ISP Drip Marketing

This is the marketing equivalent of the Tortoise and the Hare. High-powered bursts of media promotion can succeed in some circumstances, but slow and steady more often wins the race.

by Christopher M. Knight [September 13, 1999]

ISP Drip Marketing is the opposite of a marketing blitz: It's a slow, steady flow of marketing materials or advertising directed towards a specific market. The objective is to create a steady dynamic growth in your ISP sales revenue, rather than big bursts of growth separated by lengthy non-growth periods.

Many ISPs have dedicated marketing departments with significant resources, but still inconsistently deliver their sales message to the marketplace. When they gear up, it's always for a blitz, which produces a flood of incoming leads. Very often, the sales and customer service teams are swamped by this flood and can't service all the leads in a timely fashion. And because the marketing budget is drained, there are big gaps between ad campaigns—which slows growth, and gives churn a chance to overtake growth. This approach is not effective in capturing the highest return from your marketing investment.

The two primary premises of ISP Drip Marketing

1. Most of your target clients will buy Internet service eventually. The question then becomes how you can be the one to sell to them when they are ready to buy?
2. The "Law of 29," which states that a typical target client must hear—see, be told, think about, embrace—your marketing message a total of 29 times before they will make the transition from prospect to paying subscriber or customer.

Your goal then is to take actions which put messages of your benefits and service offerings in front of your total target client profile as many times as possible, in order to fish out the highest possible sales return.

Think in terms of releasing a progressive series of marketing impacts on your very narrowly defined market—which will allow your ISP sales force to respond quickly to nearly every new lead, without losing sight of your existing subscribers.

Tip: Drip marketing isn't just for acquiring new customers. Rather, you can also use this approach to help up-sell or cross-sell existing subscribers on your ISP's enhanced services.

ISP Drip Marketing, Step By Step
Here's a hypothetical drip marketing campaign, to give you a clearer sense of how this marketing approach might be implemented.

Scenario: You've entered a new market in a new city and have just launched an aggressive dialup marketing campaign to get your new POP off the ground. The objective of your drip campaign is to sell dedicated T1 or fractional T1 access to business clients in this new city. You don't have an existing base to up-sell, so you'll have to be more creative.

• Quantify your goals
  Based on your research, this market has a population of 25,000, with 1,200 qualified businesses that could benefit from your services. Selling to 12 of them (1 percent) over the next six months will provide you an annualized revenue of approximately $100,000. So, your goal is acquiring 12 new dedicated clients.
• Set a realistic marketing budget
  You decided that you'd like to acquire these 12 clients for no more than $1,000 apiece, which means the most you can spend to convert 1 percent of the 1,200 possible qualified clients, is $12,000.
• Make an initial contact
  Send a personalized letter to each of the 1,200 businesses, introducing yourself to them, and offering your services/solutions, in a direct response fashion, which invites them to call you for a free network or Internet access evaluation.
• Follow up (the first of many)
  Two weeks later, send a postcard that outlines the top 7 reasons why they should buy from you. Be positive and benefit oriented.
• Follow up
  Two weeks later, send a postcard that outlines one important reason they can't afford to wait any longer to check out your services. (This pokes at their pain, such as lost downtime, slow surfing, low employee productivity, network security, etc. For more on this, read ISP-Advertising: Pleasure or Pain?).

go to page2: Identify highly qualified leads