Lead nurturing can increase conversions and even shorten your sales cycle in some instances. Building trust over a period of time and then selling can have fruitful rewards.

Email campaigns can be an effective strategy for lead nurturing. You have the ability to plan campaigns in advance and set them to send automatically over as long a period as you need. Testing them as you go. Neil Patel is a big champion of them: “you can drip feed appropriate content at the right time – leads are never forgotten and opportunities never missed.”

Planning Your Campaign

Content

It’s important to structure your campaign around your end goal. What product or service do you hope to sell at the end? Once you have this you can start to write your emails accordingly E.g. If you are a travel company and your end goal is to sell a trip to Thailand. There is no point spending the majority of the emails talking about Europe.

Timing

When creating a time-line it can help to know how long your sales cycle is. If it takes leads on average a month to go from introduction to purchase, you could schedule your emails around this.

Picking Your Provider

It’s important to select the right email marketing provider for setting up your campaign. The benefits of using a quality service provider include:

• It’s easy to design emails that look professional.
• Easy segmentation of your lists.
• In-depth metrics and analytics for A/B testing.

Popular providers include: Mailchimp, Active Campaign and Constant Contact.

The Emails

What Should I Write?

You want to build a relationship with your subscribers. Nurturing trust in your company before trying to sell. Some ideas include:

• Showing that you understand your customers pain points.
• Giving info about your company, such as its vision and values.
• Encouraging discussion.
• Offering value: Tips, blog posts, e-courses etc. can work here.
• Get Personal: Kapost say “No one wants to feel like the recipient of a copy-pasted message with no real personalization. One of the worst things you can do is leave out a personal touch.”
• Strong subject Lines: A good subject line can be the difference between your email getting opened or getting sent straight to spam. Check out this article by WordStream to read about some different types of subject lines.

A Typical Email Sequence

Effective email sequences can vary a lot depending on the industry and each individual business. But here is an example of what to include in a typical lead nurturing campaign:

Email #1

• Introduce your business.
• Explain a little about what you do, but not too much.
• Tell the reader what they can expect to receive from you over the course of the campaign.
• Invite them to follow you on other channels such as Facebook and Instagram.
• Ask them to whitelist your email address.
• Meera Kothand recommends adding a curiosity loop that gets the reader excited about your next email.

Email #2

• Deliver on your curiosity loop.
• Add value: Maybe a tip to help with your customers pain points or a link to a blog.
• Encourage discussion, ask readers a question and tell them to reply by email or through social.

Email #3

• Go deeper with your company’s story and vision.
• Show that you can empathize with the readers pain points.

Email #4

• Provide more value: You could link to another blog, e-book or video that helps them specifically. There’s lots of options here.

Email #5

• Plant the idea of what you are going to sell in the next message. Do this in a subtle way, don’t try to sell at this point.

Email #6

• Introduce your offer. Don’t beat around the bush with this one, make it obvious what you are offering, but make sure your tone still matches the rest of your series.

A/B Test

There is no one size fits all for lead nurture campaigns. What works for you will depend on many factors such as the nature of your business and the type of customers you target. It’s important to continually A/B test your campaigns to find what is working and to keep them optimized for conversion. If you are a beginner when it comes to split testing take a look at Neil Patel’s guide.

Segmentation

Dividing up your lists based on specific interests or actions is smart move. In fact, in a survey by Ascend2, 51% of marketing influencers found segmentation to be the most effective form of personalisation . It can save you time and money as means you can get more specific with your campaigns, and there is greater chance that they will resonate with readers.

There are a number of ways to segment your list. You can even get subscribers to self-segment. Digital Marketer offers some ideas to use:

• Content such as blog posts, video, or e-books.
• Special offers: discount codes or specific promotions could work.
• Events: webinars, demos, workshops, or even one-on-one phone calls.

Wrapping it Up

It’s important to take a softly, softly approach when crafting a lead nurture campaign. Build a relationship with your leads and then try to sell once that’s established.

It’s all well and good having an email campaign ready to go, but you need subscribers to send your messages to. MailOptin’s intuitive and powerful form builder makes it super easy to build beautiful, high-converting, lead generation forms that are optimized to get people to take action. And it has integrations with many of the popular mailing providers such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact, so that you can start sending campaigns straight away.

Schedule your live demo now.

This post was written by Nick Stephens, a freelance writer specializing in digital marketing. He is a massive geek when it comes to learning how to drive business  online. And loves crafting word magic. Check out more of his work at njstephens.com.