Living things need nurturing to grow.
Humans, animals, and plants need basic life necessities to grow into maturity. Speak of food, water, air, sunlight, etc.
We all need them.
The same applies to leads in digital marketing.
Getting customers doesn’t end at lead generation, just as the harvest of food crops doesn’t end with planting.
Leads must be nurtured to retain them.
In this blog post, we will show you what an email nurture campaign is, and how to set up one for your business.
Meaning of Email Nurture Campaign
An email marketer setting up an email nurturing campaign
Email nurture campaign is the process of converting leads into customers. This conversion process involves constantly educating leads, keeping them informed, and building lasting relationships.
This is connected with inbound marketing because it lets your business share tailored and personalized content with leads based on their behaviors.
The content help leads engage with your business as expected.
Similarly, it helps them make informed decisions when it is time to make purchases, give referrals, etc.
Benefits of an Email Nurture Campaign
Nurture campaigns add to your business in varied ways. It serves as a platform for continuous communication with your audience.
Let us look at some of the benefits of an email nurturing campaign for your business.
1. Communication and Relationship
Through communication, your business can form a robust relationship with its leads. As you send emails to your leads, they are reminded of key steps to take.
In the same vein, communication will improve your relationship with your leads.
2. Boosted Engagement
Engagement with your business increases through a nurture campaign. The engagement could be with your social media links, website, and so on.
For instance, if you want to send a follow-up email with Mailchimp to 10 leads, you could also add links to your social media pages.
So, when they click those links, content on your social media pages will attract engagement.
3. Credibility
Leads will not convert to customers just by interacting with your lead magnet.
A nurture campaign shows leads that they can trust you as an expert with their resources.
How to Set up an Email Nurture Campaign
There are general steps to follow, regardless of the nurture campaign example, your business wants to use, there are general steps to follow.
The email nurture campaign practices are listed below.
1. Setting a Campaign Goal
Create specific and realistic goals. The nurture campaign should cater to a set of audiences and a particular need.
Without this, sharing valuable and personalized content with leads will be impossible.
Let’s say your goal is to sell the book your brand just published on how to set up a vegan restaurant.
Then, you are expected to share vegan-related content with leads you have gathered till they buy the book.
2. Knowing your Target Audience
One of the aspects of marketing is to identify the target audience. So, know who your target audience is and understand their buyer persona.
Find out their demography, interests, and so on.
Going with the previous example, the target audience would be prospective vegan restaurant owners would be the target audience.
Targeting non-vegans will only amount to nothing.
3. Segmenting Audience
To send personalized content, segmenting your target audience comes first.
Segmenting your audience can start with asking leads what kind of content they want (especially if you offer different services or sell different products).
It could also be done by noting where each target is on their customer journey. Following that, you can now send content that speaks to each segment’s needs.
Nurturing them becomes easier.
4. Sharing Content
Having segmented your audience, it is time to send them content.
Setting a timeframe for how you want to send content depends on when you wish to hit your sales target.
However, sharing content must follow a nurturing mindset. The goal is to nurture leads with content till they become customers.
Let’s say you have 20 printers to sell in a month, the first three weeks can be used for nurturing. Then the week left can be used to make sales.
5. Measuring & Optimizing
Regularly, check the success of the email nurture campaign. The email marketing tool used will do a breakdown of what you have done right or not.
Next, is to optimize for subsequent emails. Adjust subject lines, preview texts, call to action, body texts, etc. This will impact your sales immensely.
Email nurturing campaigns must be conducted with the mindset of dishing out value to leads. It must be centered on making sales alone.
This way, leads will convert to paying customers with less stress on your part.