When I first came across drip marketing I thought it was great. You tell me things when I want to know them, or before I even knew I wanted to know them because we have a relationship and you know me. That works, that's valuable. You keep me in the loop, the inside scoop, so I get the deals - I like that.

But drip marketing is not Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM). CRM will do all that cool stuff. Drip marketing, on the other hand, strips all the value out of customer relationship marketing and digresses from a novel, helpful, way of connecting with customers to traditional, push marketing where the objective is to get as much as possible in front of as many as possible hoping to get that 2% to respond. Pass out as many flyers as possible - show the commercial to as many people as possible - we don't know where they (our target audience) are so we'll just show everyone and let them self-select if they are interested or not.  

So what began as a way of providing relevant and timely information morphs into incessant, annoyances and before too long people regret ever having signed up for emails and you've just lost an evangelist. 

Seth Godin shared a cool example over at myventurepad.com. He wrote -

"The friction that slows down sending email to everyone all the time is the cost of all the people you'll lose. You might lose them because they unsubscribe, or more likely, you'll train them to ignore you. Worse still, you might just make them annoyed enough to badmouth you.

Drugstore.com made two mistakes with their relationship with me. First, they bought the lie that opt-out is a productive strategy. They unilaterally decided that I'd be delighted to get regular emails from them, merely because I bought some shaving cream.

The second mistake? They didn't bother to be selective about what they sent.

I've never purchased diapers online, since my diaper purchases predate online diaper shopping. And my hope is that I won't be buying Depends for another fifty years or so. Drugstore.com should know this. And yet, because it's apparently free to email me, some lame brand manager says, "sure, do it!"

Except then I unsubscribe and an asset that is worth ten or a hundred or a thousand dollars disappears, probably forever."

Drip Marketing done wrong becomes a bareboned version of relationship marketing and quickly loses all of its value to the customer and becomes nothing more than the easily ignored commercials on TV that everyone TiVo's.