Acquiring Users With a Drip
Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence. - Ovid
When you turn your coffee pot on in the morning the liquid in the carafe grows with each droplet of coffee. When the carafe is full, a single drop of water can make it overflow.
The idea of a drip is to continually release small units. Over time those drops become something incredibly large. Each drip creates more momentum.
Drip Marketing
The term drip brings up thoughts of Drip Marketing. Drip Marketing is when a company uses prewritten messages delivered at predetermined intervals to bring potential customers to the product.
Drip Marketing was originally used for mail campaigns, but has become more common by digitizing the process using e-mail campaigns.
Drip campaigns are used to create brand awareness and where the lead requires a long time to convert into a paying user. Pardot’s uses this infographic to explain how drip marketing is applied to different areas of a business.
The Drip and Writing
Other people suggest using the drip for other verticals besides marketing. Seth Godin discusses The Drip when it comes to blogging, writing, and cartooning:
A post, day after day, week after week, 400 times a year, 4000 times a decade. When you commit to writing regularly, the stakes for each thing you write go down. I spent an hour rereading Gary Larson’s magical collection, and the amazing truth is that not every cartoon he did was brilliant. But enough of them were that he left his mark.
The Drip and Startups
The hardest thing to do when starting up a company is letting people know what you’ve built. This is one of the key reasons you should constantly talk about your product before you build it.
I want to add an additional meaning to The Drip. The Drip is what comes out the bottom of your marketing funnel. Similar to the way water (the top of your funnel) goes into coffee grounds (your funnel) and becomes a single drip in a coffee pot (bottom of the funnel.
The Drip is how you bring users into your product. Bringing individual users to your product over time is how you build a massive community. Each user becomes more and more powerful because of network effects.
Each user is a single drip. Each drip is a potential advocate that can bring in referrals, create additional press, and write customer reviews. Bringing users in slowly over time builds momentum for your product and your company. A little each day creates incredible power over time.
You need to constantly be trickling users into your product and focus on how to keep those users. Keeping users happy is done through engagement. Engaged users bring more users and your product grows.
Many methods exist to keep the drip coming in. You don’t want the drip to dry up. Companies can use many methods for increasing the drip: online and offline Ads, content marketing (blogging), PR Firms, event and conference sponsorship, and public speaking at conferences.
Each method should be measured to understand what is the most effective method of drip. These can change over time so don’t abandon the ones that aren’t bringing massive results, but do cut the ones off that aren’t providing more value than you pay for.