How to Use Email Marketing to Nurture Leads

Email marketing remains one of the most effective types of business marketing. With the ability to reach large numbers of interested customers in one go, it's important that you nurture these warm leads by keeping in touch.

In this article, we will explain not only what what lead nurturing is, but how you can use email marketing to achieve it.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a type of direct marketing where you send bulk emails to curated individuals. These emails are a way of keeping customers updated with what is happening in your business, promoting your products or services, offer discounts and announce sales, grow customer loyalty and increase brand awareness. You can even segment your customers into individual groups and target them based on a chosen point of difference, as well as carrying out A/B testing. Some of the types of marketing emails you may choose to send include:

welcome emails
regular newsletters
promotional emails
feedback or survey emails
lead nurturing emails
milestone emails, such as customer birthdays

There are some downsides to email marketing however. With around 333.2 billion emails sent every day, there are large numbers of competitors who are also sending your email lists marketing emails. It's no wonder that so many people delete emails without reading them and have them blocked by over zealous spam filters.

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is about looking after your potential customers, building a positive relationship between them and your business. Most likely the only information you have from them is a name, email address and the reason why you have their email address (online purchase, lead magnet, competition sign up, contact form etc). The aim is to cultivate these leads and turn them into buyers. Through lead nurturing, you keep them engaged, offer information to assist in the buying process, and move them through the journey funnel towards becoming a customer.

The benefits of lead nurturing via email include:

personalised messaging for relationship building
growing engagement with potential customers
highly cost effective compared to other marketing types
better conversion rates
enhance brand credibility and recognition
pinpoint targeting and segmentation of potential customers
improved trackability using data analysis
A/B testing opportunities
automation for effective and efficient lead nurturing
easy to reach potential customers

Let's look at what a lead nurturing email campaign would look like next.

Using a Lead Nurturing Email Campaign

Our bulk email tool is available for you to use to set up, manage and run lead nurturing automated email campaigns. What you will need to do is firstly collect contact information from a lead. This will be someone who is already aware of your business as they likely have visited your website or followed you on social media. Their contact information can be collected via one of your lead magnets or simply a newsletter sign up request on your website. You can set up different groups based upon lead personal characteristics or the method they used to become one of your leads. Next you'll need to plan and create your nurturing campaign. This is an opportunity to build a mutually beneficial relationship with your leads and to let them know more about your business and how you can help meet their pain points.

This automated email campaign will have a specific focus and usually includes less than ten emails over the course of a month. Each email is to be of benefit to the lead and help keep them engaged on their journey towards making a purchase from your business. Best practices include keeping emails short, focusing on one relevant topic per email, sending only valuable content, personalising each email, maintaining brand consistency and ensuring that the emails progress in topic focus naturally.

Based upon your overall campaign focus, you will have plenty of topic options for the individual emails of the campaign. Remember this is why placing your new leads' into specific groupings pays off, as they will only be on an email list which is relevant to them.