It’s no secret that email marketing is one of the best ways of generating leads, but did you know that email marketing also serves as a great way to nurture leads?
Once you have a list of leads’ email addresses, you can (and should!) be sending out emails to your leads regularly to help them move further down the sales funnel until they become your customer.
But how can you use email marketing to nurture leads right (or better)?
Let’s take a look at some of the best email marketing tips for lead nurturing that you can implement in 2021.
Email Marketing Tips to Help You Nurture Leads in 2021
Email is going to continue to be an important part of the majority of consumers’ daily lives. So, why not make it a priority for your business in 2021? Here are some of the best tips for nurturing your leads with email marketing.
1. Personalize the Content in Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Personalization is no longer an option but something that you must implement to ensure that your customers don’t leave you for your competitors.
Why, exactly?
Because almost 91% of consumers are more likely to shop from brands that provide them with relevant recommendations and offers. So, unless you personalize your offerings, it’s highly likely that your leads won’t ever reach the conversion stage.
How can you personalize your email marketing campaigns?
To start, you can segment your email list based on your different buyer personas. This can help you customize your offerings for each persona separately. As a result, they’ll be more likely to receive recommendations that are suited to their tastes.
You should also use a powerful email marketing platform that can help you segment your audience well so that you can target the right audience through your emails. (Or work with a marketing agency that can help you with this.)
The idea is to use dynamic emails that cater to each subscriber differently. When you’re creating an email, you can vary some parts of it for your subscribers and encourage them to take action.
For instance, if you’re a travel company, you could send out an email with the same copy, but different images. For those in the colder climates, you can send images of sandy beaches and vice-versa.
You can also use personalization in your email subject lines, which is a great way to get prospects to open your email.
2. Use Drip Campaigns to Nurture Leads with Email Marketing
It’s critical that you send emails to your audience regularly to ensure that your brand remains top of mind and engage customers so they move further down your sales funnel.
However, sending different emails to your audience at various times can be challenging (not to mention time-consuming!). This is where your email marketing tools or an email marketing partner can help you with automation in the form of a drip campaign.
With a drip campaign, leads automatically receive a series of email marketing messages based on their specific actions or triggers that you set up. This allows your leads to receive the right emails at the right times, which keeps them nurtured until they convert.
A great example of a drip campaign is from Sephora. Sephora uses predictive analytics and machine learning to figure out when their products would get used up by their customers. Based on this, they set up triggers and send out emails just when they estimate the products will be finished.
The emails ask the customers to restock their stash and also provide a link to complete the purchase.
3. Use Powerful CTAs in Your Email Marketing
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are important parts of email marketing strategies. When you’re nurturing your leads, you need to give them a clear way to buy from you and convert. This is made possible through CTAs that guide them to take the action that you want them to right from your email.
A few things to keep in mind when it comes to CTAs:
- Include CTAs in prominent spots in your email. The goal should be to ensure that your leads have to put in minimal effort to spot these CTAs.
- Use well-designed CTA buttons. The more that the CTA button pops out from the rest of the email, the easier it will be for your leads to spot it.
- Pay attention to the text that you use in the CTA. This should prompt your leads to make the purchase, contact you, or learn more.
Here’s an example of a standout CTA from Later. The button color, CTA font, and text all clearly communicate the action that Later wants email recipients to take.
4. Include Helpful Content in Your Email Marketing
One of the best ways of nurturing your leads is through the combination of a content marketing plan and an email marketing strategy.
By putting together content in the form of blog posts or website content that addresses problems your customers may have, shares insight that’s useful in your industry, or informs customers about a particular problem and solution, you can become a resource that they’ll remember when it comes time to find a business like yours.
However, putting these posts on your blog isn’t enough. When you publish this content, you should also send out emails to your leads with links to your blog posts to amplify your content and continue nurturing your leads.
You can design your email similarly to a newsletter with visuals, a short description, and a CTA for each post so leads can click right through to your content.
Sending helpful content regularly can help build your brand trust and may also nudge your leads to buy from you.
You can leverage personalization in this case, too. By understanding what content your leads prefer engaging with, you can customize the emails and send them relevant posts to read.
For instance, see in the below example how they’ve included an image, the title of the post, and a short description along with a CTA button.
5. Request Feedback
No marketing campaign is perfect, and you may see that some of your leads stop engaging with your email marketing campaigns. While this may seem like a dead-end, you shouldn’t stop there.
Instead, you should try to find out what went wrong and put effort into rectifying it to ensure that the lead reconsiders your brand.
One way you can do this is by sending out emails to your leads seeking their feedback regarding your email marketing campaigns. Some of them may state their concerns and this can help you find out the problem. A survey that you email out is the easiest way to accomplish this.
If you’re able to address a specific lead’s concern, you can send another email to them that says that you heard what they said and made a fix. This lets marketing leads feel that their voices were heard and can boost their confidence in your brand — and it might just convince them to buy from you.
Make Email Marketing Your Lead Nurturing Superpower in 2021
Email marketing is a powerful tool that you can leverage to nurture your leads. To recap, here are the top five ways you should use email marketing for lead nurturing in 2021:
- Personalize your email marketing messages.
- Run drip email marketing campaigns.
- Use powerful CTAs in your emails.
- Send helpful content.
- Request feedback from customers.
About the Author
Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant for 15 years with an emphasis on influencer marketing in the last 5 years. He is specialized in sales funnels, targeted traffic, and website conversions. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.
