A big part of marketing is about creating relationships with your clients, customers, or prospects. This is where nurture campaigns can be incredibly useful for inbound marketing. If you didn’t already know, inbound marketing is marketing focused on leads that are already engaging with your brand, business, or industry.
Today, we will discuss the importance of nurturing campaigns, a 4-step strategy to creating effective nurturing campaigns, and some basic nurturing campaigns and emails.
But first…
What Exactly Is A Nurturing Campaign?
Often known as “lead nurturing,” a nurture campaign is an email marketing campaign that tries to nurture a relationship between your brand and your prospect or customer. It helps drive sales from people who are already aware of your brand, products, or services but aren’t ready or convinced to buy just yet.
Simply put, nurture campaigns help build stronger relationships with your existing leads. Think about when a visitor engages with your website and opts into your newsletter; you collect their email for future correspondence, sending newsletters, promotions, etc.
They become a part of your email marketing list. However, unlike most email marketing campaigns, nurture campaigns are not about selling something rather conversing with your leads. It is a less intrusive strategy to get conversions from leads who are already interested in your brand or product.
This less sales-like and more personal strategy focuses on relating to the prospect and offering them valuable information that is useful to them. Naturally, the information has to be relevant to what the lead is interested in, which means focusing on their previous engagements with your website or brand.
Ultimately, the goal of a nurture campaign is to strengthen relationships with your leads by nurturing them and guiding them to an eventual sale.
For example, if you run a health club and a visitor on your website engages specifically with the nutrition section and looks into the benefits of diets on your website. This generates an alert for you, and you can email them a week later with useful information on the subject.
You can include a video or webinar that details the benefits of diets. When your lead clicks through and watches the webinar, it can prompt another alert that sends another email directing them to a page where they can find an incredible diet chart or plan.
Such an email campaign has no actual call to action (CTA), and you are not creating any urgency for the prospect to engage, commit, or purchase. It is simply an exchange of relevant and valuable information where your brand is being helpful.
You are essentially “nurturing” the lead and guiding them through the marketing funnel for an eventual conversion, but they don’t clearly know or feel this.
The Importance of Nurturing Campaigns
Lead nurturing through a nurturing campaign is incredibly important for any brand or business. It helps them establish a strong tie with their prospects and builds trust and brand loyalty with them. Even if a lead nurturing campaign doesn’t immediately result in a direct conversion or sale, it may do so in the future.
Imagine if you engaged with a brand and they give you useful and relevant information about what you want. Even if you don’t commit or buy immediately, you will think of that brand when you do decide to buy eventually.
This is how powerful a nurturing campaign can be. Moreover, nurturing campaigns helps solve a bunch of different problems for brands and businesses while improving sales and marketing efforts.
Many brands face the problem of having too many dormant leads in their email marketing list or database. Through lead nurturing campaigns, they can easily maintain a strong relationship with these dormant leads while building trust and brand loyalty.
- Build Authority and Thought Leadership
Most people want to take their business to brands and businesses they think are the leaders in their respective fields. First-time customers, visitors, and potential customers may not necessarily know or understand where your brand stands among competitors.
Nurturing campaigns give you an opportunity to demonstrate that you are an expert, a thought leader, and an authority in your field.
- Longer Sales Cycles
These days, buyers take their time to research, explore options, and learn about products and services before they make a purchase decision. This is completely understandable because there are too many options, and markets are becoming more competitive than ever.
However, this means that businesses face longer sales cycles, which is why nurturing campaigns can be so important. When you nurture leads and prospects, not only do you shorten your sales cycles, but you also get more prospects to convert and make a purchase.
- Maintain Interest
Communication is key to keeping your leads engaged and interested. Automated nurturing campaigns help you maintain their interest through relevant, helpful, and consistent communications. This means they won’t easily bounce or go to your competitors for solutions.
- Intent and Passive Audiences
Website traffic data alone cannot easily determine visitor intent. Visitors may just be browsing through your pages with no intent to buy. They could be researching, window-shopping, checking your processes, or simply passing the time.
This is where nurturing campaigns can help guide passive audiences in the right direction and potentially plant the idea or desire to purchase in their minds. For instance, you can offer them a chance to briefly explore your brand, product, or service, establishing slight interest.
You can exchange this interest for an email address, opening them up to future email marketing campaigns. Passive audiences respond better to nurturing campaigns than email marketing campaigns that are promotional or push sales.
Through lead nurturing, you can take the time to educate, inform, and resolve the pain points of passive audiences. This helps turn them from uninterested visitors to potential customers, who will likely make a purchase over time.
- Poor Marketing Results
Often brands complain that they don’t see good results from their marketing efforts. While this can happen because of any number of factors, not nurturing their leads could be a big part of it. They may not be engaging prospects and leads enough to convert them into paying customers.
When brands nurture leads and communicate with them, they demonstrate value in the information and knowledge they provide. This helps build trust, brand loyalty, and authority and impacts the leads’ purchase decisions, increasing their likelihood to buy.
- Increase Average Sale Size
When it comes to paying customers, nurturing campaigns can often help broaden customer awareness about your products or solutions. This gives you the opportunity to up-sell or cross-sell to these customers without being pushy.
Ultimately, it can result in an increase in your average sale size because customers want to complement their purchase with other products and solutions you offer.
- Lead Generation and Referrals
Despite being targeted to leads that already exist in your email marketing list, nurturing campaigns have the potential to attract new visitors and generate new leads. If your nurturing campaigns have valuable content, it is likely that your leads will share them with people in their circles. This helps increase your brand reach and attract more visitors and leads.
4-Step Strategy to Create Effective Nurturing Campaigns
To implement effective email marketing automation, you will need to ensure that your emails are properly set up for lead nurturing. This will allow you to get more success from your email marketing efforts. Here is a 4-step guide that will help you set up your nurturing campaigns.
Step 1 – Define Audiences and Segment Accordingly
You will find many different types of visitors and customers coming to your website. So, you need to target them correctly for effective email marketing. This is why it is important that you define your target audience and segment them for your nurturing campaigns.
Determine which leads require nurturing and segment them before you start your nurturing campaign. Why waste your time, efforts, and resources on leads or prospects that don’t need high-level nurturing?
Step 2 – Start By Offering Value
When a visitor converts on your website, it doesn’t mean you should immediately start emailing them with various sales pitches. You need to nurture and prepare them through your funnel before they are ready to make a purchase decision.
Don’t start by pushing your products and services as the best solution to their problems. Instead, start by offering them value. Sending them something like an eBook, webinar, video, or whitepaper that solves their problems should be your first step.
It doesn’t have to be freshly produced content. You can utilize your existing content to nurture leads. If the content is good and has a track record of successfully converting leads in the past, it should work the same way with new leads too.
Step 3 – Set Objectives, Goals, and Timelines
Not only is it important to send valuable content first, but it is also important that the content is relevant and purposeful. It should appeal to your leads with the intention of moving them further along your campaign and sales funnel, closing in on the eventual sale.
Make sure to set objectives and implement goals for your nurturing campaign that lead to a final sale. This will help you clearly move forward with your lead nurturing efforts. Similarly, creating a timeline for your nurturing campaign is also important.
Your brand or business likely has a typical sales cycle, and your emails should be too. Generally, it is best to send 2-3 emails for your nurturing campaigns and space them out according to your typical sales cycle. For example, if your sales cycle is typically 35 days long, you should time your emails for the 1st, 7th, 15th, and 25th day from engagement or conversion.
Just remember that patience is key with nurturing, and you must let things unfold naturally without forcing or rushing a sale.
Step 4 – Keep Evaluating and Optimizing
No email marketing campaign is perfect, and there are always things you can do to improve. Try to experiment with various elements like content, subject lines, number of emails, and frequency of email till you find what works with a particular segment of your email marketing list.
Keep testing and improving your nurturing campaigns. They are a highly effective email marketing campaign when executed correctly. However, they take some time to perfect and produce good results.
Basic Nurturing Campaigns and Emails
With lead nurturing campaigns, you are building a long-term relationship with your prospects. The idea is to nurture them with relevant, valuable content and prime them for an eventual sale once they are ready.
The content you send will be crucial to the success of your campaign. This is why it is important to get the content before you start your nurturing campaign. Here are some types of relevant content you should prepare for your nurturing campaigns.
- Blog Posts
- Videos
- Webinars
- eBooks
- White Papers
- Thought Leadership Pieces
- Case Studies
- Free Demos
- Free Trials
Whatever type of content you choose to include in your emails, you must ensure it is relevant, personalized, and meaningful. This will help your leads feel like you made the email and its contents specifically for them.
Once you have the content ready, here are a few basic nurturing campaigns and emails you can use them in.
Introductions or Welcome Emails
Most leads and prospects may not be fully aware of your brand, products, services, or solutions. Welcome emails in your nurturing campaign give you an opportunity to immediately engage the lead and bring them up to speed without coming off as too sales-like.
It is typical to give information about who you are and what you do, as long as it is accompanied by valuable, relevant content that will benefit the lead. Don’t let your brand outshine the content because introduction or welcome emails are meant to open up the possibility of a lasting conversation.
Restrict brand promotion to minimal and focus on creating a lasting relationship with your leads.
Accelerator Campaigns
These are nurturing campaigns that shorten your sales cycle by moving things along faster. They offer relevant content at the right time to accelerate the purchase decision among leads. Such a nurturing campaign is automatically prompted by the lead’s activity.
For example, when they visit a specific page on your website, search a particular keyword on your search bar, or open certain email, it can trigger the accelerator campaign to nudge them through the sales funnel.
The content for such an email marketing campaign should focus on solving relevant problems identified by lead activity.
Stay in Touch Campaigns
As mentioned previously, not all website visitors intend to buy from you immediately, but this doesn’t mean they may not buy later. It is important to keep them engaged to maintain their interest. This is where a nurturing campaign like a stay in touch campaign can help you keep leads warm.
Such a campaign allows you to build credibility, trust, and brand loyalty till the lead is ready to purchase. Give them valuable content so that you are on their mind when they think of relevant solutions. It’s best to avoid sales-like emails for such campaigns and stick to educating, creating awareness, and positioning your brand as the authority and thought leader in your field.
Re-Engagement and Remarketing Emails
If you have engaging content, compelling videos, or interesting eBooks, you can use them in remarketing emails to target those prospects who showed interest but didn’t come through. It could be a website visitor or someone who shared correspondence with your brand for a long time.
Remarketing emails with good content can help build interest in these people and increase engagement once again. Similarly, Re-engagement emails can help engage customers who have lost touch for some reason.
Automated re-engagement emails in your nurturing campaigns can help revive their interests and engagement with your brand.
Customer Lifecycle Campaigns
Just because you got a successful conversion and your nurturing campaign resulted in a lead making a purchase does not mean you should stop conversations. Customer lifecycle campaigns help to keep customers in the loop.
They educate them on the latest trends, solutions, and best practices and keep them engaged for future conversions. These nurturing campaigns typically include content like newsletters, webinars, exclusive offers, and case studies.
Conclusion
Nurture campaigns, even the most basic ones, can be incredibly successful and result in amazing outcomes for any brand or business. They have the power to create lasting, loyal customers who promote and propel your brand, products, services, and solutions.
However, they take time and effort to create and implement in your email marketing strategy and automation solution. Regardless, the benefits they have for your sales and marketing far outweigh the time and effort it takes to set them up and run properly.
They allow visitors, prospects, and even existing customers to create a path through your sales funnel, improving your sales process, cycles, and reducing the number of leads that are lost.
With the right approach, objectives, goals, and timelines, you can convert leads to real customers organically. Nurturing campaigns allow brands to establish a loyal customer base and their authority in the industry.
Prospects always appreciate the fresh, non-sales-like approach of such email marketing campaigns that start a lasting conversation rather than urgently push products and services. Of course, you should always keep improving these campaigns and optimize them for various segments in your email marketing lists.
Over time, you will be amazed at how effective and profitable these campaigns can be. While every modern business and brand should implement email marketing campaigns like nurturing campaigns, it isn’t always easy or convenient for everyone.
If you want to learn more about the importance of nurturing campaigns, strategies to create them, or if you need help with the email marketing and management of your brand, please visit our website today.