Your email response rate is the single most-important metric that separates faceless numbers from genuine, brand-building, and uber-profitable human connections.

Unfortunately, most email marketing — namely, autoresponders — comes off as thoroughly inhuman: smarmy, dispassionate, robotic, and dull.

The good news is … you don’t have to rescue your autoresponders from being trash-bin-bound alone. A handful of top-email marketers have perfected the craft of human connections. This article showcases three such gurus – Ramit Sethi, Sujan Patel, and Scott Oldford.

Why your business needs both—and when.

Summary...

Defining Drip

Coined in the early days of CRM and email marketing, drip marketing conveys that every so often we "drip" a message to our prospect. It's meant as a means to stay in touch with a prospect that is currently in the pipeline or that we hope soon will be.

Defining Nurturing

Our goal is not just to get the buyers' attention, but to get them engaged. This is where drip marketing leaves off and lead nurturing steps in. Buyers need to be educated, and they need to trust you. We often hear that buyers have changed, but they haven't. What has changed is the power to buy based on education that can be consumed online, and the key to that is lead nurturing. In the past, buyers were often in the dark. Now, in this age of information overload, they need your help to weed through all the content and choices.

Drip Benefits

Drip sequences have their place as subsets of the overall nurturing funnel. They work for areas that need more frequent, yet limited, messaging windows. They are incentives to "move along," but rarely, if ever, at the top of the funnel, which is where many marketers have commonly used them.

Drip marketing should never be used for purposes of educating the buyer.

Nurture Builds Trust

So now you see—lead nurturing is all about relationship building, whereas drip marketing is about getting buyers over a hurdle. You want to nurture first, identifying the individual needs of each prospect and providing valuable information at each stage with no pressure to buy. Drip sequences can help turn some of those prospects into buyers through invitations and incentives, but only after they have been nurtured.