Email remains one of the most effective marketing methods in your arsenal.
Considering that there are nearly 4.5 billion email users around the globe, and more than half of marketers agree that it’s their most impactful channel, it’s tough to ignore its potential. However, growing an email marketing list and blasting those subscribers with generic content is no longer enough.
Instead, you want to strategically move prospects through a sales funnel — where the art and science of lead nurturing come into play.
When you get lead nurturing campaigns right, you can expect to decrease marketing costs and increase conversions.
Want to be one of the companies generating 50% more sales-ready qualified leads at a 33% lower cost? Ready to harness the power of personalization, segmentation and automation via your lead nurturing efforts?
If so, it’s time to dive deeper and consider the top tips from our in-house expert (and head of lifecycle marketing) Con Cirillo.
Con Cirillo, Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Funnel
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing involves developing and reinforcing buyer relationships throughout each sales funnel stage. As you interact with prospective and current buyers, you’ll want to build trust, boost brand awareness, maintain a connection and gain credibility.
When creating a lead nurturing email campaign, you typically develop a series of strategic, personalized emails. These emails are automatically triggered when nurtured leads take certain actions. For example, if a user adds a product to their cart, it could trigger a purchase reminder, a list of related products or a limited-time offer.
The more segmented and personalized your lead nurturing process is, the more effective it will be.
When creating your lead nurturing campaign, consider shifting perspectives from awareness to interest, to decision and then to an action-oriented stage.
Read more: Top of funnel marketing tactics to build brand awareness
Consider the following…
Here are some ways to think about this process:
- Move down the sales funnel: You can’t come out the gate asking for a sale right away. It’s like dating — you don’t ask someone to marry you on the first date! You must build and maintain relationships with your customers and provide ongoing value.
- Engage, entice and encourage: Lead nurturing is the skill of getting people to care, understand and feel motivated to do something. It’s psychology. Think of these three actions when creating your campaigns: First, grab their attention, then make the advantages of what you offer clear and, finally, motivate them to take action.
- Familiarity = conversion: People inherently don’t trust your company — especially when they learn about you for the first time. They still don't know you, even if you have a great website or publish an interesting ebook. Lead nurturing can help you bridge that gap to create and reinforce the buyer-seller relationship.
- Upsell opportunities: To increase revenue without much effort, you can lean on upselling and cross-selling marketing techniques. For example, when someone is ready to take action in the final stage, you can send an exclusive offer to upsell a product. Whenever possible, uniquely personalize the value of that upsell.
What is an email sequence?
An email sequence is just like it sounds — it’s a series of emails sent in a specific order that are meant to trigger corresponding actions from the recipient.
A lead nurturing email sequence is:
- Built upon warming-up tactics: Don't expect prospects to buy from your brand before "warming" them up. These tactics are often based on optimized and personalized email content that’s initially void of sales-related lingo.
- Comprised of strong relationships: You need to develop (and then maintain!) trust.
- A series of meaningful emails: The goal of every nurturing campaign is to get them to engage with the next piece of nurturing.
Remember, an email sequence isn’t a newsletter! Send your prospects content that makes them look forward to the next lead nurturing email in the sequence. Offer educational and interesting content that offers valuable tips and info.
Benefits of lead nurturing (what the research says)
When your business implements an effective lead nurturing strategy, you can enjoy:
- Up to 47% larger purchases, helping you improve your cash flow.
- A 20% increase in sales opportunities, helping you experience sustained growth.
- A nearly 140% increase in click-through rates when prioritizing personalization and tailored messaging.
- Less of a need to hard-sell. Up to half of consumers will make a purchase from marketing emails each month, driving sales without any aggressive sales tactics.
- Unique strategies that drive higher conversion rates — including those surrounding abandoned carts — drive the highest average revenue per recipient. When sending abandoned cart emails, you can achieve up to triple the conversion rate compared to other automated emails.
When looking at the available stats and research, it’s clear that lead nurturing can have a powerful effect on conversion rates and sales.
So, how does it work?
Most customers aren’t automatically ready to buy. So, how do you guarantee your brand stays top-of-mind?
Achieving this means providing value, and that requires intention. Be intentional with your email content, and when they’re ready to buy, your brand will be the one they’ll think of.
Lead nurturing is all about strategically creating and sending specific touchpoints. Even if a lead loves your brand, it's easy to forget about it in the face of so much digital noise. Remind them why they initially showed interest in your brand and that you genuinely care about them as a customer.
Lead nurturing works because it:
- Maintains connections and relationships during a period when prospective customers are still unsure — keep warming up that relationship.
- Is a low-commitment process for prospects, often involving an email sign-up, adding a product to a cart, etc. These actions trigger strategically designed emails that keep your brand relevant without coming across as overly pushy. Content is delivered based on the user’s actions, ensuring more relevant and timely emails.
Keep your business top-of-mind, and when customers are ready to take action, they’ll come to you.
Key elements
We know — that’s a lot to digest. So, what should you prioritize? Regardless of the sales stage or campaign objective, always focus on these key elements:
Get their attention!
It’s well-known that the human attention span is shortening. Your brand will likely get lost in the noise if you don’t grab — and keep — your audience's attention.
Your subject lines play a significant role in this strategy and in your ongoing offerings, including educational content, user tips, customer success stories and more. Your sequences should not just be sales-based emails.
Focus on the value of personalization
Personalization will always remain a crucial element within any nurture email campaign.
Why?
Customers crave a curated experience based on their interests, behaviors and funnel stage. To ensure your message lands exactly where you intend, you can create several emails and send the most appropriate based on specific actions.
Personalizing those trigger points can make all the difference in your conversion rates. Pair this strategy with your marketing data and email testing initiatives to see even better results.
Con suggests that, when thinking about the lead nurturing creation process, you aim to keep it as natural as possible.
"Too often, marketers don’t think about what they would want to read, especially when trying to tell a story or introduce a concept.,” he said. “It’s a person-to-person thing, like a conversation. Even if it’s automated, it doesn’t have to feel sterile. It should feel kind of like a friend writing you a letter.”
Education matters when aiming to sell
What do you wish your prospects knew about you? What are those things about your business that genuinely set you apart from others in your industry? It’s important to make this information a part of your email sequences.
Within your emails, you can include:
- Customer testimonials and success stories
- Industry- and company-specific news and updates (related to the stage the recipient is in)
- Insider advice and tips that address specific pain points
- Links to helpful internal blog posts, product pages or even glossary entries
- Valuable content related to the specific problems your brand solves
- Info about new products or services that offer the reader value
You must educate your prospects on the benefits and features of what you offer — particularly those they might not be aware of.
9 email sequence best practices to consider
To develop a winning lead nurturing strategy, consider the following best practices:
1. Offer valuable content
Always write with value in mind. Targeted content addresses customers' pain points, gives tips and offers free insights and knowledge. Be generous with the content you send. It has to stand out!
2. Stick to one topic per email
When you send your audience an email, you want them to take some kind of action. Sometimes, you’ll push for the sale. However, other times you may want them to learn more about an upcoming event you’re hosting or encourage them to book a free demo to see your product or service in action for themselves.
Regardless, you want to develop email content that’s easy to digest and act on. So, stick with one concept and one call-to-action (CTA).
“A good nurture campaign focuses on one thing at a time. To take away one concept or one next step. Some businesses send out very long and complex emails with a bunch of CTAs, and it’s not clear enough what they want the reader to do.” - Con Cirillo
3. Keep it short
According to Con, creating short emails is part of ensuring your messaging is concise and effective.
“Many marketers mistakenly assume they are the main character in that person’s day.,” he said. “They send emails that they expect prospects to read. I think some healthy nihilism can help — assume no one cares. That means we need to make it good and easy to read. If we’re lucky, they give us three to five seconds of their time, and in the back of their minds, think, ‘Ok, this seems like someone who knows what they’re talking about.’”
4. Gentle progression
The best lead nurturing sequence should be progressive, logical and natural.
Mapping out sequences that create a compelling narrative can help you visualize the natural progression of the conversation. Each email builds on the last, which is why Con recommends having an email nurturing stream for each stage of the funnel instead of trying to move prospective customers through the whole funnel and buyer’s journey in one email series.
This tactic can be even more effective when you focus a strategy just on one thing. For example, you could send your latest social media posts to increase awareness of an email subscription list. It's OK for it to take time. Let the relationship develop naturally.
5. Test and track
Lead nurturing is not a "set it and forget it" situation.
Constant ongoing testing and tracking will help hone your email lists to be as successful as possible. Test everything from topics and content to subject lines and calls to action.
During testing, pay attention to metrics like open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates.
6. Personalize and segment
As discussed, when creating lead nurturing emails, make them human. Segment your audience and personalize your content to each audience. Segmented emails generate nearly 58% of all revenue, and some marketers have seen a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns compared to non-segmented campaigns.
7. Branding and voice consistency
Personality is important. Email nurtures work best when the messages feel warm, human and honest. A little personality goes a long way, and ensuring it's in line with the brand’s wider voice and style is important.
8. Transparency is key in content marketing
It's critical to clearly outline what your subscribers are signing up for, what the lead nurturing program covers and what they’ll gain from it. This insight builds trust and sets clear expectations. It's also helpful to be transparent about the content and the timing of the nurturing program. This information can be communicated in the welcome email and specify the topics you’ll cover and how often they can expect your messages in their inbox.
9. Tips for good subject lines
To improve your open rates and engagement, you need good great subject lines.
Really boosting interaction requires:
- Keeping subject lines short and simple. They need to be attention-grabbing in under 60 characters.
- Using emojis, but not going overboard. Add one or two emojis to enhance your subject line, but don’t replace a word with an emoji. Keep your message clear.
- Leverage merge tags to personalize subject lines. Include a user’s name or other hyper-personalized details. Trigger birthday deal messaging around 15 to 30 days before their big day.
- Continue testing subject lines. A/B testing can help you gain insight into performance levels.
Related reading: A/B testing explained
Avoid these common email nurturing pitfalls
Don’t fall into the trap many people experience once they embark on the email nurture journey. Some mistakes are forgettable and you can easily recover, while others can topple your business.
These common pitfalls can set you back, eliminate trust, damage your reputation and sink your ROI:
- Not pacing yourself. Sending too many emails out can be counterproductive, as Con points out.
“You can’t assume anything,” he said. “There are a multitude of ways people can enter your nurturing track, so you need to be very gentle with them.” - Forgetting your history with the customer. Your customers remember every interaction. If you forget something important, like a customer’s recent poor experience, it can break trust. Leverage engagement metrics so you’re not flying blind.
- Using a set-it-and-forget-it approach. Marketing automation is a central strategy for today’s most productive brands. But leaving your campaigns on autopilot can render them outdated and irrelevant. Consistently monitor and update your nurture streams, especially when products, features or company-specific goals change.
- Relying solely on email. While email nurturing can be effective, it's even better when combined with face-to-face interactions, one-on-one meetings and other scenarios in which your customers can get to know you better. After all, an email can be easily missed, ignored, deleted, unsubscribed from or inadvertently marked as spam. If you’re an e-commerce company that never interacts with customers in person, consider leveraging other channels, such as social media, to make meaningful connections. You might be surprised at the reception you’ll get when responding to comments, sending direct messages or tagging your loyalists in customer appreciation posts.
When sales and marketing teams consider these tips and best practices for email nurture campaigns, brands can see significant (and sustained) growth. Start prioritizing and developing your email lead nurturing strategy within your marketing team today!