Email Lead Nurturing: How to Increase the Purchase Readiness of Your Leads

1. How does lead nurturing work in email marketing?
2. Email Lead Nurturing offers these benefits to your company
3. Building a Lead Nurturing Email Campaign: 7 Best Practices
4. The Best Tools for Email Lead Nurturing 
5. Three Examples of Successful Email Lead Nurturing 
6. Start your email lead nurturing campaign now

If you are having trouble converting your leads into customers, you should try email lead nurturing. This involves sending automated emails with personalized content to potential customers. The goal is to engage leads and accompany them through the entire customer journey. In this article, we will show you why email lead nurturing is so important and how you can use it to optimize your sales strategy.

How does lead nurturing work in email marketing?

In lead nurturing it's about building relationships with potential customers. Various lead nurturing strategies are used - email marketing is one of them. Lead nurturing emails are sent to leads who have shown interest in your products but have not yet made a purchase.

There are many types of emails that you can use for lead nurturing:

• Emails with informative content
• Promotional emails
• Emails for free demos or product offers
• Congratulations emails, for example for birthdays
• Welcome emails for signing up for newsletters

These emails ultimately aim to target potential customers and provide them with information until they are ready to purchase.

Email Lead Nurturing offers these benefits to your company

You will not be forgotten by your potential customers:  With lead nurturing emails, you stay in constant contact with your prospects. This is especially important if you sell high-quality products or services that require a longer sales cycle. 

You build long-term relationships: Lead nurturing emails allow you to get closer to your leads. By answering their questions and providing them with valuable content, you show them that you're not just about sales. You really understand their problems and want to solve them with your products.

You reach your leads at the right time: No matter how good your team is, it's unlikely that you can answer every lead's inquiry in a timely manner. Email nurturing campaigns can help you with this. Thanks to automation, you can send follow-up emails in real time or when leads perform a certain action (for example, download your e-book or go to a certain product page).

You build trust: Customers want to do business with brands they know and trust. When they first land on your website, this is of course not yet the case. However, lead nurturing emails can change this. By addressing the problems of the leads, they see that you take their problems seriously.

You improve your sales cycle: No matter where your lead is in the sales funnel - an email nurturing campaign accompanies them to the purchase decision.

Market2Lead also found that nurtured leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle. The same study also showed that 9% of nurtured leads have a higher average deal size. This is because email lead nurturing allows you to offer cross- and up-sell opportunities to prospects. As a result, conversions and sales increase. 

Building a Lead Nurturing Email Campaign: 7 Best Practices

1. Create Sign Up Forms 

In order to nurture leads via email, you need to have them on your mailing list. Therefore, signing up should be as easy as possible for them. For example, you can set up a pop-up into which visitors can enter their email address or embed a sign-up form at the bottom of your website. Similarly, you can ask them for their name. But don't overdo it. According to Marketing Sherpa, every field you add to an email form decreases the number of sign-ups by 11%.

2. Segment your target audience

Segmenting your target audience allows you to send relevant content at the right time to the right users. For example, if you sell glasses for both men and women, it makes sense to send nurturing emails for men's glasses only to male subscribers, and vice versa. This results in higher brand affinity and more engagement. Target audience segmentation also allows you to focus on the groups of prospects most likely to make a purchase.

3. Offer added value

Nurturing is about soft selling. It aims to provide added value in order to build a relationship with your potential customers. Therefore, you should avoid any kind of overt selling in your nurturing emails. Instead, focus on engaging the leads and informing them in order to motivate them to buy.

For new subscribers, for example, you could send an email in which you introduce your company, including its values. In another email, you could give them a behind-the-scenes look to show employee cohesion. This can be followed by a blog post about a product they are interested in.

4. Set goals 

Each email in your lead nurturing campaign should have a specific goal to guide the campaign in the right direction. An email whose CTA encourages reading a new blog post, for example, aims to inform your leads. An email that encourages subscribers to download your limited glasses brochure, on the other hand, aims to identify potential customers with high purchasing power.

5. Personalize your email nurturing campaigns

Remember step 1 when we asked the leads for their name? The simple act of personalizing an email works wonders for sales. It not only leads to six times higher transaction rates. Emails with personalized subject lines are also 26% more likely to be opened.

6. Measure and evaluate lead nurturing email campaign

During your campaign, you can use your collected data to see what's working and where you should make improvements. There are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) you should track:

• Open rate: the number of subscribers who have opened your nurturing mail. This gives you an idea of how convincing your subject lines are.
• Click-Through Rate: the number of subscribers who click on your product or offer in the email. From this, you can see if your offers are enticing and if your links work.
• Bounce Rate: the number of email addresses that have not received your nurturing emails for any reason. A high bounce rate means that your lead list is not of high quality - this is often the case when you buy email lists.
• Number of Unsubscribers: the users who have unsubscribed from your nurturing emails. A high number of unsubscribes could mean that you are not reaching the right target audience or that you are not personalizing your emails sufficiently. 
• Conversion Rate: the number of users who have clicked on your link and performed a desired action (purchase of a product, download of an e-book, etc.).
• Spam rate: the number of recipients who have marked your emails as spam. A high spam rate can get you in trouble with your email provider.
• Sales Rate: the actual sales generated by the email nurturing campaign. 
• Forwarding Rate: the number of subscribers who have forwarded your nurturing emails to others. This gives you an indication of the potential reach of your campaign.
• Return on Investment: is probably the most important KPI you should be tracking. It shows how your campaign has performed in relation to costs. To calculate it, simply divide total revenue by total expenses.

According to Litmus, email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of all digital marketing strategies. The average marketer experiences an ROI of up to 3600% or $36 for every $1 spent. 

7. Automate Lead Nurturing Email Process 

With automation, you can send nurturing emails to potential customers based on a schedule or triggers you define. You can, among other things, send automated birthday emails to your leads and thank them for their support. Alternatively, you can send emails based on specific triggers, such as: 

• Download of gated content
• Completion of a subscription to your email list
• Product was placed in the shopping cart, but the transaction was cancelled
• Sign up for a free trial 
• Request for a product demo

By automating your nurturing emails, you ensure that the right content is sent to the right leads at the right time - without having to spend too much time and effort creating new emails for each lead on your list.

The Best Tools for Email Lead Nurturing 

Lead nurturing takes place at every stage of the customer journey. Therefore, lead nurturing software works seamlessly with other tools, especially CRMs and marketing automation software. Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) is a comprehensive system used by marketing and sales teams. It increases the Customer Lifetime Value, by managing the entire customer journey - from lead generation to customer retention. Marketing automation tools, like GetResponse meanwhile use technologies to streamline and make marketing measures (including email marketing campaigns) more effective.

Depending on your business requirements, you can use these tools separately or integrate the lead nurturing and marketing automation tools into your CRM software. The latter is advantageous if you want to have all your business processes in one place.

Here are some examples of CRM systems that already have features for email lead nurturing:

Hubspot Sales Hub

Zoho CRM

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Pipedrive

Zendesk Sell

Keap

insightly CRM

If you don't want to invest in a full-fledged CRM system, you can also use these email marketing software for lead nurturing: 

rapidmail

Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue)

Mailchimp

HubSpot Marketing Hub

GetResponse

CleverReach

Emarsys

Three Examples of Successful Email Lead Nurturing 

Monday.com

​​A classic type of lead nurturing emails are messages that serve an informative purpose. They have two benefits: They highlight a brand's expertise and provide helpful content that subscribers are interested in. A good example of such an email is the following from Monday:

Source: monday.com

With this email, Monday strengthens its reputation as an expert in the industry, providing subscribers with relevant information on current issues. And even though the Monday platform is not addressed at all in this email, it strengthens trust in the brand. It gives subscribers the feeling that Monday really knows what it's talking about.

Zalando 

Did you know that birthday greeting emails generate 342% more revenue per message and 481% higher conversion rates? Apart from boosting loyalty, they are a great way to re-engage inactive subscribers.

Take a look at this example from Zalando. The email not only shows how much the company cares about its subscribers' special day. It goes a step further and offers discounts and coupon codes that can be redeemed throughout the birthday month. 

 Source: Zalando

Paperwork

Your customers subscribe to your emails to stay up-to-date with your brand. That's why it's important to include current information about your offers in your nurturing emails. Take a look at this nurturing email from Papierkram, for example: 

Source: papierkram.de

This type of email serves to inform prospects about improvements to your products as well as new features. This can strengthen trust in your brand and lead to more conversions.

Start your email lead nurturing campaign now

Email lead nurturing campaigns are an effective way to increase brand awareness, build trust and establish customer relationships. By investing in these measures, you can build a loyal audience. And the more loyal an audience, the more revenue you can generate and the faster your brand will grow. So what are you waiting for? Start your email lead nurturing campaign now and guide potential customers through the entire customer journey. If you want to learn more about lead nurturing and how to convert leads, you should visit OMR Reviews.