It’s no secret that prospects are rarely ready to pull the trigger on a purchase right away. In fact, the journey from prospect to customer (or client) can often take months or even years. But with the right strategy, you can accelerate the process. You can educate leads on your services, provide information where it is needed, and form relationships that build trust. How? The answer is simple—create a lead nurturing email campaign. In this post, I look at create a lead nurturing email campaign. In this post, I look at how advisors can use email to nurture leads.
The basics
Let’s start with the basics—what is a lead nurturing email campaign? Lead nurture campaigns are a series of emails that help guide a prospect further down your marketing and sales funnel by providing valuable information about your services while increasing your brand awareness. Email nurture campaigns are designed to be automated so an email is sent when a contact takes a specific action on your website, such as downloading a content offer, scheduling a call, or visiting a specific page. Email nurture campaigns help you provide useful information and establish trust with prospects so when it comes time for them to buy, they have all the information they need at their fingertips to make an informed decision. Ready to build a nurture campaign for your practice? Let’s dive in.
Determining Who Will Receive Your Nurture Emails
As you begin to put some thought into building an email nurture campaign, your first step is to decide which contacts in your CRM database will be receiving the email campaigns. You’ll likely end up building out multiple email campaigns, each one designed for different segments of your database. Segmenting your database will help ensure you’re creating content that will be best received and that will resonate most strongly with your prospects. There are many different ways to organize and segment email lists for nurture campaigns based on the data you have in your CRM. Some examples include:
- Leads who have visited a specific page on your website
- Leads who made an initial inquiry to your firm
- Leads who have downloaded a content offer on your website but haven’t had a sales call
- Leads who have an identified marketing persona
That last one is important. Marketing personas, or client avatars, are fictional representations of your ideal customers and help guide all of the content you create, whether it is an email campaign, social media post, or blog post. Client avatars will set you up for success in your marketing and sales efforts, as you’ll understand how to communicate in a way that will resonate with prospects and prompt them to take action based on their needs, wants, and goals. Defining your client avatars is important when designing a nurture campaign and will allow you to provide the most relevant, tailored email messages that have the highest chance of success.
Mapping Out Your Content
Once you’ve determined who will receive your nurture campaign, the next step is determining what they’ll receive. I’ve found creating a high-level outline to be most helpful with this step. Write out the topic of each email and then outline a few pieces of content that will support that topic when it comes time to actually write each email. You don’t need to create brand new content for your lead nurturing emails—I’m a big advocate for repurposing content. What blog posts have resonated with contacts in the past? What pages on your website are most popular? Dig into the data to help guide the content of your nurture emails.
Each email needs a goal—what is the ultimate action you want a prospect to take? This is known as a call-to-action or CTA. CTA’s guide your prospects throughout the nurture campaign. There are many different types of CTAs you can use based on which particular action you want recipients to take. Some common CTAs prompt prospects to download a content offering on your website, schedule an introductory call with you, follow you on social media, or register for a webinar. As a general rule of thumb, the CTA should be a large button within your email versus a simple link. This will draw the reader’s eyes to the CTA and make them more likely to click.
Creating the Content
Now comes the fun part – creating the content. If writing isn’t something you enjoy or feel you’re particularly good at, you can hire outside marketing help with this piece. Otherwise, it’s time to put pencil to paper (or rather, fingers to keyboard). All you need is the outline you created in the step above. You don’t need to write these emails in order and it may actually be helpful to write bits and pieces of each email and then connect the dots after the fact. Do whatever works for you. This part can take a bit of time, so don’t rush through it. Make sure you’re using the right tone and voice throughout and that these emails align with your brand. You want the tone of your emails to match the audience the campaign is designed for. There are moments to be funny and there are moments to be informational. You know your audience best and it’s important the tone of your emails matches the audience it was intended for.
Always remember that you are a resource to your prospects and clients. Nurture campaigns help you foster better relationships with your audience by providing helpful, valuable, and relevant information that will showcase your expertise and value, which they’re sure to remember when it comes time to make a buying decision.
I hope that you’ve found this post on How Advisors can use email to nurture leads useful.
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