Creating Lead nurturing campaigns is one skill you need to master if you want to run successful email campaigns. And Most email campaigns are long-term because lead nurturing takes time.
With a good email nurturing campaign, you educate your audience, create awareness, and build trust that will make it easy to convert them.
If you are using email sparingly, it’s time to ramp up your efforts. Especially if you are a B2B company with a longer sales cycle.
In this article, you’ll learn all you need to carry out an effective lead nurturing campaign for your B2B business.
There isn’t just one way to set up email campaigns. It all depends on your business goals.
So before we get started, let’s learn the basics.
Email lead nurturing is a process of moving your prospects down the sales funnel until they become your customers. The nurturing is done by providing high-value educational content over a period.
It is an indirect form of sales where your content builds trust among your prospects which then leads to sales.
Since lead nurturing is a lengthy process, delivering content via emails is easy and cost-friendly.
To nurture a lead by email, you need them on your email list. And for that to happen, you need to make the process of lead submission as easy as possible.
Start off with a landing page and a simple sign-up form. You need to make sure your newsletter is visible on your website. With so many brands fighting for attention, you might want to clearly express why your prospects should sign-up for your email list.
Ask only the necessary information. Probably just the name and the email address. People are concerned about their privacy, and hence asking for any additional information might pull them away.
For your nurturing campaign to be successful, you need an audience who is likely to become your customer. They must fall into your typical audience persona.
The content you send will only help if the audience is facing problems your customers usually face. Only then they’ll be able to trust you.
Segmenting the audience means the right people see the content at the right time.
If you are just starting out and unsure about your ideal audience, you can check your google analytics and conduct customer surveys to understand who is interacting with your content.
You can also segment the audience based on where they lie in your buying cycle.
Nurturing is all about delivering value. Trust requires a minimal friction experience and the content you provide must not upright sell your product/services.
Instead, focus on providing value and getting customers ready to buy.
For new subscribers, you can send a welcome email and talk about how you believe in giving back to the community.
Another email could be behind the scenes of your company. It helps you create an emotional bond with your audience. You can create tutorials, how-to-guides to help the audience solve the problem and present your product/service as a way to accomplish the goal.
Every email you send must have a specific goal. Along with the ultimate goal of converting maximum leads, each email must have broken down into smaller goals that will take the prospect further in the sales funnel. CTA’s must be designed accordingly.
The goals could be visiting your website, downloading additional content, signing up for a webinar, or visiting your product page.
Setting goals helps you write content that motivates the user to take action. Also, your goal cannot be to generate revenue right away. That’s the ultimate goal you are trying to achieve. The tiny nurturing goal must align with the user’s needs. This is the best way to get your subscribers to perform some action.
How often and what type of content you send depends on the sales cycle. If you have a product launch a few weeks away, it’s better to send educational content.
As the launch date gets closer, you can create drip campaigns depending on how quickly you want to make sales.
For example, Let’s say you have a software launch in six weeks. You might want to send two emails in the first week introducing your brand and client testimonials.
The next 3 weeks can be educational content related to the product. Once the nurturing is done, the last week could be about following up on your prospects with a discount offer.
Remember earlier we discussed segmentation? Well, that helps you create personalized email nurturing journeys.
The simple act of segmenting and personalizing your content has wonderful effects on sales.
You can segment the audience based on the problem they are facing and personalize the email addressing those problems.
For example, a person in the lower hierarchy might look for free or cost-friendly solutions by not minding the limitations associated with them. While a CEO or owner may opt for a premium version of your product.
So you can two different emails, one insisting lower hierarchy users join the free trial and another insisting the CEO on upgrading the premium.
All the strategies you make and nurturing emails you send creates data in one or the other form.
As your campaigns run, you can use data to see what works and where you need improvements.
Run A/B tests, tweak subject lines, send shorter and longer emails. See what version of changes work best for your growth and revenue.
There’s always room for improvement. The more tests you run, the better you’ll get at anticipating customer response. With each campaign, you can refine your strategies. No lead nurturing campaign is optimized from the start. It’s the constant experimentation that gets you the best results.
One way to easily manage your email nurturing campaigns is by utilizing marketing automation tools.
Automation can help you build an email sequence that can enlighten your customers about the product while you are busy with other business-related tasks.
The automated behavior can be triggered by specific behaviors such as filing forms, page views, call to action, etc. Once the action is performed, the automation is triggered and they receive emails based on that behavior.
One way to be effective at lead nurturing campaigns is combining it with other marketing activities such as Facebook marketing, re-targeting.
It is possible to connect your email CRMs with Facebook. This will help you send your email straight to your CRM. Connecting these two tools will help you automate the email sequence as soon as the lead fills your Facebook form. It helps you avoid the process of manually downloading your email and uploading it in the CRM. The moment the prospect fills the lead form, the automation uploads the email into a CRM and shoots the welcome email. This way your prospects receive an email before they turn cold.
Email re-targeting is targeting people who are already on your email list with different offers. This helps you increase the conversion rates as the audience is already familiar with the brand. It entices your prospects to visit your stores for checking out different products. There are various platforms that allow you to do this. Examples are Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn allow you to upload the email list and target those specific users with paid ads. You can even use automation tools to upload the email list directly to the relevant platforms. Automation makes the process faster. Especially if you have an extensive list to manage.
The first step of email lead nurturing is to score your leads. Since personalization is crucial in lead nurturing, lead scoring helps you figure out the position of the leads in the sales funnel, enabling you to craft appropriate email copies. Ask relevant questions to know where they are in the sales cycle and score them accordingly. Ask questions that help you score lead accurately. The questions can be related to behavior, product information, or previous experiences with the product. Don’t ask for information you don’t need as it may drive away the prospects.
There are several email automation tools that help you make your life easy. Different email tasks, such as lead collection, email sequencing, auto-replies, can be a part of email automation.
Automated emails are necessary to scale your lead nurturing campaigns. With a growing list, it becomes necessary to manage email subscribers, unsubscribes, and launching drip campaigns to provide a good customer experience.
Email lead nurturing is good, but with email ids, you can also make your other marketing campaigns great. This is where you can leverage multi-channel marketing campaigns to reach leads where they are. This includes providing dynamic website content, social media ads, re-targeting ads, and mobile marketing.
B2B purchases are never made on impulse. The prospect research all the possible things and then take decision deliberately.
This is the reason sales funnel conversions take time. Companies wanting to scale their business consistently need to develop relationships that eliminate buyer friction.
Typically, there are three stages of the funnel and each step invites a different type of friction.
1) Awareness Stage: Slow website loading speed, lengthy home pages, buffering videos, may stop buyers from knowing your brand.
2) Consideration Stage: High cost, lack of reviews, low trustworthiness, competition can all stop people from buying your product.
3) Purchase Stage: Lengthy checkout processes, payment gateway problems can be a huge barrier to customer conversion.
As a marketer, it’s your job to ensure that all the buying stages are as frictionless as possible.
Email lead nurturing is an important activity for B2B marketers. Products and services with longer sales cycles cannot make prospects convert with just short-term branding campaigns.
Email nurturing allows you to develop a deeper relationship with your customers. Making the sales process easy and frictionless.
People want to know about your product and services before they buy from you. And what better way to provide that information than email marketing. Once you nurture them with different email sequences, a prospect will surely become your loyal customer.
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