How To Nurture Your Leads With An Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is a powerful tool for nurturing leads in a competitive online world. The aim is to send personalized emails to your prospects to build a relationship that drives sales.

With almost 4.5 billion daily email users worldwide, brands utilizing email marketing will have a significant advantage over those who don’t.

This article explores lead nurturing, its benefits, how to communicate and connect with leads via email marketing, and how to test your campaign.

What Is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is building and maintaining professional relationships with new and existing customers, starting from the marketing phase and continuing through every stage of the sales funnel. The aim is to earn their custom when they are ready to engage with your business.

To run a successful lead nurturing campaign, marketers must anticipate the needs of the lead, even when they are not yet ready to buy. Email content can vary based on who the prospects are and where they are in the buying journey.

You can nurture leads through social media, content marketing, sales calls, and email marketing. To gather email subscribers for your lead nurturing campaign, you must utilize a lead magnet – giving away something for free (a 10% discount code) in exchange for someone’s contact information.

Benefits Of Nurturing Your Leads

Enhanced customer experiences

Sending personalized emails to your prospects, using their name or addressing their pain points, enhances their experience with your brand. This ultimately leads to increased engagement and trust.

Increase brand awareness

In a connected online world, customers are able to research your products or services and your competitors online before making a purchase. Luckily, lead nurturing keeps your brand at the forefront of a prospective buyer’s mind while they’re in the exploration phase.

For example, a consumer searching for a new pair of sports shoes may browse your fitness wear website and sign up for your email list. However, as they continue browsing the web for the perfect pair of shoes, they could just as quickly forget your brand exists.

With a lead nurturing campaign, you can remind the shopper of your brand by sending them personalized emails about your upcoming promotions, how your products can benefit them, and anything else that addresses their pain points.

Shortened sales cycle

As mentioned, shoppers are taking more time to research their options and educate themselves before purchasing. This suggests that the seven stages of the sales cycle will take longer than they used to.

Image Source: Ebsta

However, a study by Market2Lead found that nurtured leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle. By nurturing your leads, you shorten your sales cycle and convert more prospects into buyers.

Increases sales and ROI

Some of the best lead nurture campaigns generate 50% more sales-ready shoppers at a 33% lower cost. This is because effective lead nurturing motivates your leads to buy.

Lead nurturing can guide prospects through the buyer’s journey and increase conversions.

5 Tips For Nurturing Your Leads Through Email Marketing

Once you have a database of email addresses from existing and potential leads, it’s time to begin nurturing them so they convert.

The goal is to build that relationship, position your brand as an industry expert, and continuously be in front of them without being annoying or causing spam. Once you’ve built a relationship, you can transition into the selling phase of your campaign.

Unfortunately, 80% of new leads never convert into sales, so it’s time for marketers to learn more about how to nurture their leads, specifically through email marketing.

Here are five tips for nurturing your leads through email marketing:

Personalize your emails

Customers want a unique experience when they interact with a brand. 74% of customers become frustrated when an email isn’t personalized, and 63% said they never respond to non-personalized emails.

The key is to write your emails as if you were sending them to one person. This means including their name and any other details you have, as well as only sending them relevant content and offers.

With email marketing platforms, you can segment your audience and gain insight into their preferences so you can provide the personalization they expect. This allows you to connect with your leads based on their unique interests, behaviors, and stage in the funnel.

Send newsletters

You could create a newsletter that you automatically send to all your prospects weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

Newsletters are another way to keep leads informed about your business and how your products or services can meet their needs, share success stories, and answer common questions.

You can even use a newsletter to introduce your brand because if you use a lead magnet to gather emails, they might not even know who you are or what you sell.

Stay consistent with your branding

Your lead nurturing emails are an extension of your overall brand, so remember to be consistent. This helps build trust and credibility with your prospects over time.

Your emails should be consistent with the rest of your marketing materials, such as your website, app, or social media channels. This includes using colors, fonts, imagery, and a tone of voice that is cohesive with your brand.

That said, if your branding is usually professional and authoritative, showing some personality in emails can help make you more memorable and build connections faster.

Focus on one key topic per email

Less is often more effective with lead nurturing emails. Focusing on one key topic per email ensures your content is easy to digest and act on, increasing conversion rates.

Plus, focusing on one topic allows you to really dig into it and provide value rather than just skimming the surface. This increases brand credibility and authority.

Test your emails

To know what is and isn’t working with your target audience, you should consider A/B testing your email marketing campaigns and gathering the following key metrics:

• Open rates. Determined by the subject line.
• Click-through rates. Determined by the call to action (CTA) in the email.
• Conversion rates. Determined by your offer, landing page, and how well you’ve conveyed your message in the emails.

I recommend A/B testing different topic ideas, subject lines, content, calls-to-action, and even the timing and frequency of your emails. However, ensure you test just one variable at a time to get the most accurate results.

For example, you could use a subject line with emojis for 50% of your email list and a subject line without for the other 50%.

Image Source: Zapier

Wrapping Up

Effective lead nurturing saves time and resources by focusing on the most qualified leads and motivating them to become customers. By following these tips, your email marketing campaign can take a customer from their initial interest to a final conversion through communication and connection.