Synopsis: Email marketing is said to provide 3800% of ROI. If you want to excel at nurturing your leads through email marketing, then you need a plan. Discover how to nurture your email leads and leverage several key aspects of creating an effective email marketing strategy.
What is the hardest part of marketing? To achieve leads or nurture them? The latter being the hardest right! According to a survey, 47% of purchases are achieved through the nurturing of leads. Email marketing is far from dead and it offers high ROI if nurtured well!
So, we can assume that nurturing an email marketing strategy is the best way forward. But, it is easier said than done. Nurturing a lead through email marketing needs some efforts. As the world is going mobile, your emails should be more engaging than ever. The same old plain text emails are not that attractive anymore.
So, what are the new rules for nurturing an email marketing campaign in 2021? Let’s explore!
Targeted Content Delivery:
Content delivered based on the buyer personas always provides results. The best way is to analyze your leads and create effective buyer personas. Here, data-driven analytics can certainly help you create better customer personas. These personas must include data like.
- Demographics
- Gender
- Age-group
- Spending Power
- Lifestyle Choices
The creation of personas helps you understand your target audience. So, you can create content based on the persona and deliver the emails. Here, personalization can make a huge difference, that is what we will discuss later. But, personas have a huge impact on marketing strategies. They can help brands create unique campaigns purely on the basis of their customers.
Trigger Emails:
What is the first thing that comes to mind when interacting with a brand? That is responsiveness. Trigger emails are a great way to show your leads that you are vigilant about every problem of the customer and work towards a better understanding of the issue.
Trigger emails have high open rates. In fact, it is opened 70.5% more times than usual marketing emails. It is also automated marketing. These emails are mostly automated and it does not need to be manually triggered. They are mostly triggered by a call to action button on the website or filling of a form by users.
Personalizations:
Personalizations can be in several different forms for email marketing. You can personalize the “From Name”, the “Subject line”, and even personalize the content in context with customers. It depends on the target audiences. For example, Converse uses one fo the best subject line personalization. They change the subject line for each of their customers.
Personalization can be a powerful tool for nurturing plan of your emails. You should be able to come up with interesting and dynamic content that instantly relates to the customer’s persona to be more persuasive. As research suggests, personalizations can help your campaigns by increasing the email open rates by 26%.
Vision Statement:
One way to nurture your email leads is by sending vision statements thorough the emails. It formulates the brand of trust and users to understand your vision. It should include the latest changes and updates that you make into your products to make users understand the steps you are taking to achieve the vision.
Take an example of this email from Mint, they are conveying the latest changes in their app through such emails. Here, the email not only informs the users about changes in the app but, also guides them on the usage part.
Statistics:
Businesses around the world are data-driven. If you are a B2B service provider then, statistics are your best friends. While you nurturing your email leads for B2B clients, it is important to use statistics as it allows them to understand the exact ROI they can achieve by working with you on a specific technology.
Take an example of an app development company that wants to attract other businesses to develop an app. What they can do is use statistics on the total number of smartphone users or the number of apps downloaded, to help other companies understand what they are getting out of the investment.
Thought Leadership:
More than anything try to educate your consumers. Thought leadership induction into nurturing plans can help you achieve such marketing goals. Customer education on aspects of your business and best practices can certainly help.
You can divide such educational campaigns into three major phases.
- Awareness Campaigns:
The goal of such awareness campaigns is to educate the customer and make them aware of products and services. They can be educated on how to leverage your products well.
- Consideration Phase:
Here, the nurturing team should focus on helping the customers consider possible outcomes of using a product or service. It will help them understand the ROI on their investment in a certain product or service.
- Deciding Phase:
It is the last phase of your educational campaign, where you can help customers decide on their purchase decision. Here, you should be prompt in making the customers know of everything and then let them think over the same.
When you segment the email campaign into a phase-wise communication than the entire process becomes more thought-provoking and less promotional. It helps you gain trust and create loyal customers over time. Your nurturing plan must include such an educational campaign with some personalized content based on customer personas.
Follow-Ups:
The follow-up emails that you are using after the trigger or response emails. Follow up emails should be persuasive and not nagging. It should not enforce a product or service. It should also not be annoying at all.
Repeated emails for asking about the purchase decision can blow the whole lead-in contention. The best way forward is to have a gentle followup that does not force the issue on your customers.
Conclusion:
Nurturing a plant for its fruits needs some effort, love, and sunshine. The same goes for email marketing. Show some love by providing some products or parts of it free as a gesture. Put efforts to nurture a thought among your consumers and the last but not the least, provide some sunshine on them.
You should provide them with more opportunities to grow. So, they can help you grow. It is more symbiosis than you can fathom. So, start nurturing your email with an effective plan!