When creating your lead nurturing campaign it’s important that you carefully plan the flow of your emails to ensure that your overall campaign guides your leads through the funnel. Implement automatically triggered campaigns (a series of automated emails called a “drip” campaign) that deliver consistent brand messages at specified time intervals and when leads reach certain milestones. In a long sales cycle, messages need to be more informative and not a sales pitch. Offer them something of value (webinars, eBooks, white papers, articles, free reports, blog posts, etc.).
Here are five essential elements of an effective lead nurturing campaign:
- Compelling. Effective nurturing requires thought leadership. Create compelling and informative content that resonates with your audience and motivates them toward action.
- Personalized. It’s important that lead nurturing campaigns are relevant to prospects. Personalize your message based on your recipients’ preferences and past engagement with your content.
- Targeted. Keep emails targeted and relevant to where they are in the sales cycle, and feature a prominent call to action, when their interest in purchasing your product or service is peaking.
- Concise. Keep your content simple, focused and short enough to stop your recipients from losing interest.
- Timely. The timing and frequency of touch points should be linked to the prospect’s purchasing cycle. Prospects appreciate receiving timely information which adds value. Use a marketing automation tool that allows you to segment your database according to behaviors, and send out consistent messages based on behavior or action triggers when a prospect enters a new stage in the buying process.
In summary, one of the most beneficial things you can add to your sales process is an email lead nurturing campaign to engage with prospects through the middle of the funnel. This is the time between when they have shown interest in what you do or the problem you solve and actually converting to a customer.
Read Are Your Leads Leaking Out of the Funnel? for more tips on how to turning prospects into customers through lead nurturing.
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