the entire year so you know, for instance, that you’ll be sending an email in July about the best spots to watch Fourth of July fireworks and one in April about taxes.

“That way, you’re not scrambling when it’s time to send another email,” Hahn says. “You don’t have to wonder what you’re going to say because you already know.”

Automation also helps. King, for instance, writes all her emails ahead of time and schedules them to go out automatically using email marketing software. Khoury does something similar with her postcards; every time she sells a property, her vendor receives an MLS-based alert and asks if she wants to send a postcard, which she can do with the click of a button.

“You need to have systems in place,” Khoury says. “It just makes things so much easier.”

4. Be patient.

It’s important to measure progress, according to Morelli. When it comes to emails, for instance, he recommends watching metrics like open rates and unsubscribes. Noticeable changes in either can indicate that your messages are either hitting the bull’s-eye or missing the mark.

Keep in mind, however, that drip marketing is designed to be slow, not swift. So stay the course. “With drip marketing, you have to give it at least a year to get the kind of results you want,” Hahn concludes. “Because as we all know, the lifecycle of real estate buying and selling is long.” 

Matt Alderton is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

Meet your Designation Maintenance Requirement today! Read this article and “Tailor Your Marketing Plan to Meet Generational Needs,” take a 10-question quiz and earn 2 credits. Go to
CRS.com/trs-quiz to get started.