Best practices for Lead Nurturing through Email Marketing
Contrary to popular belief, email works wonders for nurturing and converting leads. But a series of bad emails can only lead to bad results. You have to offer something very interesting to the prospect for it to work.
Writing a good email is one of the most important steps. Also, more than setting up an email campaign to generate leads is required. To optimize your outbound marketing, you must adopt good inbound marketing practices and set up lead-nurturing campaigns.
You will be able to segment your leads better, work 100% on your leads, and align your sales and marketing teams on common conversion objectives. Compared to other leads, nurtured leads usually make 47% more purchases.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead Nurturing is a marketing technique where you accompany your prospects throughout their customer journey by providing them with educational information that will allow them to form an opinion on your expertise and your ability to meet their needs.
Lead nurturing is based on three pillars:
- Segmentation of your prospects to be able to address them in a specific way.
- Quality content to be able to demonstrate your expertise and create the trust necessary for your future business relationship.
- A tool for sending automated emails to sequence the sending of your messages.
How Lead Nurturing Works Through Email Marketing?
A lead nurturing campaign is created using buyer personas. The customer personas will vary depending on the product or service being provided. They may be men or women, young or elderly, wealthy or not, have certain consuming habits, specific problems to be handled, or have certain personal beliefs.
Depending on whether the business model is B2C or B2B, these clearly defined characteristics are different and enable the creation of a personalized strategy based on the expectations and behaviors of these marketing targets.
The majority of people that visit your website are not inclined to buy anything. They are in a stage of uncertainty and seeking pertinent information to address their inquiries. Lead nurturing is a strategy that involves figuring out these prospects’ profiles and giving them content that is tailored specifically to them.
Emails are used in this situation to develop the prospect’s interest in your business. Over time, a solid link will form, and brand preference will grow, promoting purchase and action. The most efficient method for personalized lead nurturing, according to 51% of email marketers, is email list segmentation.
“Once a lead signs up for your list, don’t send any promotional content in the first seven emails.” – Neil Patel.
5 Email Marketing Lead Nurturing Strategies that Work
Segment emails based on where they are in the sales cycle.
The significance of segmentation is usually more emphasized.
But why specifically?
The goal of this strategy is to keep the prospect’s position in the sales cycle going naturally from cold to hot.
Educate cold leads
Prospects know nothing about you during the discovery phase, and their degree of interest is relatively low. In fact, just because someone downloads your white paper doesn’t mean they’ll want to use it tomorrow. Since you also know very little about them, it is necessary to apply lead scoring to every new possibility.
Sending a series of emails to encourage sales at this point would be ineffective. Your duty at the beginning of the funnel is primarily to set the groundwork for a positive relationship:
- Convey that you are paying attention
- Get to know your audience.
- Establish trust by demonstrating your knowledge.
Sending the prospect relevant content based on his areas of interest is thus pretty important at this point. With this content, you will be able to establish yourselves as experts and concentrate your activating efforts on hotter prospects.
You can invite the prospect to continue by downloading more content through automated emails. This strategy aims to build on your existing expertise while also starting to gather behavioral data according to a lead score system.
Discover hot prospects
Hot leads, also known as MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), are those that we can provide to the sales team.
Which of your connections actually has a project? You can go upscale to find out by providing white papers that go into detail about particular topics. To put it simply, it involves taking the prospect’s pulse and having them complete a second form with more details. Use sophisticated progressive profiling forms for this.
Again, you can rely on lead behavior to provide targeted and contextualized messages to them. And lead scoring makes that possible.
These nurturing emails’ responses, or the recipients who downloaded the content, will reveal prospects worth pursuing.
Concentrate your messages on the prospect’s issues
A strong lead nurturing email’s level of contextualization is what gives it its strength. The ability to customize your communications will increase the level of trust you establish with your audience.
Lead nurturing’s goal is to connect with the issues of your audience rather than to emphasize your product. A personal conversation with your prospects is lead nurturing. Usually, you focus on checking out your incredible offer, turnkey solution, latest publications, and new clients and ignore the issues that your prospect is facing.
Maintain your focus and be brief
You don’t anticipate readers to read your blog nonstop all day. Instead, you are aware that many consumers desire to get carefully selected and pertinent content in a very approachable manner.
For this reason, you need to send emails that include a brief summary of a blog article and a strong call to action that motivates recipients to read further. To maintain a clear focus on your message, this must be done such that each email centers on a particular subject.
Each email should be written in such a way that readers can quickly and easily recognize the value it offers them. Consider how many emails you send each day. People often get confused when there is too much information because of the excessive volume.
Use headings, bold important words, and information grouping to make the content easier to read. Emails that are shorter and more to the point convert better. And those emails and texts are more likely to be read by users.
Personalize your messages
You can send personalized content to your future customers thanks to segmentation and automation, which is one of the most attractive features. However, adding the subscriber’s name to the subject line is no longer the only way to personalize communications.
Nobody likes to have the impression that their message was just copied and pasted without any personalization.
Include visuals
If marketing has taught us anything, it’s that appearance matters, likewise with emails used for nurturing. You must make sure that every component of your email captures the attention and keeps the interest of a potential consumer when he opens it.
“Lead nurturing is far more effective than standard e-mail campaigns and does not require an excessive amount of effort.” – Daniel Tan.
People’s attention spans are now widely acknowledged to be merely a few seconds. Visual marketing is, therefore, your best friend because people comprehend visuals considerably more quickly than they do words. It will help you create email campaigns that not only capture the reader’s interest but also keep it long enough for them to respond.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, lead nurturing is based on a process. By cultivating their loyalty and persuading them to buy your products or services, it identifies the prospects and turns unsure into mature contacts.
This guide should help you put together a killer lead nurturing strategy using email marketing. You may easily nurture your prospects using the technique of creating a sequence of communications in email marketing. Also, you may employ Prospect wallet to find what to include in your lead nurturing emails if you get stuck on any of these lead nurturing campaign strategies.
