Lead nurturing is the process of developing a meaningful relationship with potential clients and turning them into buying customers.

In this article you will learn how to build a lead nurturing strategy through email marketing. This way you will increase brand reputation, customers’ loyalty and ultimately, sales.

What is lead nurturing?

Being that a leads are potentially interested customers, lead nurturing is a mix of stretegies that convince them to buy your product. This is a general definition, though. In fact, lead nurturing can get you all sorts of connections through the entire customer journey.

From getting them to subscribe to a newsletter to convincing them to read your messages. From being engaged in activities to performing call to actions. Finally, to buy your products and services. Thus increasing your sells and brand reputation.

What role does email marketing play?

In the latest reaserches about the topic, marketers still firmly believe that email marketing is the number one way to acquire customers. Lead nurturing emails are a particular kind of messages you send via electronic mail.

In order to do so, a lead nurturing strategy has to meet these criteria:

• personalized;
• unforgettable;
• relevant.

In fact, people receive tons of emails every day and they don’t want to open them all. Your goal is to induce them to read yours and perform your call to action.

Brand awareness and lead nurturing

Generally speaking, people who buy online are less likely to choose your brand if they don’t know you. So, first and foremost you need to include brand awareness in your lead nurturing startegy.

Let’s say a user is visiting your website. They are scrolling through products, comparing prices, reading about your services. They even put something in their basket. In the end, though, they don’t click on the “buy now” button. Why?

Probably, they just don’t trust you enough. So you need to make them know you and your values. Lead nurturing means understanding what they like about you and make them procede to buy.

How to generate leads

Your goal now is to generate leads, which means attract more and more potential clients. After getting them and earning their loyalty, you will be more likely the next brand they will buy from.

But, how you can convince them? First of all, understand their needs. Data analysis is a great asset in this regard. In fact, you can use it to know how they got to your website, what they were searching for, which pages they visited.

Thus, understanding their problems, you can offer a solution thrugh a well-thought lead nurturing strategy.

A lead nurturing campaign through email marketing

In order to set up your next email campaign, you can use several strategies. First, try with transactional emails. If people look some of your products up, remind them to go back to the website and complete their purchase.

For instance, you can offer a discount or special promotion. Think about FOMO: they will be more likely to buy if they think this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Also, this can consume less time, money and energy if you use automated email marketing.

Finally, invite them to know more about you. Engage them in conversations, make them feel part of a community. This way they will buy from you because they trust you and are intrigued by your storytelling techniques.

Lead nurturing strategy in 2021

There are several strategies you can use in order to generate and nurture leads in this day and age. Let’s see some of them in detail.

1. Qualify leads

This is the first thing you need to do with potential customers: get to know them. Where are they in their customer journey? What are their habits regarding online shopping? In which age group and geographical location do they belong?

2. Segmentation matters

We told you over and over: email marketing is nothing without a sharp segmentation startegy. You need to divide your leads in similar groups based on age, gender, location, habits and more. In the end, your goal is to send the right message to the right people.

3. Use automated messages

In order to save time, energy and money, you can apply automation to most of your email marketing actions. This applies to lead nurturing emails, too. Writing a personalized message to each customer can be slow and boring, but will get you results. So let email marketing services do that for you.

4. Use CTAA CTA is a phrase or word designed to get an immediate response from the reader. As the name suggests, it's usually something that involves a precise action performed by... wisely in your lead nurturing strategy

Inviting someone to subscribe to your newsletter is pretty useless, if they already did. So apply the right call to action to the right people. Analyzing their customer journey and knowing where they land in the funnel is a great way to choose the CTA. Also, remember to use an eye-catching aesthetic in order to highlight the call to action.

5. Hire a copywriter

Your lead nurturing campaign needs a lot of professional figures. You should involve email marketers, of course, but also someone who will write sharp copy and let your emails stand out in the noise. The headline is the most important thing: it will make the difference in opening rates and ROI.

6. Automated doesn’t mean robotic

Empathy is the number one feature people are looking for in a brand. Read the room and be delicate about sentitive matters. Think about what values attract your clients to your brand and use them. Be human, kind, empathic: this will increase your lead nurturing by up to 349%.

7. Optimize your lead nurturing strategy

How? Conducting AB tests every now and then. This way you can monitor which messages, visuals and call to actions perform better and create more conversions. And you can change your startegy accordingly.

8. Integrate every tool in your digital marketing box

We already told you email marketing is still the best performing tool. But what about social media? Actually you can integrate the two with a complex lead nurturing strategy. For example, make people go directly from your fcebook page to your newsletter form. Or let them know about the latest offer in an Instagram story and lead them to your website.

9. Adopt the right tone of voice

If your target audience is teenagers, use a funny and relatable way of speaking. To the contrary, a company working in B2B or addressing professionals should use a formal tone of voice and more technical phrases. In short, your lead nurturing campaign should match your overall tone of communication.

10. Include relevant topics or pop culture phenomena

You know on the web everything is connected. So, if something is talked about all over the internet, use it to your advantage. You can use a little polical satire or a funny quote from the last tv sensation in order to catch a reader’s attention. The thing is, don’t be tone-deaf about sensitive topics. Moreover, keep in mind what is relevant to your specific target.

General advices

When talking about email marketing, you should always follow these principles.

• Don’t be insignificant and don’t copy other brands. In a nutshell, find your unique voice.
• Remember mobile marketing strategies. Whether in lead nurturing or any other aspect of communication, users are most likely to open your email from their mobile devices.
• Create a unique and consistent visual and stick to it: people will instantly recognize your email.

In conclusion

Lead nurturing is the first way to turn potential customers in loyal ones. Even though you can apply it to most marketing techniques, email marketing is for sure the highest performing.

Contact us and explore our email marketing services in order to get your tailor-made campaign by Mailsenpai and start growing your audience.