Driving traffic to your website is excellent, but when only 4% of visitors are ready to buy, it can be challenging to convert them to customers.
Email marketing is remarkably effective when done well—it generates a whopping $38 for every $1 spent. An effective email campaign can not only help nurture leads, but it can also assist in qualifying them in the first place.
You can increase brand awareness and build strong loyalty to your products through strategic email marketing using personalization and automation. In turn, bringing in more revenue from subscribers who show interest in your products and services.
Keep reading to learn more about nurturing your customers with an email campaign and B2B lead nurturing email examples that will help you generate more revenue.
The Benefits of Nurturing Leads With an Email Campaign
Lead nurturing refers to the process of investing in relationships with your target audience. Lead nurture campaigns are equally as important for B2C companies as B2B brands.
There is a reason that 74% of global companies prioritize lead nurturing and conversion. It’s key to any marketing arsenal, and it starts with email marketing.
Email Nurturing Increases Quality Leads and Sales
Lead nurture email campaigns factor in brand education and awareness. They should give prospective clients insight into who you are, what you do, and why you’re the best in your field. Many brands do this through email marketing campaigns.
Here are a few more statistics to show how powerful email nurturing can be.
Nurturing leads through email generates 50% more sales than sending emails to non-nurtured leads.
Email nurturing results in a 451% increase in qualified leads when used in conjunction with marketing automation. Point blank, companies that combine automation with lead nurturing emails generate more qualified leads.
Lead Nurturing Is the Key to a Better Email Response
Compared to standalone email blasts, nurturing leads through emails brings 4-10 times the response rate. This increase in response rate is due to personalized emails customized to each subscriber’s customer journey.
Now that you’re aware of the benefits of email nurturing let’s talk about email nurturing campaigns.
What Is an Email Nurture Campaign?
Email campaigns are initiatives that help you organically engage with your target audience. They’re meant to inspire, educate, and enlighten consumers. With these campaigns, you can provide consumers with the answers to their questions and the content they need to begin their customer journey.
Nurture campaigns center around behaviors. Together, they create email nurture campaigns, which are email campaigns designed to engage, educate, enlighten, and encourage leads to take action. Brands create them to answer their lead’s questions and provide them with engaging content as they flow through the sales journey.
The goal of these campaigns is to turn prospects into high-quality leads and ultimately into loyal customers.
The best email nurture campaigns are created based on past user behavior. For example, a user visits a specific page on the website, fills out a form, or signs up for a webinar.
After a user takes a specific action, the email nurturing campaign process begins.
Qualifying Leads
The first step to creating a nurture email campaign is determining where your prospects are located in the sales funnel.
When marketing and sales teams work together to forecast the likelihood that a prospect will make a purchase, they’re engaging in lead qualification. Lead qualification is vital at every stage of the sales journey. Ultimately, it decides whether a prospect will continue to be funneled down the sales pipeline.
This process is vital because it saves you energy, time, and your bottom line. Lead qualification starts early in the pipeline. It’s best if this begins as you’re making the first contact—or beforehand. It helps you ascertain:
- If the prospect is in the right location and industry to benefit from your products or services
- If they have a need that your product or services can fill
- If the prospect has the budget and authority to make purchasing decisions
- If there is a way you can provide value over the prospect’s current vendor or your competitors
Keep in mind that the right communication at the wrong time can be just as harmful to the process as the wrong message—sometimes, it is more detrimental than no message at all.
Asking the Right Questions
When someone new subscribes to your emails, you must ask for crucial information to help you determine where they are in the customer journey.
It’s essential to ask for only the most relevant information. The more questions you ask, the more annoyed your prospects become, which ultimately decreases conversion.
For example, if it’s unnecessary to know your prospect’s last name, consider asking for their occupation instead. Knowing their profession can help you better understand who they are and what content they would find beneficial. All you lose is a bit of information you didn’t have a use for anyway.
Instead of considering opt-in forms as a necessity, think about how you can leverage them for lead qualification. Ask the prospect for information your company needs to qualify them based on:
- Fit
- Behavior
- Interest
- Buying stage
Remember, your subscribers won’t want to give you an endless amount of data willingly. The most effective opt-in forms only include 2-4 form fields. Unless they know they’re getting something of value out of it, customers aren’t interested in providing you with personal information.
Consider the reciprocity and ask yourself what you can give your subscribers in exchange for their data?
Try offering gated content, like a free e-book download, in exchange for more customer information. Once you have trusting subscribers who recognize your content as high-quality, they’ll be willing to provide the information you’re asking for to receive something of value in return.
Once you have the necessary information about your target prospects, it’s time to move to the next step: segmenting leads.
Segmenting Leads
Email marketing is efficient for lead nurturing, thanks to automation and segmentation.
By using segmentation, you can send your prospects the content they want without spending hours crafting individual emails for each individual subscriber. Break your prospects into segments and use automation to make the process easier.
Segmentation is used to split your audience into categories, such as age, gender, or location—this depends on what’s best for your industry and company. However, you don’t have to stop there. Shoot for hyper-segmentation. Use the data you’ve collected, such as their past activity, stated preferences, and more, and strive to create a segment of one.
For example, you might segment your list by gender to ensure customers receive the most relevant content. Why not take it further and target female customers, aged 20-30, living in Atlanta, who purchased one of your products. Or you can target female millennials who work in fashion. It’s possible to develop segments according to where they are in the sales funnel.
When segmenting, you can get as specific as you want. Create the segments that make the most sense for your audience and industry. Marketing directly to these individual groups will tell you what content they like and want, and what products or services they need—then you can deliver precisely that.
The idea is to personalize your content as much as possible to deliver exactly what they desire—and nothing else. The more you hone this process and the better content you provide, it’s more likely your customers will come back for more. This gives you even more data and allows you to segment even further. Thus the cycle continues.
Build Trust With Your Prospects
Segmenting content in the right way not only builds trust and associates your brand with value in your customers’ minds, but it also improves your deliverability. Deliverability is key to better inbox placement, which is a proven way to see tangible outcomes from your email campaigns.
Today, the concept of spam has evolved to include more than Nigerian princes looking for love. Any unsolicited or irrelevant email is often flagged as spam. Segmentation is a way to combat this and generate significant revenue for your business.
3. Automating Email Campaigns
Once you’ve placed qualified subscribers into relevant segments, use automation to boost your lead nurturing process.
Email campaign automation ensures that you will never miss an opportunity to reach out to a prospective client—which is an opportunity to convert.
If you’re offering a discount because of a special occasion or holiday, try scheduling your emails in advance. Setting your email campaign up in this way ensures that your audience sees your email at the opportune time. Plus, it’s liberating just to set it and forget it.
Automating your email campaigns also enables you to track consumer behavior. You can see which prospects opened your email, which links they clicked, and the actions they took once they arrived there.
Know exactly whether your email campaign click-throughs translated into revenue. This data allows you to improve your content and, in turn, increase your income.
If you schedule your email campaigns, your prospects that live in different time zones will still get them at a time that’s convenient for them. Timing is everything, as you don’t want your emails to end up buried at the bottom of their inbox.
By scheduling your email campaigns in advance, you also improve deliverability. Fewer spam filters will target your emails, and you’ll get better inbox placement. Not even the most well-targeted and meticulously designed email can gain traction if it’s sitting at the bottom of your prospect’s inbox.
4. Personalizing Email Campaigns
Marketing automation works best when you can deliver content that’s hyper-tailored to your individual prospects.
Thanks to technology, personalizing emails is no longer a day-long job. You can take your content personalization to the next level using dynamic content.
Dynamic content is easy to create and allows you to build one email and customize it depending on whoever receives it. For example, when creating an email for your boutique spa, keep the copy the same, but change the banner image according to the treatment that interests your prospects the most.
You can tempt remote-working subscribers with images of relaxing massages while your business people receive a banner showing facials and beauty treatments. Dynamic content like this puts your data, automation, and segmentation to work for you.
All of this depends on whether you know what’s effective for each of your segments. An easy way to test your campaigns is to use A/B testing to see which content delivers the best results.
A/B testing is a form of digital testing. First, design an email and then change a minor feature (such as the call-to-action) before sending both emails out to a small list of subscribers who engage with your brand.
Analyze the email metrics to determine which performs best. Once you know, you can send the better-performing campaign to your remaining subscribers. This tactic ensures you’re reaping the best possible benefits from your marketing campaign. If you know that one group prefers blog posts over images, you can shift your dynamic content to include more text than pictures. If one group buys mostly work apparel, your next “newest arrivals” email can feature comfortable flats for work.
Personalization in marketing goes far beyond simply including a subscriber’s name. You can’t just tell prospects that you’re listening to them. You have to prove it. Then you’ll start seeing actual results.
5. Customizing Nurture Journeys
To make the most out of nurturing prospects through email campaigns, automate the entire customer journey.
To do this, focus on triggers that will automatically send an email (or an entire series of emails) to prospects based on their actions or behaviors when performed by a visitor.
It’s as easy as designing an email campaign one time. By identifying relevant triggers, your prospects will receive personalized emails based on their customer journey. You don’t have to do a single thing after the initial design.
Customer journeys present a great way to build brand loyalty without requiring any heavy lifting on your part. For example, you can offer a unique case study or download once customers spend a certain amount of money or reach a certain threshold.
Actions might be triggers, such as entering an email address in exchange for an e-book. However, there are other types of triggers, as well, including date and time. For example, you can set up an automatic email to request a review one week after a customer purchases from your site.
Designing a well-thought-out customer journey will go a long way to impress your prospects, as 55% are willing to pay for a better customer experience.
Often, your industry and business will determine what your customer journeys will be. However, here are a few examples:
- Abandoned cart emails
- Order follow-up
- Feedback, surveys, or suggestions
- Re-engagement
- Thank you
Each of these customer journeys begins with automation and ends with a prospect completing the desired action. This action might be as simple as re-engaging with your content or as significant as making a purchase.
Automating these journeys enables you to build a consistent narrative across your website and email campaigns. This goes a long way in building loyalty and brand recognition.
6. Using Compelling Calls-to-Action
A call-to-action is arguably the most essential part of your email campaign. In whichever way you decide to frame your next campaign, make sure each email ends with a solid CTA to convert your leads.
Once you’ve nurtured your leads through the sales funnel, it’s vital to end on a CTA that tells your prospects exactly what to do, such as:
- Grab a download
- Buy a product
- Read the rest of a blog
- Share a piece of content
- Fill out a form
- Register for an event
…The list goes on.
CTA buttons consistently outperform text links, mainly because most people scan emails without reading them. Bold CTA buttons stand out. You also want to avoid too many CTAs, as this will confuse prospects and lead to a decrease in customer engagement.
The primary function of a CTA is to make it easy for your prospect to perform a specific action. Once you’ve split your leads into segments and nurtured them, you want to make converting straightforward. Please don’t make the mistake of spending time qualifying and nurturing your leads only to lose them at the bottom of the sales funnel.
Creating the Perfect CTA
When writing a call-to-action, the words you choose matter. Significantly.
The language in your CTA can cause people to move on or push them to click. Here are the steps to take to craft a perfect CTA for your next email nurturing campaign.
Use Action Words
The most powerful CTAs use action words to tell viewers what actions they need to take next. Use power words to be more persuasive and evoke an emotional response.
Generate Curiosity and Excitement
The best calls-to-action rely on psychology to combine curiosity with excitement or anticipation. Use words that make prospects feel like they’ll miss out if they don’t follow through.
One way to generate excitement is to gamify your opt-in forms so that people are more likely to click through.
Highlight Value
Good CTAs often focus on the value they offer. You can communicate this by simply adding the words “Risk-Free” or “Free” to your CTAs.
Button Design
Design is another crucial aspect of calls to action. How do you make them stand out? By utilizing a few key design elements.
Most experts agree that when designing call-to-action buttons, you should:
- Use white space so that the button stands out
- Frame the button to create contrast
- Use a button color that contrasts with the other colors on the page
- Make sure it’s large enough to click but not so large that it’s overwhelming
- Optimize buttons for mobile
Testing Calls-to-Action
You can’t wing it when creating calls to action. You can’t trust your gut and make hasty writing and design decisions. You need to assess your efforts by using data.
It’s also easier to judge the performance of your email campaigns by being direct. Are you successfully converting prospects into customers? Are you swiftly leading them through the next stage in the customer journey? Are your prospects opening your emails and immediately deleting them?
A clear and specific call to action with an associated metric simplifies the process of evaluating how effective your campaigns have been and how well you’re converting.
Convert as Many New Leads Into Customers as Possible
A more innovative and direct lead nurturing campaign will help you convert quality leads into customers as soon as possible. When doing so, you’re generating the maximum amount of revenue for your business.
Your customer has to get to know your brand and trust you before buying, but once they do, they’ll likely spend far more money. Add email marketing to your lead nurturing efforts, and you’ll not only convert more prospects into leads, but you’ll see bigger purchases come through.
Following these steps will lead to building awareness and brand loyalty and upping your company’s bottom line.
Even if your brand is positioned in the market well, you need the right digital marketing strategy to scale.
If you’re not sure where to start, let us help you. Bear Fox Marketing follows a customer-centric approach. We strive to match your value proposition to your customer’s needs or problems while making them the heroes. Our tactics will help you build loyal customers. Let us help you develop a nurture email campaign strategy so that you can save even more money.
When you’re ready to get started, let us know how we can help.