How does lead nurture email marketing work?

If you already have an email marketing strategy in place, you’re familiar with the concept of sending customers a “Welcome” email when they first opt into contact from your business. This email is typically a brief “thank you” for filling out a form along with a note about the next step to becoming a customer. But what happens next?

With a traditional lead nurturing strategy, the subscriber may be placed on a list and sent weekly or monthly newsletters or promotional emails. But with a more advanced strategy, your company may stagger emails over the next few months to gradually familiarize subscribers with your products, nurturing a lead and eventually convincing them to make a purchase.

With our MarketingCloud technology, we take things a step further. Instead of basing email frequency and content solely on how much time has elapsed since a lead signed up for a particular list, you can adjust your emails based on their subsequent website actions as well as firmographic data.

Did they open the first email? Return to your site? Do they work in an industry that your company knows well? Are there certain products they’re likely to be interested?

These actions and traits all signal different levels of engagement and interest, and they can help you decide what message you’d like to send next to nurture a lead. And with that lead nurturing, you can automate the process so all of your leads receive relevant, targeted content without you lifting a finger.

You’ll start by creating content that is designed to move different leads through the sales funnel depending on how ready they are to buy. For example, let’s say you’re a B2B heavy equipment manufacturer and you want to reach potential customers in the mining industry. Your lead nurturing strategy might look something like this:

With CompanyTracker, you’ll be able to tell when someone who fits this profile visits your site. If they give you their email address to hear from you, you’ll automatically deliver the right content.

Connect your emails with your site experience

Every time a lead visits your site, they provide you with information that will help you better understand their needs and convert them into a paying customer. The pages they view, forms they fill out, and resources they download are all indicators of interest. With email marketing, you can use that information to determine the content of your emails and deliver the right information to each of your leads.

This integrated approach not only benefits your business, but also provides your customers with a seamless purchasing experience.

For example, let’s say you run a B2B company that sells heavy equipment, and a visitor arrives on your site for the first time. They click through a few general information pages, then sign up for your amazing email newsletter. You have a new lead!

Within minutes, they’ll receive a welcome email thanking them for subscribing and providing them with a few links to important content on your site. The next day, they return to your site and visit pages about mining equipment. Two days later, they receive a second email from you with information about your products for mining companies.

Each email you send is nurturing your lead and moving them through the sales funnel. The content of these emails is more likely to be useful and interesting to them than information about other industries, and it'll resonate with them since it's similar to what they've already seen on your site.

Even if a lead hasn’t returned to your site yet, you can send them a broader email with links to a variety of pages and encourage them to return.

This is just one example of how your leads’ actions can impact the messages you send. Depending on the trends you see during your email campaign, you can modify it to be as simple or complex as you want to nurture leads and convert new customers.

When you work with us, the messages you send to your leads are unique to your business, and the email marketing experts at Tech Sailor can work with you to create a campaign that will nurture your leads with the right messages at the right time.