On average, it takes up to seven touches before someone takes action to buy. And this is why marketers come up with the thing called lead nurturing.
People don’t buy without any good reason. And to get people to buy from you at the first contact is very challenging.
A lead nurturing process includes two parts. Market to lead (lead generation) and lead to cash(closing the deal).
Instead of breaking the big bricks, you are taking one step forward slowly by establishing a relationship first. Then, only present your offer when they are comfortable to convert.
If you are interested to get more leads and sales, let’s see how we do this. Today, we will be sharing lead nurturing via emails.
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What Is A Lead Nurturing Email?
A lead nurturing email is an email that is part of a series of emails that is sent to a lead in order to build a relationship with them and move them through the sales funnel. Lead nurturing emails are typically used when a lead has expressed an interest in your business but is not yet ready to make a purchase.
The goal of a lead nurturing email is to provide the lead with valuable content and offers that will help them make an informed purchasing decision.
Lead nurturing emails can take many forms, including educational emails that provide helpful information about your product or service. Or, promotional emails that offer special deals or discounts, and newsletters that keep leads up-to-date on new developments in your business.
Overall, lead nurturing emails are an important part of the sales process. They help to establish trust and build relationships with potential customers over time. By providing valuable content and offers, you can help lead your leads through the sales funnel and ultimately turn them into paying customers.
Why Are Lead Nurturing Emails Crucial For Your Business?
People are not ready to make a purchase. Or at least just take out their credit card and make a purchase on the first visit. The more expensive your item, the more justification they need to make a purchase decision.
Unless your product is highly popular and wanted by the market, you will need to nurture your leads in order to get them to take action and buy your product.
Lead nurturing emails are crucial for your business because they help you build relationships with potential customers and guide them through the sales process.
To Establish Trust – Lead Nurturing Email
By providing valuable content and offers over time, you can establish trust with your leads. You can also position yourself as a trusted resource in your industry. This is especially important for businesses that sell expensive products or services. This is because it can take time for leads to fully understand and trust your offering.
Keep Leads Engaged – Lead Nurturing Email
If a lead is not yet ready to make a purchase, it is important to keep them engaged with your business. Lead nurturing emails can help you do this by providing valuable content and offers that are relevant to their needs and interests. You or your business will always be shown in front of them.
Move Leads Through Sales Funnel – Lead Nurturing Email
By providing valuable content and offers that are tailored to each lead’s needs and interests, you can help move them through the sales funnel. And ultimately, turn them into paying customers.
Lead nurturing emails are important as they help to build relationships with potential customers and guide them through the sales funnel. By using lead nurturing emails, you can establish trust, keep leads engaged, and ultimately convert more leads into paying customers.
This is why email lead nurturing is crucial.
If you stay on their radar and keep engaging them with helpful content, you will increase their chances of clicking the “buy now” button.
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Why lead nurturing emails are important:
Build Your Credibility – Lead Nurturing Email
Your prospect might not be ready to buy now or they don’t need it urgently now. But it does not mean they won’t get it within the next six months or more.
There is no harm to keep them in your email list and send them a regular email to show that you are around when they need you. Also, to provide value to them. So, they’ll know whom to reach out to when they want to buy a product or service.
Run Effective Campaigns – Lead Nurturing Email
There are so many things to do as a business owner or digital marketer. Lead nurturing emails can be sent automatically when your email workflow is in place. You can group your audience by their stage in your sales funnel and send respective emails.
It will feel more personalized for them instead of a general email that they won’t appreciate.
Shorten the Sales Cycle – Lead Nurturing Email
When you keep providing values and showing you or your business as an expert in your email, it can help to speed up the buying decisions.
Your prospects will appreciate the values provided. And during next time when they wanted to make a purchase, they will be more likely to buy from you.
Increase your conversion rates – Lead Nurturing Email
A lead nurturing email campaign is designed towards persuading sales. Through lead nurturing email, you can mix entertainment, information and offer in the same email. So, they won’t feel that you are always selling. And, in some cases, it will be an invisible sale where they will persuade themselves to make the buying decision.
Lead Nurturing Email – How Does It Work?
Email nurturing is a process of using email marketing campaigns to build relationships with potential customers who have expressed an interest in your business, but are not yet ready to make a purchase.
The goal of email nurturing is to convert someone from leads to buying customers. This is done by providing them with values and offers that will help them to decide to buy from you.
An email nurturing campaign starts with building an email list. The list of people who visited your website and submitted their contact details. This can be done by offering free lead magnets on your landing page or sales funnel in exchange for their contact details.
These people have shown interest in your business but had not purchased anything from you yet. You need to follow up with them to get them to trust you and buy from you.
People buy from people they know and trust.
Imagine that you have a list of 10,000 engaging subscribers. Now, you have a new product launch or new promotion. What you need to do is just send an email to the list. And by getting 1% of them to convert, you are getting 100 sales. All without additional customer acquisition costs.
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Here is an overview of how email nurturing typically works:
Identify Your Dream Customer
The first step in email nurturing is to identify who you want to serve and leads that are interested in your business but not yet ready to make a purchase.
Then, you can create the landing page and lead magnets offer to convert them from a visitor to a lead.
Segment Your Leads
Once you have identified your leads, it is important to segment them based on their interests and needs. By understanding them better, you can have a more personalized for each group. This will help you to be able to provide them with relevant content and offers.
Create An Email Campaign
Now, it’s time to create different email campaigns for your leads that are in different stages of the sales funnel or have different interests.
For example, we use “Soap Opera Sequence” for the welcome, onboarding and product sales email, and “Daily Seinfeld Email Sequence” for newsletter emails. Once you have segmented your leads, you can create an email nurture campaign that includes a series of emails that are designed to educate and engage your leads over time. These emails should provide valuable content and offers that are relevant to each lead’s needs and interests.
Track & Analyze Results
One of the keys to digital marketing success is to analyse the data. After launching your campaign, you should know your data and optimize your campaign based on the data acquired.
Lead Nurturing Email Samples
There are different types of emails that you can send out for your lead nurturing email campaign.
Here are a few common ones that are mostly used.
A welcome email or Onboarding Lead Nurturing Email
When someone subscribes to your email list, this is the first email sequence they will receive. Typically, it’s a five to seven days email sequence to introduce to them your background, and what they are going to expect from you. And finally, at the end of the email sequence, will be presenting your offer.
The first few days are very useful to build your reputation and relationship with them. So that, at the end of the email sequence they will be more likely to buy from you.
Newsletter/Regular Lead Nurturing Email
These types of emails are the regular emails that you sent to your subscribers. It can be sent out twice a week or three times a week. It depends solely on your audience. Some even send it out daily.
But how can you craft out so many emails while getting them excited to read?
We call this the “Daily Seinfeld Email Sequence”. The Daily Seinfeld Email Sequence, it’s focusing more on entertaining the readers instead of packing too much information in one email.
The email is 80% entertainment and 20% information. Making it easy to consume, and easier for you to write.
The aim here is to build relationships with them and at the end of the email, you can have a P/S side note to explain your offer.
New Product Launch Lead Nurturing Email
This is a special email sequence when you want to promote a new product. For this, it comes with a 5 days email sequence where you first start by explaining the obstacles your met.
Then, what’s your struggle and how did you overcome it? And finally, the solution that you found is the product that you are selling. And you are going to tell them what’s the result and transformation that you get.
This email sequence aims to sell by telling a story that your leads can relate to. With this, it will be easier for them to decide on the purchase as it’s something they are facing. And something they want to solve.
Webinar Promotion Lead Nurturing Email
This email invites your audience to join your upcoming webinar to learn about a topic. The topic will be based on something they are interested to learn. And something that will bring value to them.
A webinar is very useful if you are selling high-ticket products as they feel the values you provide during the webinar. And will trust you more as you did provide them with many values during the free webinar.
It is expected that they will be getting more value in the paid version.
Festive Offer or Special offer Lead Nurturing Email
When you have any new product offers or festive offers, you may send out the offer right to them. And if they decided to buy, they can do it on the spot.
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Best Practice for Lead Nurturing Email
After looking at what email to send, it’s time to see how can you send a better email. This is a crucial part of email marketing for a successful campaign.
One of the best practices is to be consistent and dedicated. Be there to serve your audience instead of just selling. When they feel that you are really helping them, they will be able to trust you more.
Remember, lead nurturing is a long-term and ongoing process to build a sustainable business.
These are some best practices for a successful lead-nurturing email marketing campaign.
Know your audience
This is the first thing every business owner must do. You need to know your dream customers in detail to be able to serve them better.
Knowing their age group and gender only is not enough. The more details you know, the better it will be. We recommend creating an avatar for your dream customer and having the details of his/her daily lifestyle, interest, hobby, favourites and so on.
By knowing them, you can have personalized emails crafted for them.
Personalize your emails
People are getting many emails every day. And lots of them are spam emails. Being able to send a personalized email will help them to be more likely to open your email.
First of all, your email Subject and recipients should be tailored to them. It should be HI {firstname}. By having their name at the beginning of the email, it will feel more like the emails are written for them.
Also, people at different sales funnel stages of AIDA(Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) should get different emails. Not only that, the emails shall be based on their interest. Only with that, they will look forward to your future emails.
Provide valuable insights
It’s not easy for someone to give their contact details to someone they don’t know. Especially their email address as there are so many scams and spam emails out there.
You already did the first thing by providing the free lead magnets to get their email address. Now, it’s time to prove that you are worth their time to read your future emails.
Remember this, people don’t like to be sold. You should focus on providing value, and only sell occasionally. Or even sell it invisibly with stories.
Split Test Your Emails
When you create your email, you can select whether you want it to be a plain text email or a visually designed email. While both will work for different markets, you shall know which works best for yours.
To do this, you can run a split test on your email and see which works. You can create two copies of the same email content, just change the design. And then, run the split test by sending 50% of traffic to each version to see which version converts better.
With this, you are able to select the winning copy and email pattern for your business.
Know Your Data
After sending your email out, you need to know what’s working and what’s not. You can do this by reading the open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, unsubscribe rate, spam rate and bounce rate.
Most autoresponders will provide a dashboard report for this. You just need to understand the key parameters and optimize your campaign accordingly.
Group Your Audience
Group your audience based on their status. You want to first group them based on which stage they are in the sales funnel. Awareness, interest, desire and action.
And out of these funnel stages, you should also group them based on their user scoring. Then, for those who normally not responding to your email, you can label them as low-value customers and focus more on the high-value ones.
Offer Free Giveaways
For your most engaging subscribers or the ones that give the most feedback, you can occasionally offer giveaways.
This can be a 30 minutes free consultation or free access to your premium products for a month.
Create Email Automation
Entrepreneurs are always busy with different tasks. And the best would be automating your process so that even when you are on holiday, your campaigns will run by themselves.
All you need to do is create the email sequence and design the process workflow. Then, when the event is triggered, the email marketing tool will automatically send out the emails.
This can be done easily nowadays with the email autoresponder. You can also get a fully visualized drag-and-drop workflow for your email automation.
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How To Write Lead Nurturing Email
As you noticed, one crucial element appears in every marketing automation workflow – “select a message to send.”
So, how do you create a message that will deliver results?
Here’s our 9-step process you can use right away:
1. Identify Your Goal
When writing an email, you should know what your goals are. Identify what your audiences need to know and what you want them to do.
It can be joining a webinar, buying a product or interacting with you. Knowing the goal of your email will make it easier for you to craft the masterpiece.
2. Choose your subscriber segment
It’s time to choose who to send it out to. The messaging will be different for a B2B email from a B2C email.
You should understand their pain points and goals in life in order to craft an email that is relatable to them.
3. Keep it Brief
Most people don’t like to read long texts unless it interests them. But in general, they don’t. So, keep your email to short and to the point. Make sure your key message is transferred directly to your audience.
4. Design an eye-catching subject and preheader
These are the two most important elements in your lead nurturing email. And, it will determine whether your email campaign is successful or failed.
That’s the first thing your audience saw when they receive your email. And based on that, they will decide whether are they going to click and open your email.
Make sure you write the best subject and pre-header for your email. To do that, you should create different variants and split-test them to find the best combinations. To learn more about how to write better emails, you may read the Copywriting Secrets book here.
5. Personalized Your Email
Now, you managed to get through the first barrier and get them to open your email. Great. What’s next?
You address them with their name in your email. Your email can start with “Hi {firstname}”. An email like this will be appreciated more as it feels like the email is crafted for him/her.
6. Tell a story
Story sells. It can be applied to all your sales copy and includes the email you sent. Telling a story that they can relate to, will make them buy more.
To do this, you can use the “Epiphany Bridge” email sequence to tell a better story. An Epiphany Bridge story starts with the backstory. Mostly related to their current stage where they have internal and external desires that they want to achieve.
However, on their journey to achieve that, there are obstacles that stop them. We call that a wall here. And, this is the pain point that they are having now and wanted to resolve it.
This is where you present the new opportunity aka your product/service to solve their problem. Then, during the implementation of the plan, what you faced and what was the achievement and transformation that you got from that?
This is how you write the sales story by following the five steps script. It can apply to every email to craft a story they want to read.
7. Write Like How You Talk
While AI is trying to take over the copywriting words, there is a lack of humans in the writing style. The same goes for your email, your emails need to be seen as an email written for them. Like how you are talking.
You don’t need a professional writing style or complex words. It is how you talk, that’s the way you write.
8. Use Case Studies and Testimonials
Whenever possible, use case studies or testimonials in each of your sales copies, including your email. People don’t like to listen to you. As a product owner, you will definitely say that your product/service is good.
So, your customer testimonials are a much more powerful tool to close sales.
9. End with a CTA
A clear call to action should be the bottom line of every lead nurturing email. It’s the only way you get them to visit your sales page and then, buy from you. No matter if you are directing them to a sales page or a webinar registration page, that’s the end goal of your email.
Use powerful words in your CTA. Generic CTAs like “learn more” or “read more” are not powerful enough. You may try “Get Instant Access Now”. Test it out for the best CTA for your email campaign.
10. Give them a chance to unsubscribe
By law, you need to include an unsubscribe button in all your email. Looking at people opting out from your email list is not something you want. But, sometime in life, we can’t make everyone like us. And that’s absolutely fine.
That’s the nature of life. Accept that and focus on those who like you. By doing that, it is easier for your life too. It’s hard to change a no to a yes. But, changing a maybe to yes is much easier.
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Final Thoughts – Start your email lead nurturing campaign today
If you are reading this, chances are you already complete the entire article. Congrats.
You took a very good choice to consume all the key information. Now, it’s time for you to start doing it yourself for your business. If it’s the first time for you, congrats you decided to take action. And if you already have a lead nurturing email sequence in place. Hope that my sharing will help to optimize your flow.
Remember that the lead nurturing process is a long-term ongoing process. You need to be consistent to get it done.
If you want to try building your first marketing automation workflow, you can do it with GetResponse for free now.
