How Automation Can Give a Leg Up to Your Lead Nurturing Game

Often brands obsess so much over adding new customers to their pipeline that they fail to pay attention to what follows after, something that is absolutely critical to making sure that these fresh additions convert into recurring and loyal buyers- lead nurturing. As any seasoned email marketer will tell you, the real job begins after a visitor has filled out your sign up form. Soon after a new lead has entered your funnel, your next priority needs to be ensuring their retention and strengthening your relationship. To that extent, you need to execute a variety of things ranging from conveying your value proposition to addressing your customer’s pain points. By sending lead nurturing emails, you can tick off all these objectives without breaking a sweat. 

Make no mistake, lead nurturing is not an easy nut to crack. You have to be at it for a while before things align in order and start making sense to you. But, there is something that can both easen the implementation of lead nurturing campaigns and increase their efficiency significantly as well- automation. Imagine actively responding to every single one of your customer’s interactions and activities. That would go a long way toward making them sale-ready, wouldn’t it? So, how can you go about it? Well, that’s what we answer in this blog. Today, we talk about what goes into curating a winning lead nurturing email campaign and how you can leverage email marketing automation to amplify its impact. In the process, we’ll also be looking at some stunning lead nurturing email templates to give you more clarity. Can’t wait to dive in? Let’s go!

Building a Nurture Email Campaign: Best Practices to Follow

As we have already touched upon previously, the benefits of sending lead nurturing emails are many- 

• It firmly positions your business as a thought leader 
• It gives you the scope of amassing valuable insights regarding your customers
• It helps you stay constantly on their radar
• It allows you to tap into up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
• It lets you generate new leads

However, all these rewards can be claimed only if your lead nurturing email campaigns hit all the right notes. Wondering how you can make that possible? Take a look at these best practices:

1. Offer Value to Your Subscribers

Whenever someone signs up for your communication, they do so with the intention of learning something new from you; any email marketing automation agency will tell you this. Hence, summoning your original insights and presenting them in a manner such that the subscriber is able to derive value must be among your foremost lead nurturing strategies. Goes without saying, it is something that you’ll observe across the best lead nurturing email examples out there. Ideally, the information you share with your readers should serve two purposes:

1. It should help your customers make the most out of your products or services
2. It should apprise them of industry trends with a view of improving their decision-making process.

Although we live in an age of information overload, there’s always a market for content that exhibits exceptional clarity and rigor. Hence, don’t attempt to forcefully compile everything you have to say in one email, assuming that your audience will lose interest otherwise. If your material is compelling and your storytelling abilities, top-notch, feel free to phase out your narrative across an email sequence. 

Should you manage to share original and insightful content with your subscribers on a regular basis, you’ll have them looking forward to your communication. That, in turn, will increase their interaction with you and also heighten the possibility of their conversion. 

2. Segment Your Email List

To be able to nurture your leads effectively, you must first identify all the various factors that set them apart from each other. This, you’ll only be able to achieve if you divide your email list into different segments on the basis of different parameters such as age, gender, occupation, past purchases, browsing history, interests and preferences, position in the sales funnel, and the like. 

Email segmentation enables you to understand the diverse buyer personas interacting with your business, subsequently empowering you to devise unique and personalized engagement strategies for each of them. All agencies dabbling with email marketing campaign management understand this. A huge part of nurturing your leads involves sending them content that is directly relevant to their interests and activities. All the best lead nurturing email examples you come across will be emblematic of this wihtout fail. By segmenting your list, you’ll be able to accomplish this objective with ease. The best part is that you don’t even have to chalk out a complex segmentation framework to drive impressive results. Basic parameters like the ones mentioned above are enough to help you build a solid foundation. Of course, you are free to add more parameters down the line as and when there’s a need for the same.

3. Be Aware of Your Lead’s Position in the Sales Funnel

This has a massive bearing on your email lead nurturing campaign and strategies. The stage a particular lead occupies in your sales funnel directly influences the type of content you have to craft for them. For instance, if it’s an untouched lead, you can’t send them live demos and competitor analysis from the get-go. That kind of content is more suited to a lead at the bottom of your funnel, someone who is wise to their problem statement and knows what kind of solution they are looking for. 

On the other hand, leads at the awareness level are best engaged with content which helps them discover their pain points. The focus should be on familiarising them with your objective and community, all the while illustrating how your offerings could be just the right fix for their problems.

4. Ensure Brand Consistency

If your brand has a presence across multiple platforms, it is very crucial to make sure that your tone across all these channels is the same. Maintaining consistency in this regard goes a long way toward winning the trust of your customers.

And by tone, we are not necessarily alluding to just copy. It extends to your visual language as well. Your color palette, font, usage of images, and other such factors also contribute to your brand identity. Keeping a uniform tone fosters the possibility of building a strong brand recall in your customers’ minds.

5. Nurture Your Leads Better by Leveraging Automation

Let’s start this section by answering this question first: Why use automation for lead nurturing? You see, as much as nurturing is about sending relevant content to your leads, it is also about sending said content at the right time. 

With automation, you get to set triggers- essentially, a possible event concerning the customer- which when set off, activates a workflow corresponding to the action or event comprising the trigger. Simply put, you are able to send the right message at the right time to your audience. Quite nifty, isn’t it?

Now that we understand the significance of automation, let us take a look at some workflows which you can employ to level up your lead nurturing game.

• Welcome Emails: Generally sent as soon as a lead submits their contact information, a welcome email is the first form of communication which subscribers receive from you. In that sense, thus, your welcome email is representative of your brand’s ethos and character. The trick to crafting a winning welcome email is to keep things simple. Marketers often end up trying too much, in a bid to land that perfect first impression. But welcome emails are not meant to do all that. They exist to introduce new subscribers to your scope of work, set their expectations for the future, and, most importantly, thank the subscriber for opting in.
  
  Take a look at this welcome email from Four Sigmatic to get a clearer picture of what we are talking about.

• Cart Abandonment Emails: On average 7 out of 10 customers tend to add items to their cart, only to never look back at them again. Yep, we are talking about abandoned carts, one of the leading sources of email marketer’s nightmares. Given how annoyingly commonplace they are, if you don’t have a solid cart abandonment workflow in your armor, you stand to lose an extraordinary amount of revenue. Looking for inspiration to create one. Check out this one by Chatters, easily amongthe best lead nurturing emails you’ll find.

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• Educational Emails: Educating subscribers about your products refers to sharing insights, tips and tricks, and best practices to help them harness the full potential of your offerings. Ideally, these are sent as a sequence in the week following the product’s purchase. Educational emails not only enhance the buyer’s user experience but also give them a reason to keep coming back to you for more.
  
  This email from Craighill brilliantly illustrates our arguments.

• Product Recommendation Emails: There’s perhaps few better ways to grab your customer’s interest than by hitting them up with recommendations that align with their preferences and past interactions with your brand.
  
  Uncommon Goods hits it out of the park with their recommendation email.

• Testimonial or Social Proof Emails: A surefire way of convincing your customers of your product’s efficacy is by sharing with them the review of a fellow customer. Social proof is an incredibly powerful tool of persuasion, making this workflow a non-negotiable member of your lead nurturing strategy.
  
  If you are looking for tips to make one, don’t look beyond this email by Magic Spoon

Wrapping It Up

Nurturing your leads right paves the path for improved customer relationships, ultimately leading to higher conversions and revenue. Add automation to the mix, and the ensuing results stand to be nothing short of mind-boggling!