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Lead nurturing email sequences are a vital part of all sales funnel. Whether B2B or B2C, businesses use email nurturing as a channel to get in touch with potential clients and establish loyal relationships. According to research, 89% of marketers use emails as their primary source of generating quality leads.
Marketers are leveraging emails to move leads from the top of the funnel to the bottom. Brands are aware that not all leads are ready to convert in the first encounter with a company.
So with the help of email nurturing, it becomes easier to reach out to all prospects in an organized manner and nurture them into loyal customers. For all this to happen smoothly, a well-planned lead nurturing email model needs to be in place.
Lead nurturing email sequences are elaborate and take a lot of time to set up. Marketers in a hurry often make mistakes in establishing nurturing models, leading to a loss of quality leads. It becomes crucial to understand the most common lead nurturing email mistakes marketers make.
But first, let’s talk about lead nurturing email definition and its importance.
What is a Lead Nurturing Email?
Lead nurturing email campaigns are a series of emails designed to help prospects with their buyer’s journey. It helps in gaining users’ trust and generating brand credibility. It’s essential to look into a lead’s concerns and pain points to generate a lead nurturing email sequence
As lead nurturing email sequences are more consumer-oriented, they get 4-10 times more responses than cold emails.
Why You Should Have Lead Nurturing Email Sequences
A lead nurturing framework comprises many components like lead segmentation, lead scoring, automation, intent marketing, emails, etc. The strength of lead nurturing lies in the fact that all its components are closely connected. Any dysfunctionality or lacking components results in an inefficient nurturing process.
Email sequences allow marketers to interact with individual prospect behaviour. Creating emails that align and educate prospects towards the final goal: conversion, email sequences hold a special spot in the nurturing framework.
It is a cost-effective lead nurturing strategy that generates an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent. Capturing crucial consumer data through surveys, CTRs, and responses becomes easier to capture with lead nurturing emails, making them essential for every marketer.
Now let’s understand where marketers go wrong with email nurturing sequences.
Mistakes to Avoid in Lead Nurturing Email Campaigns
Indeed, building the perfect lead nurturing email campaign won’t be possible on the first try. But attempting to create one with the least mistakes leads to lesser changes required in the future.
1. Lousy Execution
Companies often have 2-3 buyers’ personas. The demands, queries, pain points, conditions, etc., vary for different leads at various sales funnel stages. Then having a single lead nurturing email sequence makes no sense.
Lead nurturing campaigns must be populated with various email sequences that help prospects realize the brand as a reliable source and partner. A lot of research and planning is required to build such complex buyers’ journeys that help potential customers at every step.
Some popular but essential lead nurturing email campaigns are:
- Welcome Sequence
When a new lead enters a brand’s sales funnel, this sequence helps expand on their pain point, its solution and introduces the brand to them. - Educational Sequences
Such sequences allow a brand to further share its expertise with interested leads through blog snippets, research, and lead magnets.
It doesn’t mean that brands must stick with traditional lead nurturing emails. Marketers can develop their own original ideas to make email sequences that suit their target audiences’ needs.
2. No Personalization
The main aim of lead nurturing is to build strong bonds with leads and make them confident about the brand. So every lead nurturing strategy is bound to work well only when personalized according to the targeted prospects.
91% of consumers say they want to buy from brands that remember, recognize, and provide relevant offers. Emailing is a channel that makes it easier to engage with target prospects. But such an opportunity might be wasted if the emails are not personalized.
Manual execution of email personalization is an exhausting process. But marketing automation and lead segmentation make the personalization of email campaigns easier.
Get started with your email personalization strategy by going through these blogs:
3. Nothing Happens When a Lead Replies
Just because a brand’s lead nurturing email campaigns are automated doesn’t mean they won’t need some sort of manual attention. If your email sequences, primarily educational and informational ones, are impactful, they might get replies from leads. Such lead replies must be reverted immediately and not kept on hold to showcase efficient customer services.
Marketers need to have a plan in place and choose someone from the marketing team to keep a close eye on such emails.
4. Sales Team is Unaware
One of the biggest challenges in lead nurturing is alignment between the sales and marketing teams. Leads often receive multiple emails from the same brand, some from the marketing and some from the sales department. Such a practice can annoy the prospects and push them to unsubscribe or block the brand from emailing them altogether.
To avoid such conflicts, the sales team must always be aware and a part of the email nurturing strategy. As a plus, the sales team interacts with different leads daily; they can provide deep insights into user behaviour. Also, by studying which type of emails the high-potential prospect opened or responded to, sales can create a better pitch.
5. Mailing Too Often
Say you have created this amazing and elaborate email nurturing series that gives clients doses of knowledge every single day.
Can you spot the problem in this statement? The “every single day” can create several problems for a brand.
a. The prospects’ inboxes are filled up with your brand’s emails, and no space for their personal emails. Hence, your emails end up in the trash.
b. Coming up with great email nurturing content for every day might harm the quality of the deliverables.
Then what about weekly emails? Would that work?
The answer lies in a brand’s target audience. There are numerous pieces of research available in the market; below is a compilation:
6. Not Optimizing the Emails
Email optimization is a thing, and it is not just limited to making an email mobile-friendly.
Marketers have understood that email marketing is never going out of fashion and have found ways to optimize them better. A/B testing is a method where various variations of the same model get distributed among segments of audiences.
The variation that receives high positive feedback gets chosen as the final model. Brands can perform A/B testing for various variations of their emails. For example, they can check for subject lines, CTAs, content, etc., and improve their email sequences.
Marketers must also keep a close on email analytics to optimize emails further, like CTR, open rate, etc. Here, you can read about crucial lead nurturing metrics and KPIs:
7. Missing Lead Scoring
Though lead scoring is an advanced lead nurturing strategy, it blends well with email sequences. Lead scoring is a model that allows marketers to give points to prospects when they perform an action that showcases a buying intent.
Email sequences can be a key part of lead scoring. It is so because leads who are actively interacting with emails indicate interest. Such leads must not get ignored and should be given top priority. With lead scoring, all this process becomes automated and easy to execute.
Get Started With a Lead Nurturing Email Series
My blog “A Simple Guide For Email Nurturing Campaigns With Examples” talks about everything you need to know about email nurturing.
Marketers can create an efficient emailing model by using the above guide and keeping common lead nurturing email mistakes in mind. Personalization, clear execution, prompt reverts, sales team involvement, etc., help build an effective email nurturing series.
But before you go, download the PDF resource on the page, which provides a comprehensive collection of lead nurturing ideas to help marketers and entrepreneurs understand and design their first lead nurturing campaigns with the right goals.
If you want to understand the art of lead nurturing in-depth, then check out this ultimate guide for it:
Related posts:
Lead Nurturing Email Examples From My Personal Account
Optimizing Lead Nurturing for Higher Qualified Leads
Content Marketing Vs. Email Marketing: Which is Better?
