You’ve created some amazing content and your website visitors are promisingly moving their way down the sales funnel. It’s obvious that they like something about your brand and find your content interesting. However, this is only half of the battle. Trawling through a cluttered inbox full of marketing offers can be laborious and most of your leads won’t be ready to buy yet. So the first step here is building trust and creating that spark of excitement, that’s where lead nurturing emails come into play.
Firstly, how do we define lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of creating relationships with buyers at every stage of the buyer's journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects, and providing them with the relevant information and answers they need.
Lead nurturing emails are a great way to connect with prospects who aren’t at the stage of buying yet as you have an opportunity build trust and create a familiarity with your brand until they are ready to buy.
1. Write powerful subject lines
You may have written the best email in marketing history, but if it doesn’t ever get opened what was the point? Using intriguing subject lines is essential for lead nurturing. However, there is a fine line between intriguing and clickbait, if you are going to make a bold claim or statement in your subject line make sure you can follow through with your content. Creating subject lines purely for clickbait will ruin your prospects trust, diminishing brand credibility and inevitably leading to unsubscribes.
2. Always get the timing spot on
According to a survey conducted by Technology Advice, 43% of people unsubscribe if they receive too many emails. A sure way to lose leads is by emailing them too often. The best way to get over this is to set a plan and stick to it by automating emails and coordinating the time sent with the prospects place in the buying funnel.
3. Be interesting and educate
Providing your prospects with information that is both interesting and teaches them something new is obvious. However this is particularly valuable at the beginning of the sales funnel, where you should focus heavily on providing valuable information that they use to inform their future decisions and interactions with your brand. At this stage you are still trying to build authority and trust and this isn’t a fast process when it comes to getting people to buy. You have to first make customers believe that you know exactly what you’re talking about and you are a thought leader in your industry. It’s also really important to target the right information at the right people, so you need to know exactly what stage of the funnel they are in.
Ask yourself these questions:
What have they already downloaded?
Which pages on your website have they engaged with the most?
What subjects are they most interested in/talking about on social media?
Remember: you want to educate, not sound like a salesman.
4. Create content that is both relevant and personalised
It’s really important that your emails don’t seem automated and generic, the reader needs to know that they’ve been created by a real person, with unique content that is completely authentic to them. Let your leads know that you care about them individually and they’ll be more inclined to engage with your content. You should at minimum know why your lead has signed up to receive your piece of content and where they have come from to find you. A simple way to make sure you achieve this is through segmentation, your content should be unique to every stage of the buyer’s journey so you need to focus on one stage at a time. The more you segment, the more relevant your content will be for the reader. Segmentation will mean higher engagement with your content, leading to an increase in open and click rates.
5. ‘Clarity beats clever every time’
As writers it’s easy to get carried away with the language, using words we think sound interesting and clever, but in reality people switch off and you end up causing confusion. Your readers will be busy people and within seconds of glancing at your email they should have all the information they need to understand the purpose and value that it will provide them with.
There are a number of tactics to create content that is easier to digest:
- Use bullet points
- Bold headlines
- Use lists
- Short sentences
- Use only one CTA
- Images
- Always provide a next step
The key with lead nurturing emails is to build both trust and familiarity with your brand. Steer far away from writing sales pitch emails. When done effectively, lead nurturing emails should generate a strong conversion rate.
