Email Nurture Campaign

Those selling products online do so in a highly competitive market. No matter what industry, what software niche you’re in, to attract new customers means taking a more involved, targeted approach with your marketing. Establishing a multi channel lead nurturing campaign is one such approach.

An email nurture campaign is about improving each of your leads, investing in their marketing by targeting your marketing for each lead and for each phase of their journey. A core component of such email nurture campaigns is the use of a drip campaign. Why use a drip campaign? Drip campaigns are a type of email nurture campaign in which the company or marketer creates a series of messages that are to be then sent to a lead in a pre-defined order. Every time a new lead is earned, they will get the first message in the drip email sequence and will then get the subsequent messages as they progress forward in their buyer’s journey.This type of campaign is different than a typical email newsletter or lead subscription set-up in which leads or subscribed individuals will receive the same messages all others are receiving regardless of where they are in their buyer’s journey.

Email Nurture Campaign Best Practices

Once you’ve decided to enact a lead nurturing email strategy, the next step is to create a solid lead nurturing campaign strategy that incorporates email nurture campaign best practices. Lead nurturing best practices are those practices that other marketers, businesses, and product-led software companies like yours have utilized to ensure that their targeted leads get the best information, in the best format, with the best timing to accelerate their buyer’s journey and transition them from lead to customer.

Some nurture campaign best practices may feel intuitive and be practices you are already enacting in your current marketing strategy, while others are trickier and often are best done with the help of an experienced marketer who knows how to optimize a lead nurturing three pronged approach. A great example of a best practice that on paper sounds easy but can often require a skilled person’s assistance is finding the best email send frequency and cadence. Send emails too often and you risk a lead unsubscribing or marking as spam (which can have a very negative effect on your overall deliverability), but at the opposite end of the spectrum, if you send emails too infrequently with minimal information, you risk being dismissed as irrelevant.

Lead Nurturing Funnel

Lead nurturing is about creating a relationship with your potential buyers, nurturing those potentials with planned emails and products with the long-term goal of securing a long-term client. Thus, another great way of thinking about lead nurturing is as you leading your target down the sales funnel. Each email and other manner of outreach to your potential should be and connected with a different part of your sales funnel, with each being a small step closer to buying or subscribing to your products.

There are four distinct lead nurturing stages or parts of your lead nurturing funnel: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. When creating your next campaign, it’s a good idea to base a lead nurturing plan template around these four stages. In your email funnel template or lead nurturing email workflow plan, try to create at least one different email for each of these stages. For example, the awareness stage of the email funnel is about establishing what problem your audience might have and how your product or service solves that problem. Consider how different buyers of your product would describe their goals and pain points and create at least three different emails about how they might try to resolve it.

Lead nurturing is a lot about warming up those leads who could be interested in a product or service but are not yet convinced or ready to buy. The lead nurturing funnel thus is best utilized for high-ticket products or complex services that need to really answer prospective customers’ concerns or needs. Each email in each stage thus should be written to give leads the right type of information at the right time and in the right order.

Email Nurture Sequence

The sequence of your company’s emails is critical to the success of the overall email nurturing campaign. We like to compare setting up a new lead email sequence to setting up a new personal date prospect; you want to put your best foot forward, to make the best impression. You are trying to attract leads without being too aggressive and scaring them off, but also without being too meek and thereby easily forgettable.

Whether you follow an established email nurture sequence template, or create your own, there should be some basic email nurture sequence elements you should follow. First, having an interesting and relevant subject line for every email is essential. You might also use your email subject line as a reference to the actual email sequence, to give your leads an understanding of where they are and where you are going. For instance, email sequence examples might include something like “Chapter 2 of 4: Your title here” or “Episode 3 of 5: Your title here”.

It’s also very important or each instance of your email nurture sequence examples to include a part of the story you are trying to tell — and you are trying to tell a story. Your story, at its base, starts with your customer having a conflict, the reveal of your product, and the resolution of how your product helps your customers overcome their conflict. Whether you set up email sequence automation or you manually send out each email in your sequence, make sure that you create and follow a storyline. Make a goal for your company, such as having twenty customers who complete the full email sequence, and then run analytics to see how successful your sequence was.

B2B Nurture Email Templates

If you’re a business to business company, then B2B drip campaigns and B2B lead nurturing ought to be a cornerstone of your marketing and lead generation plan. While some marketers and new business owners might doubt the power of email, consider the recent study by Marketing Sherpa that found that 81% of surveyed B2B companies found that email marketing was their number one lead generation tool. Email tends to be even more effective for new B2B and even B2C business owners who are just starting out as it is a cost-effective way to nudge leads down the sales funnel due to you being able to draft a full sequence of emails in a couple of days to use for your next hundred or so leads.

Note, however, that you should not just slap together a quick email series and send it out. Practice makes perfect and until you have that practice in forming or composing effective SaaS nurture emails, or whatever your B2B product is, we strongly suggest using B2B nurture email templates. Using the best B2B nurture emails and the best B2B email templates will enable you to follow successful B2B marketing automation examples, and the more you see how they work, the better you’ll get at crafting your own unique version of tried-and-true nurture email campaigns.

Drip Vs Nurture Campaign

Throughout this article, we have more or less used drip campaign and nurture campaign interchangeably as both have the same format, or the same essential core idea. Both drip and client nurture campaign strategies are campaigns that are email based in which information is segmented and sent to users in scheduled pieces. So if they both have the same format and the same idea, what is the answer to drip vs nurture campaign? The answer lies in the tone of the approach.

The best drip campaign examples are those that send messages to prospects or leads in a steady, but more passive approach. These are general campaigns that can be easily but broadly defined with established language and goals and sent out on more general timelines. In contrast, the best nurture campaigns are more aggressive and tend to be more targeted to the specific needs of a specific, niche buyer persona. In other words, a drip campaign is about slowly and generally let your information and marketing drip to an audience while a nurture campaign is about isolating a specific type of seed (buyer persona) and sending them targeted emails to help nurture or grow them from lead to customer.

Lead Nurturing Campaign Example

Because drip campaigns and lead nurturing campaigns can be so similar, when you’re first starting out or experimenting with this type of campaign you should review what others have done. Do some market research by using an alias email and subscribing to receive emails from other companies in your industry. See what type of lead nurturing tools and lead nurturing examples they are using. Take special note of how they are approaching customer problems and how they craft their own product or SaaS as the solution.

Once you have an idea of what other companies within your industry are doing, go out and find the best nurture programs where you can download a strong lead nurturing campaign example. Then, just as we recommended above with the drip campaign examples, use those best of examples as a template upon which to fill in your information and content. While some companies may feel like they should create their own nurture campaigns from the ground-up, just remember that it pays to stand on the shoulders of giants. Using a template or framework that is already successful will help expedite your company’s learning process and fast-forward your growth. If you’re unsure about this strategy, you can always establish a timeline trial of it, reviewing at the end of the timeline how effective each email nurturing campaign was.