Lead nurturing is essentially the process of fostering relationships and building trust with email subscribers, before they make their way onto the checkout page. It has long been held in sales that buyers don’t like being sold to, they want to be heard, they want to be understood, and ultimately they want you to prove your trustworthiness and authority before considering your solution.
While there are some tried and tested best practices to get the best results from lead nurturing, the process itself involves plenty of testing, tracking, and optimization based on unique buyer personas, interests, goals, and objectives. Segmenting is even more important if you are working with a business leads database that can greatly improve your profits.
Thus, this is an art, just as much as it is a science, and in this article we dive deep into both sides to provide marketers with the basic playbook to get started.
1. Open With A Bang
You never get a second chance at making a great first impression, and this is all the more true when it comes to email marketing.
Welcome emails help set the stage for the relationship between you and the subscriber, and ideally they should reflect the brand, trust, and authority you wish to establish. If you are using lead magnets, such as promises of freebies or discounts, this would be the time to fulfill the same.
The open rates and other engagement metrics are often substantially higher with welcome emails, before falling off a cliff in subsequent mails. This makes it absolutely crucial to make the most of this limited attention span by leaving no stone unturned. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this, but marketers can refer to certain examples and best practices for further inspiration.
2. Segment Your Lists
The age of lumping all of your subscribers into a single mailing list is long gone. To get the best engagement and results, consider segmenting your leads based on factors such as source, demographics, interests, intent, and more.
For example, it doesn’t make any sense to send a newsletter on ‘Personal Finance For Beginners’ to seasoned finance professionals, who might find it patronizing.
Most email marketing tools provide segmentation features, and don’t require any extensive learning curve, or data analysis skills to get started. To do this more effectively, a critical component is lead intelligence, which at its core is just data mining to capture as much information regarding your prospects as possible, so that they can be classified and segmented more efficiently.
3. Automation With Personalization
Anyone who has tried their hand at email marketing will scoff at the amount of work involved, which is why automation has made such major in-roads into this segment. However, it should be noted that automation does not mean robotic, or generic, in fact, the new generation of automated email marketing solutions actually enable a great degree of personalization.
Automation essentially refers to mapping out information, messages, and notifications based on triggers, actions, and segmentations. While it might require substantial planning and effort in the beginning, it can result in steady results for years to come with minimal effort.
The best way to get a hang of this is to sign up for Aweber’s eMail automation tool and actually get your hands dirty.
Final Words
Even after two decades of hitting the mainstream, email marketing still reigns supreme when it comes to return on marketing spends, and overall engagement.
Over the years, innovations in this space have only increased the potency and value of email marketing lists, making them indispensable to businesses and marketers across the world.
Despite this, a vast majority of marketers remain unorganized and mistake spammy mass mailers as marketing, or lead nurturing.
