Email Nurture Series: You Reap What You Sow
Each spring, your local hardware store is stocked with everything the home gardener needs to grow a garden, right in their backyard.
Some of these valuable gardening lessons and tools are skills that small business owners can use. Plant wisely, tend to your marketing strategy and prospects with care and develop a blooming business!
When a new plant starts to grow, it’s important to nurture and support it so it can flourish. The same process applies when turning a prospect into a customer. The ideal tool to do that, is an email nurture program.
What is an email nurture program?
An email nurture program is an automated way to build relationships and keep in touch with your clients and prospects throughout their journey with you. It is a powerful way to keep users engaged.
Throughout your daily business, you collect contacts and email addresses in a variety of ways - such as your website pop-up, an online sales transaction, a visit to your site or business card drop-off at your store or a networking meeting.
All of these “warm” email leads are ideal to add to a specific list in your email marketing toolbox that triggers an email nurture campaign.
Types of email nurture campaigns
There are different types of nurture campaigns, that serve different purposes. Here are two sample email nurture campaigns to maximize new sales, exposure and - more importantly - profits.
1 - Prospect Lead Nurturing
This automated email sequence kicks off after a prospect has indicated interest in your product or services.
Their actions inform when they receive timed and targeted information to their inbox.
According to The Annuitas Group, adding a lead nurture campaign to your sales process allows you to close additional sales up to 23% faster. In addition, your nurtured leads will make 47% larger purchases on average than non-nurtured leads.
2 - Post-Sale / Relationship Nurturing (Upsell and Cross-Sell)
This series of automated email communications helps educate customers on what they’ve bought already and how to get the best results.
The emails also highlight other services or products you offer that they may need, as well as allowing you to build relationships with existing customers so they don’t leave and go to a competitor. Nurtured leads produce on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads.
Once you have these two basic nurture campaigns in place, you’ll be able to see increases in new customers, new sales and overall profits.
Additional types of nurture series include:
- Reengagement Nurture Campaigns - ideal for lapsed customers
- New Customer Onboarding Nurture Campaigns - perfect to ensure a new customer's experience is positive
- Customer Renewal Nurture Campaigns - for programs that require a renewal, it's a smart approach to extend the relationship
- Abandoned Cart Reminder Campaigns - for e-commerce businesses to increase a website's close rate
Like a blossoming garden that is tended to, a successful email nurture program focuses on the needs of prospects.
These email campaigns provide the information to build trust, increase brand awareness, and maintain a connection until those prospects are ready to make a purchase.