So, you’ve got new leads. That’s great! Now what?
It’s time to turn your leads into customers. If you’re new to building lead nurturing strategies, you may feel overwhelmed about your next steps.
In this post, you’ll learn how to develop long-term relationships with your new leads and how to build four types of email campaigns to jumpstart the customer experience.
What is a lead nurturing campaign?
A lead nurturing campaign is an email marketing strategy focused on building relationships with potential customers (AKA leads) throughout their buying journey. The goal is to guide leads through the sales funnel, provide them with valuable and relevant content at each stage, and move them closer to making a purchase.
The key components of a successful lead nurturing campaign typically include:
- Understanding the buyer’s journey: Identifying the different stages a lead goes through from awareness to consideration and finally to decision-making.
- Segmentation: Segmenting leads based on common characteristics or behaviors to deliver personalized and targeted content.
- Content creation: Developing different type of content that addresses the needs and concerns of leads at each stage of the buyer’s journey. This can include blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, and more.
- Multi-channel engagement: Utilizing various communication channels such as email, social media, and webinars to reach leads where they’re most active.
- Lead scoring: Assigning scores to leads based on their interactions with the content and engagement level. This helps prioritize ideal customers for your sales team and streamline the sales process
- Automation: Implementing marketing automation tools to streamline the process and deliver timely and relevant content based on lead behavior.
- Measurement and analysis: Tracking and analyzing the performance of the campaign to understand what works and making data-driven adjustments.
By nurturing leads over time, you’ll establish trust, provide value, and ultimately increase the likelihood of conversion when the lead is ready to make a purchasing decision.
Follow the customer lifecycle framework
The first stage of the customer lifecycle involves nurturing and educating your lead about your product or service. Through several marketing team efforts, like blog posts, social media, and email campaigns, you can showcase the benefits of your brand to new leads.
But remember, nurturing your leads is an ongoing process. Writing one blog post or sending a single email isn’t enough. Instead, consider the lead nurturing process as a series of communications with the individual.
By focusing on building high-quality customer relationships, you can turn your leads into paying customers.
Build a long-term customer relationship
Segmenting your leads is key to building better relationships. Through email segmentation, you can adjust your marketing spend and target the audience that is most likely to become customers. Then, you can provide valuable content to the right lead at the right time.
Lead nurturing campaign examples
There are dozens of ways to build lead nurturing email flows, each serving its own purpose to help companies reach their goals and keep up a consistent conversation with their prospective customers. Below are four types of lead nurturing campaigns that will help you attract and retain customers.
1. Create targeted welcome emails
By welcoming a new lead, you’re making a good impression that reflects your brand.
Your welcome email could be anything from offering a discount for their first purchase, a quick video tutorial, a fun-loving hello, to a downloadable free exclusive ebook.
Did you know that welcome emails generate 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than regular email marketing campaigns?
They’re so effective that their average open rate is a whopping 50%, which is 86% more effective than standard newsletters. And more interestingly, subscribers who receive welcome emails show 33% more engagement with the brand.
Welcome emails are designed to help potential customers get familiar with your brand. Furthermore, welcome emails give you the chance to show off what makes your company great. A welcome email starts once a new contact has been added to your list. It needs to give a warm, fuzzy, and welcoming vibe, allowing the lead to feel the start of the personal relationship.
When do you send a welcome email? If you use a double opt-in system, you should send a welcome email once the subscriber verifies their email address. If not, send a welcome email when a new lead signs up on your form.
Check out this welcome email from Medium.com.
Now, look at how Medium leads their new subscribers to read their stories:
2. Send relevant newsletters
By sending newsletters, you keep your targeted audience always in the know about your business. They are also effective in building conversations with your audience, sharing valuable and informative content, and growing your lead base.
Sending an email isn’t just about placing a big advertisement in the email. Instead, it’s about sending targeted messages based on purchase history and demographics.
Take a look at his newsletter from Outwrite, providing educational content:
How often should you send newsletters? Newsletters can be time-based and sent at predetermined interval times. Or, they can be trigger-based, sending a particular email based on the subscriber’s actions.
3. Upgrade promotional emails
A study found that 59% of respondents said that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions, and 50% buy from marketing emails at least once a month.
Promotional emails are focused on discounts or incentives to boost sales and revenue. The goal of promotional emails is to persuade potential customers to take an actionーmake a purchase, join your webinar, or enter a course.
But take note, promotional emails are not just entirely for announcing special offers. They’re also a powerful way to build brand awareness, generate sales, and improve relationships with customers and prospects. After all, you need to find ways to keep your subscribers excited to open your email.
When it comes to promotional emails, less is more. Share your company’s story and the history behind your product or service.
Big e-commerce brands know this very well. Check out this succinct promotional email from Canva:
Keep your content concise, yet powerful. Be persuasive, but do not sound too salesy. You can achieve this goal by talking about the problem (something that keeps them up at night) and showing how your product or service provides the solution. Tell stories!
Here are some ideas for your next promotional emails:
Limited-time offers
This limited-time offer from Adobe is short and compelling. Notice how they used “Save Now” as the CTA, instead of “Buy Now.”
Sales promotion
Simple, direct, and persuasive customer sales promotion email from Drop.
Product launch
What better way to entice your prospects with your new product than boasting its benefits? Samsung’s product launch email is compelling and attractive.
For other tactics in launching your product, check out our “How To Launch A Product” blog post, which offers a step-by-step process and 20 free templates. Use these articles to prepare for your next product launch and stand above the rest.
Subscriber-only offers
Booking.com gives exclusive offers to subscribers. It’s a great way to encourage your prospects to subscribe to your newsletter to receive such offers.
4. Develop triggered emails
Have you ever received a special offer email just hours after you browsed an online store?
Triggered emails are specific to your lead’s behavior, meaning they get relevant messages based on an action they take in your customer lifecycle.
Check out some of these examples:
- If a lead hasn’t checked your website in a while > special offer email
- If a lead always reads your email > reward email
Here’s a triggered email sent by StreetBy after a user creates an account.
Trying to re-engage customers who have wandered? Find examples of reactivation emails you can deploy today to reignite curiosity with your stray customers.
Good lead nurturing campaigns result in more customers
By using lead nurturing campaigns effectively, your leads can turn into paying customers. It all starts with building quality relationships. Reach and engage with your leads by providing educational content. You can create these lead nurturing campaign examples above to win more customers and increase revenue.
Marketing automation and lead nurturing campaigns
Using marketing automation to build lead nurturing email campaigns is a great way to send relevant messaging to your customers when they’re ready to receive it.
- Maybe they visited your product’s pricing page. Send them a discount code.
- Maybe they watched a video about your upcoming webinar. Send them a reminder email about it.
These motions and more can be done when you fold automation into your lead nurturing strategy. With ActiveCampaign, you can set up triggers that start an automated drip campaign that’s specific to that customer’s behaviors. Automation and campaign building go hand in hand.
Want to give us a test drive and uplevel your lead nurturing campaigns? Sign up for a free 14-day trial of ActiveCampaign below.
This post was contributed by Ross Jenkins, the founder of DigitalME and an ActiveCampaign Certified Consultant. He is ranked #1 on UpWork for his proficiency in digital marketing. DigitalME offers targeted digital solutions and is perfect for anyone who wants to increase leads in your sales funnel, and productivity through automation.
