Email marketing – building your ‘nurture phase’ for lead generation

What is ‘lead nurturing’ and how does email marketing fit into that?

Lead nurture is simply building a relationship with your customers. For this blog, we’ll be talking specifically about nurturing the leads your sales funnel, or lead generation strategy, has brought into your database.

The leads you captured gave you their email to claim a discount, offer or free download, and now you have the opportunity to continue the relationship, educating them about your product/service and how it will help deliver what they need.

Email marketing is the perfect way to continue building the relationship, offering value and staying front of mind so they can get to like, know and trust you… and eventually buy or buy again.

Why should you bother with lead nurturing?

For one thing, according to Forrester Research, companies that successfully implement lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead.

And importantly, around 65% of B2B marketers have NOT established lead nurturing. If your competitors aren’t doing it yet, adding it to your own marketing efforts could give you the edge in your industry.

How do you go about using email as a nurturing strategy?

Let’s be clear. This is not about sending them an overload of emails that are all about you and your brand, or focused on selling ‘at’ them. This is about identifying what their problems are, what they need and sending them targeted, relevant information that solves those problems and demonstrates that you get them.

When creating anything for your emails, ask yourself; Does this:

– Add Value?
– Build Trust?
– Educate?

You want to slowly add value, build trust and educate them on your product or offer until they understand exactly why and how your service can solve their specific problem. Then it’s a no-brainer for them to buy in.

Getting started…

First off, you want to identify their goals, problems and challenges.

Then, figure out how your product/service/offering can meet their needs and solve their problems, and also, what they need to know along the way = how you can educate them and offer value.

Now you have your content topics, the key is to personalise them to the individual customer, as well as to their stage in their buying journey.

Tips for personalisation:

Using their name, the company name and/or location, helps it feel less like an automated email ‘blast’ and more human-to-human. Another way to personalise is to use list segmentation to target specific behaviors or groups, that way you can send more targeted emails containing information that is more specific to them – rather than a generic mass email.

Targeting their buying ‘stage’.

A great nurture campaign is focused on what your customer needs, when they need it. If they have already bought from you, they are in a different stage than someone who has just signed up to your blog – so the emails they receive need to reflect that.

Here are 3 strategies you can use for email nurturing…

1. A content-based strategy, e.g. emails based on the leads current interaction with your brand. This is where you identify what they are interested in (did they download a PDF about assessing their current financial position or register for an initial call about corporate consulting) and add them to the relevant email nurture campaign. That way, every email they receive contains content relevant to their interests at this stage of their buying journey.

2. A goal-based strategy. This is where you identify the 3 main problems your lead has that your product solves, and create 3 campaigns based on helping them gain the solutions to that problem, so they can achieve their goal.

3. A ‘DIY’ strategy. This is a single ‘onboarding’ email that allows your lead to enter themselves into the campaign they feel is of most value to them. For example, at FrogOnline, we could send an email to our leads asking what they feel their business needs most right now, and how we can help them most.

E.g. Do you want to make sure your website is working for your business?
Do you need to increase the amount of leads your business gets each week?
Do you want to know what’s hot in marketing for 2020?

Then, they can choose what will be of most value to them, and they enter a nurture campaign that will be targeted to them; building trust, adding value and educating them!

Some tips from our lead nurture experts:

– Space out your emails. On behalf of leads everywhere, please do not email them every day! You want to find the sweet spot of staying front of mind, without being spammy.
– Encourage them to take action. Occasionallyremind them that you are here to help, ask them for their feedback, and add an incentive or offer so that they get a gentle nudge to re-engage with your brand.
– Did we mention to personalise? You never want every lead to get every email. By segmenting your database by age, location, job or interests you will get more traction with your campaigns.

B2B marketers say the #1 benefit of marketing automation (email campaigns) is the ability to generate more and better leads. Email nurturing is a must-have for marketing in 2020.

If your business doesn’t currently have a lead generation process in place, or you just don’t have the time to keep up with your lead nurturing – our team can help.

We can handle every stage of your lead generation, from social media advertising, to landing pages and on-going nurture campaigns, so if that’s the boost your business needs this year, just get in touch!