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I did an 8-hour long workshop for a new client of mine. The CMO of the company, Sara, is an incredibly savvy marketer in the B2C segment. Anything about marketing a luxury brand, she is on top of it. One of her key initiatives in 2020 is to work and enable sales. In the workshop, we identified sales stages, mapped content from marketing to sales, created a series of email campaigns to help outside sales engage with SQLs. We also created a drip campaign to continue engagement with prospects after events.

She asked me what is the difference between the Drip and Nurture campaigns.

Here is how I explained to her:

Both Drip and Nurture campaigns use a series of marketing communication channels, mostly email or a combination of email and phone calls, to reach out to prospects.

Drip focuses on presenting buyers information so that they become familiar with your brands and products.

The email series is more top of the funnel focused; the message is more generally intended for a broader audience. A great example I use is that a person comes to a pet food ecommerce site and signs up for their newsletter. A Drip campaign may start with the first email to welcome the subscriber with a 25% off coupon. The 2nd email is to share tips and tricks to quickly find relevant pet food on the website. The 3rd email is to invite the subscriber to the exclusive FB community. This is a very typical Drip campaign, targeting the first-timer on your website to get to know your site and community better.

Nurture aims at further engaging with your existing customers and prospects that have already shown interest in purchasing.

You create a series of emails and other marketing activities based upon their previous actions or interactions and their places in the buying cycle. Since you know them better, they are likely to be in the middle and bottom of the purchase funnel. You can customize your email based on specific segments, and various attributes, such as buying behaviors, content consumption and other information you may have about them.

Using the same subscriber as in the Drip example, this person joined the FB community and, from pictures he posted, you found out that he owns two cats of a certain breed. You also know that he has been on the websites to buy certain types of cat food. Your nurturing email may include suggestions for other types of cat food, toys, and other cat-care information which he may find interesting.

During our workshop, I told the CMO that many people use these 2 terms interchangeably.

The big thing is not about knowing the difference between the 2 terms. The key is to create relevant drip and nurture communications that your audience finds relevant and useful without being sales-y and creepy. That’s hard to do right and it takes AB testing, data analytics, clean customer data and solid writing to tie everything together.

After the workshop, one of the biggest action items is to rework the company’s drip and nurture campaigns. It’s so much work, but I love working with the team to create the workflows and a series of emails that facilitates the customer journey.

If you have great drip or nurture campaigns, I’d love to hear about them and share with others.

Again, subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts and share your challenges. I look forward to addressing them in a future podcast or YouTube video.

If you happen to be on YouTube, please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel. I publish one video a week.

Before you leave, make sure to check out the previous podcast episodes.

Have an awesome day!!

What can Pam Didner do for you?

Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.