If you’ve been scratching your head, wondering what lead nurturing emails are and how to best implement them, then you’ve come to the right place.
These types of emails are crucial when it comes to building up a relationship between you and a lead, as well as turning that lead into a regular, loyal customer.
And while, of course, crafting a solid and successful lead nurturing email strategy doesn’t happen overnight, we’re confident that if you apply the tips and tricks in this guide, you’ll soon be well on your way to adding lead nurturing to your marketing arsenal.
Let’s get right into it.
What Are Lead Nurturing Emails?
The official, textbook definition states that lead nurturing emails are the emails that move your leads – aka, potential customers – along the sales funnel. But there’s more to the story.
Lead nurturing emails are crucial for the following reasons:
- They help you build trust between you and your audience
- They are responsible for spreading brand awareness
- They represent an important step in placing yourself as a leader in your industry.
Nurturing emails help to cultivate a strong sense of connection between you and your leads, with the result being that they are more likely to buy your service or item. If you’ve been pondering over how to increase online sales, these emails are a pretty safe bet.
Your typical lead, or prospective customer, has several ways of interacting with your business before purchasing something. They might have gotten all the way to ‘adding to cart’, or perhaps they signed up for your monthly newsletter.
This touchpoint serves as a trigger on your end, for your company to spring into action. Sending out a lead nurturing email after these interactions means that you stay in contact with the user and that they can keep your brand top of mind.
For example, you might send a helpful email that reminds the lead that they still have items waiting in their cart. Alternatively, offering valuable insight or discount codes can be a great way to bring a non-buying customer back into your sphere.
You can also send multiple emails, in what’s known as a “lead nurturing email sequence”. These are triggered by a particular action and are sent out in a pre-arranged sequence to follow up and guide the user through that particular journey.
Why Lead Nurturing Emails Are Important
Consider the fact that 99% of email users check their inboxes every day. In that light, opting for lead nurturing emails seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?
Many in the industry agree that lead nurturing emails are one of the most successful email marketing methods you can engage in. For instance, a successful lead nurturing strategy can generate 50% more sales leads at a 33% lower cost, according to invespcro.com.
The success of lead nurturing emails doesn’t only lie in the method, though.
Remember that many leads are not necessarily sales-ready when they interact with your business. They might want more time to buy, might have financial constraints, or might simply get distracted and forget about the purchase entirely.
Keeping this in mind, and using lead nurturing emails to coax them into the right place when they’re ready, means that you don’t lose those precious leads over time.
10 Practices for Crafting an Effective Lead Nurturing Email
In this section, we’ll cover our ultimate tips for securing the most effective lead nurturing email strategy.
Do you want to know how long your email should be?
Are you wondering what the best time is to send it?
Are you sure you are structuring your lead nurturing emails right?
This next section has all the answers you need.
1. Know Your Customer
Remember that lead nurturing emails are about fostering a connection and relationship between your company and a lead.
With that in mind, it’s no surprise that you should not just be throwing out a mass email and hoping it sticks with at least some of its readers.
Tailoring content is a huge part of lead nurturing emails, but before you can get there, you need to know – and understand – your users.
To that end, the first and most important step you need to take is around customer metrics and behavior. Figure out how your customers think, what they need, and what they want.
For example, if you offer io domains, you’ll already know that tech companies are probably your biggest audience. You’ve already figured out who your audience is, but now you need to dig deeper and see what questions they need answering.
A great tool here is, unsurprisingly, customer interviews and surveys. This takes all the guesswork out of ascertaining the pain points of users. Customer metrics from your website and other email marketing tools are invaluable here, too.
Once you’ve gathered all your audience data, it’s time to segment. Segment leads according to interests, or opt for other criteria, such as:
- Buyer personas
- Sociographic attributes
- Corporate attributes
- Geographic attributes
- Psychographic attributes
Dividing into segments allows you to ascertain where your valuable leads are. As it turns out, this is a really helpful precursor to our next tip!
Here’s a lead nurturing email example with customer personalization.
2. Tailor Your Content
As we mentioned, the quickest path to success with lead nurturing emails is to offer tailored content. Personalized emails will improve open rates by 26%, so do not skimp on this part.
Having handily gathered all that precious customer data in step 1, it couldn’t be easier to then create impeccable content around the needs, problems, and interests of your leads.
Not only does doing so make your leads feel more connected to your brand and interested in your content. It also, cleverly, solves their pain points for them – including pain points they didn’t realize they had.
For instance, if your company provides a remote access solution, your individualized content may focus on managing remote teams and the best tools for successful remote work.
Crucially, though, you want to offer content that is high-value to customers. No fluff, no nonsense.
3. Write Insightful Content
In an ever-optimized world replete with keywords and AI, you need to make sure that every word counts.
Your content needs to be miles ahead of your competitors, offering such valuable insight and insider tidbits that it’s a no-brainer for users to opt for your business.
Indeed, offering thoughtful and fresh content is not only useful for your leads, but it also helps cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship based on trust. No customer wants to feel like they’re being taken for a ride. In contrast, every individual wants to buy products from a company that really loves what they sell.
SEO will naturally be your best friend here, in order to really scratch the surface of consumer behavior. You could even be really smart and speed up the process with SEO automation.
Let’s take a real-world example. Maybe you offer top-line human resources software. With HR as your main audience, you want to make sure they can come to you not only for technical solutions.
Having done your keyword research, you’ve decided to create a lead nurturing email series on how to manage a call center. In this way, valuable and meaningful content acts as a magnet that draws your leads in and provides the perfect pathway towards that final purchase.
4. Focus on One Topic at a Time
When it comes to writing each nurturing email, choose a specific subject to focus on and stick to it. You might have lots to say about your products and services, and it can be tempting to cover all your bases in the first email. But if you overwhelm subscribers, you can easily confuse them, decreasing the effectiveness of your messaging.
For your emails to be as engaging as possible, ensure each one is centered on the topic that the lead originally converted on and include a clear call to action. Consider what stage of the funnel they’re at, what their pain point at this stage may be, and directly explain how you can help them solve it.
For example, if your lead downloaded a brochure called “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO”, they are likely at the top of your funnel. With that in mind, your first email could focus on a topic such as “How to sell your marketing team on SEO” or “Easy ways to incorporate SEO into your content marketing strategy”.
5. Keep Emails Short and Catchy
Please – keep those emails short. You want to nurture those leads, not waste their time with essay-length emails.
The sweet spot is 50-125 words, according to HubSpot. This means you need to get ruthless, but it also provides you with a pretty useful framework. Such a short amount of space means there’s no room for fluff and you have to really concentrate on the essentials of your message.
The reason for the brevity is that you don’t want leads to get information overload. Remember, we check our emails every day, and we are constantly bombarded with information from every corner. If you’re offering a .ca domain name, for example, don’t get into the technicalities too soon – just highlight the benefits and price value.
Keeping things short and sweet means you’ll stand out.
6. Decide on the Natural Email Progression
Having crafted the perfect email, you now need to decide on the sequence of your lead nurturing emails.
This depends on the subject and the purpose of the emails, and it’s really up to you.
Perhaps the first email is educational, whereas the second is more geared towards conversion, using discount codes or free trials. This is a great traditional email sequence as it allows you to establish interest and trust before cementing that connection with a reward.
Don’t forget to personalize each leg of the journey, though. And keep that branding consistent: don’t throw in variations of your logo or typography across different email sequences.
For example, let’s say a lead signed up to the free version of your SaaS platform. Your first message, the onboarding email, might welcome them and briefly remind them of the features they have access to.
The following email in your sequence might feature a testimonial, case study, or customer success story, and so on. Eventually, you can introduce offers to convert that lead into a paying customer.
7. Automate Your Emails
When dealing with lead nurturing emails, automation is going to be your new best friend.
It saves you a ton of work, thus allowing you to focus on crafting those fabulous products or services that you are trying to sell through those emails. Crucially, it also means your leads are still getting their deserved attention and keeping you at the top of their minds.
Also known as automated lead nurturing, automating the different sequences in your email campaigns is an important step to master. There are two different types of automated lead nurturing: drip campaigns and triggered campaigns.
Drip campaigns entail sending out scheduled nurturing emails at specific times. In contrast, triggered campaigns mean you send out your email campaign after a specific customer action (think: clicking a link or visiting a specific page).
There’s a whole host of drip and triggered nurturing email campaigns you can send out. Here are some of the most popular examples:
- Welcome email sequence: These help build trust and set the tone of future communications.
- Confirmation emails, such as identify verification.
- Onboarding email sequence: This helps highlight the benefits your services or product provide as well as tips on how to use them. Testimonials fit in great here.
- Cart abandonment email sequence: These are hugely important for re-engaging customers.
- Repeat customer email sequence: These are useful for upselling or offering recommendations to loyal customers.
- Re-engagement or reactivation email sequences
- Event email sequences, most useful for upcoming events or webinars
- Follow-up email sequences: Did your lead forget to finish a task, like reading a blog post or completing a course?
Just remember to time your emails well. Late afternoons are well-known for having the highest open rates!
8. Build a Strong Landing Page
Okay, this is not strictly related to lead nurturing emails. But you’ve gone to all that effort to craft a tailored, incentivized email, for all your different segment groups. Let’s say the plan worked and your leads are excited to see what you have on offer for them.
Does the email lead them to a clear, crisp, beautiful landing page? Or is it a mess of lackluster copy and out-of-date branding?
Lead nurturing emails are important in their own right because they are part of your broader marketing strategy. For that same reason, your landing page needs to be strong and attractive. Think lots of white space, inviting copy, clear CTAs, and user-friendly navigation.
Examples of Strong Landing Pages:
9. Conduct Post-Email Tracking
Do you remember how we gathered all that customer information before we even thought about composing a lead nurturing email?
Well, we’re back there again. Post-event, you want to analyze and track all the data at your disposal. Metrics contain invaluable insight into the success of your email campaign.
The two most important metrics to follow are click-through rate and unsubscribe rate. If your leads aren’t clicking on those all-important CTAs or, worse, they’re unsubscribing from your emails, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
10. Adopt an Omnichannel Lead Nurturing Strategy
A final tip. Not many people realize this, but you can diversify your lead nurturing email strategy.
Consider your audience segments: is email really the best way to reach them? For some, an app might be more effective. Indeed, using multiple platforms simultaneously can offer a cohesive and coherent brand experience, when done effectively.
As an example, imagine you’re trying to reach out to highlight the benefits of using a domain service. Perhaps, social media is a better bet if your Generation Z segment is more prolific there, and you should focus your email strategy on Millennials.
Opting for an omnichannel lead nurturing strategy reflects the wider nature of a lead nurturing email strategy. It’s important to be agile and ever-changing, because customer interests, needs, and wants will naturally change over time.
Being able to anticipate them will put you ahead of the curve. And if you want social media lead generation ideas, Influno has got you covered!
The Future of Online Marketing? Lead Nurturing Emails
We hope you found this all-inclusive guide to effective lead nurturing emails useful.
There’s so much out there when it comes to marketing and improving online sales, but we truly believe that effective lead nurturing emails are the way to go.
We also mentioned how these fit into omnichannel marketing. Omnichannel marketing has slowly come to dominate the discourse around marketing strategies and it’s absolutely here to stay.
So, if you want to stay ahead of the curve, check out this guide to creating a successful omnichannel marketing strategy.
Key Takeaways for Lead Nurturing Emails
In this article, we explored the best practices for crafting an effective lead nurturing email to build trust with customers and foster loyalty.
Each best practice, such as understanding your customer, automating emails, and taking an omnichannel approach, can be effective in their own right. But remember, these should be incorporated into your broader strategy to really boost the impact.
We highlighted the importance of creating a logical email sequence that helps gradually build a connection with customers. Creating content that is high-value, relevant, and personalized were also among the tips for increasing the chances of engagement.
Real-world examples show how these tips are put into practice. To create your own lead nurturing email strategy, start by gathering data about customers. Then, focus on crafting a message that answers their pain points, and ensure you’re directing them to a well-branded, cohesive landing page. Finally, conduct post-email tracking to give you a clear idea of how you can improve future lead nurturing emails.
With these best practices, you can connect with, engage, and convert leads into loyal customers that will help your business grow.
To achieve the best results with email outreach, we recommend using a professional email automation software
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