Lead Nurturing Campaign

Defining the Customers to Nurture 

The first thing you need to do to develop an effective lead nurturing campaign is to define who the customers are which require nurturing. Companies usually have more than one type of customer, which is great because the more customer types t are, the more leads are generated and the more sales can be made at the end of each day.

However, before you start any kind of email marketing or lead nurturing campaign, defining who these specific customers are needs to be done. You want to choose the ideal customer types, the ones who are liable to actually look at your marketing emails and potentially buy products. Email marketing can involve more than one avenue, but for this, you need to segment them into segments so you can target individual groups specifically.

Offering Something of Value

One of the biggest mistakes which many newbies make when embarking on their first email marketing or lead nurturing campaign is to start with a sales pitch. This has a tendency to actually drive customers away, because nobody likes being bombarded with sales emails. You shouldn’t start off with one of those emails w you offer for a quote for your services or products, w you offer a demo, or even one w you send customers emails regarding new promotions.

This is especially the case if it is the first email in the campaign. You want to offer the customer something of value. Send them a whitepaper, a free eBook, a webinar to take part in, or maybe even a 2-for-1 sales offer. However, starting off with a purely sales-oriented campaign is likely to annoy people more than anything. The point of lead nurturing campaigns is not to ram new products down the throats of customers, but to offer them something of value so they come back for more on their own.

Setting Goals and Objectives for Campaign Emails

Now you have figured out who your target audience is, you have segmented them into groups, and you also know to send valuable content in the emails before you send sales quotes or so called deals; however, exactly what kind of content are you supposed to send, and what exactly is the purpose of it? The rule of thumb is that you want to send those people light nudges that will slowly entice them to become repeat customers.

You need to look at your various segments of potential or repeat customers you have created, and then send them various types of content which will specifically appeal to those people. You can start with some plain content and offers, and then slowly move towards more specific product or service advertising. Lead nurturing can take a while to be successful, but  you are playing the long game. It’s not all about making sales through the first set of emails. You also need to figure out what your exact goals are, and what kinds of emails you need to send to which people in order to achieve these goals.

Sending Out Emails on a Timeline

Another important consideration to keep in mind when it comes to lead nurturing campaigns is your timeline. First figure out what the sales cycle of your business is. How often do some people come back for more? When do you make the most sales, and when are the fewest sales made? For instance, many businesses might have a cycle of 30 days, and you want to space the emails you send out as part of the campaign accordingly.

You don’t want to rush into pushing sales, but rather to let these leads develop naturally. So, if your cycle is 30 days, you want to space out your emails as such. You may want to send 3 emails, 1 on the day after conversion, one on the 10th day, and one on the 20th. Send enough so people remember who you are, but not so many that they get annoyed or overwhelmed with your campaign. Creating a timeline is crucial to the success of a lead nurturing campaign.

Evaluating Results and Optimizing

The final thing to keep in mind in relation to your lead nurturing campaign, is that you always want to experiment and evaluate. Send different offers, use different subject lines, change up the timeline a bit, and so on.

You want to keep track of the success each email has had in relation to another. You always want to be optimizing your campaign emails to get the best and most leads. You don’t want to become stagnant and keep doing the same sequence over and over again.

Conclusion

There you have the 5 basic steps on how to start your own lead nurturing campaign. Sure, it is a bit more to it, but this is what you need to know in order to get started.