Email nurturing campaigns are the best way to engage prospects throughout their buyer’s journey. Marketers rely on lead nurturing emails for sharing personalised content with qualified leads. It can result in better conversion rates and securing quality leads.
It is crucial to establish reliable relations with your customers in inbound marketing. Email nurturing campaigns help create such bonds with the prospects from an early stage of the sales funnel. It helps develop seamless communication with the consumer and a better brand reputation.
In this article, I will discuss email nurturing campaigns and explain some of the best email sequences in the market with examples.
What Are Email Nurturing Campaigns?
Email nurturing campaigns involve sharing tailored content with a lead via email sequences. Such email campaigns get personalised with the help of leads’ behavioural data, which can be:
- email opening rate
- email click-through rate
- website’s page visited
- webinar attended
The primary aim of a nurturing email series is to engage prospects with relevant content that can prompt them into buying. The shared content helps establish you as an expert and your services as the primary solution to prospects’ problems. This exercise gives the lead enough confidence to invest in your services.
Benefits of Email Nurturing Campaigns
a. Boosts Brand Engagement
An email nurturing campaign increases a lead’s brand engagement by timely delivering targeted information. It helps keep the company at the top of the consumers’ minds and smoothly shifts them down the sales funnel.
b. Caters to All Types of Prospects
The most significant benefit of email nurturing is you can utilise them to nurture all types of leads be it MQL, IQL, or existing customers. By understanding the active pain points of your target audience, you can create a unique way to engage them with emails.
c. Maintains Long Term Relationships With Leads
Email campaigns help you to stay in constant touch with all your leads. It results in a higher customer lifetime value (CLV), which estimates how much the lead might spend on your services.
Best Practises In Email Nurturing Campaigns
a. Automation
Email nurturing can sound like a lot of work as you have to send timely emails and customise them according to the leads’ preferences. Automation tools like Mailchimp, Sendinblue, ActiveCampaign, and Hubspot allow you to streamline your email nurturing campaigns.
Email automation utilises a trigger action to send pre-written emails to the prospect, which revolve around their interest. It provides the prospect targeted information while also promoting the brand.
For example, if a lead downloads an e-book, it acts as an action that triggers a series of emails. The email series nurture the prospect with no manual interventions and helps them understand your services better.
It all leads to a stronger consumer-brand relationship and increases customer lifetime value.
b. Lead segmentation and Lead Scoring
The best way to make a successful email nurturing campaign is to make it highly personalised. Marketers achieve it with the help of two methods:
- Lead segmentation
- Lead scoring
Let’s discuss them briefly.
1. Lead segmentation: It involves dividing your leads into different groups based on demographics, firmographics, location, behaviour, etc. It helps you better understand your prospect’s attributes and at what stage they are in the sales funnel.
You can also use the lead segmentation method before starting a nurturing email campaign. It can provide you with an already sorted list of the leads you want to target.
2. Lead scoring: Lead segmentation considers many factors for segmenting prospects. It can sometimes become complex. In such situations, lead scoring comes to the rescue. Lead scoring allows the segmentation of leads based on a single factor: online behaviour.
It closely monitors various lead activities like email CTR, lead magnets downloaded, etc. Based on these factors, the leads receive scores or tags and get segregated into different leads lists. Marketers use lead segmentation and scoring to prioritise leads and shorten sales cycles.
c. Impactful Copy
Setting up a nurturing email workflow is incomplete without impactful email copies. After doing lead segmentation, it becomes easier to understand the target audience’s pain points. A good email copy must-have four things:
- Catchy headline
- Addresses consumer problems
- Educate prospects about your services as the solution
- Effective CTA button
Let’s understand this with an example.
Zapier is an online platform that automates your workflows by connecting the apps and services you use. Below is a nurturing email by Zapier.
The email heading points out a problem the reader might be having and answers it with a short paragraph. It educates the reader about significant industries where their platform is beneficial, such as marketing, sales, and customer service.
The CTA button at the end motivates the readers to explore Zapier for finding out more about the platform.
Understanding Email Nurturing Campaigns Through Examples:
Now let’s discuss the three of the most used email nurturing campaigns:
- Booking Email Sequence
- Demo Email Sequence
- Long-Term Nurture Sequence
Let’s understand them in detail.
1. Booking Email Sequence
A booking email sequence aims to get the prospect to sign up for a meeting. It is a short email nurturing sequence that invites your clients to know about your company directly from a sales associate or you.
Let’s see how Apexure has executed its booking email sequence. It is a landing page design agency that specialises in conversion rate optimisation, landing pages, and web designing.
First, a visitor shares their enquiry on the official site of Apexure.
Right after signing up for the enquiry, the visitor turned lead receives an email inviting them for a discovery call about discussing the prospect’s problems in-depth.
From here, two situations arise:
- The lead accepts the invite and books a date in Calendly for a meeting. Here the goal of the booking email sequence gets fulfilled.
- The lead is still figuring out whether they are ready to buy or not. Such prospects are considered lost leads and added to a long-term nurture sequence.
Depending on what the lead picks, the nurturing email workflow tackles it.
Below is a flowchart of how a simple booking email sequence works.
2. Free Demo Email Sequence
The goal of a free demo email sequence is to get the lead sign-up for a free demo about the services or products. Like a booking email sequence, it is a short email nurturing campaign. But it has a different trigger action and waiting period.
Let’s understand this email sequence with the help of Semrush, which is an all-in-one marketing tool to get the latest insights and data.
First, the visitor downloads a resource from Semrush’s site.
After some time, a mail gets delivered to the lead inviting them for a free demo.
Here two scenarios arise:
- The lead accepts the invite and books a date in Calendly for a free demo. Here the goal of the free demo email sequence is achieved.
- The lead is still figuring out whether they are ready to buy or not. Such prospects are considered lost leads and moved to a long-term nurture sequence.
Depending on the lead’s decision, the email sequence moves further.
Below is a simple flowchart of how a free demo email sequence works.
3. Long-Term Nurture Sequence
The main goal of a long-term nurture sequence is to solve prospects’ pain points with relevant content and educate them about your services and products. Such long nurture sequences are perfect for spreading brand awareness.
In the case of Semrush, a lead is added to their long-term nurture sequence when the visitor signs up for a free trial or when they get excluded from their free demo email sequence.
After the leads get added to the mailing list, they receive content like blogs, free templates, and webinars that address their pain points and present Semrush as a solution.
Their mailing list also includes a survey that helps Semrush understand any particular lead better. Below are some of the survey questions.
The above survey is for marketing companies only. Likewise, they must have different surveys for all their buyer personas. Such surveys help implement efficient lead segmentation and deliver more relevant information to the leads.
The long-term nurture sequence is for leads who have just entered the sales funnel and need information about your services and products. Such email nurturing campaigns can go on for twelve or more months, depending on the consumer behaviour and level of interaction they have with your brand.
Below is a flowchart of a long-term nurture sequence. It does not have an “end process”, as emails must get constantly added and updated.
Conclusion
Setting up a nurturing email workflow requires monitoring and updating your sequences accordingly. It gets easily achieved with the help of automation lead nurturing, and lead scoring. With the end of this article, you now have the apt knowledge to start your email nurturing campaigns.
You can share relevant content with your leads by executing nurturing emails that align with consumer behaviour. It will help you in engaging your prospect effectively with your brand.
If you want to understand lead nurturing in-depth and do not know where to start, check out our blog for
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