Many leads begin not as customers interested in your products, but as cooler leads signing up looking for information in a certain industry or process. For example, a business signing up to an affiliate networking newsletter may not be looking for software (yet), but instead tips on how to make the most from their current affiliate partnerships.
It’s your job to then nurture those leads using a solid email marketing strategy, coupled with automation sequences to convert those subscribers into warm leads and eventually customers.
A widely accepted misconception is that driving email subscribers to conversion is about somehow forcing them up to the next stage in their buyer journey, but that’s not quite accurate.
The trick to nurturing a lead is ensuring your communication is always in sync with their stage in the buyer journey, not to force them onto the next one.
Let’s look at how you can achieve this.
At the start of their customer journey, the lead has most likely signed up because they want to learn more. They’ve found the topic of your newsletter interesting or want access to your downloadable resource or your free webinar. They’re not necessarily looking to purchase anything now or even anytime soon, but they want to engage with the industry.
This will be the case for around 80% of your new leads. The goal here is to keep your content useful so they stay on your email list. Keeping those leads warm and happy can lead to conversions much later down the line and reduce churn, but only if you use your email campaign to show you’re an authority on the subject and keep them engaged and coming back.
The goal here is to enable your list growth through consistently providing valuable information. So when the time comes for them to look at purchasing, they become your customer, not someone else’s.
Let’s assume you’ve already completed step one and have a list of warm, interested leads who regularly open your newsletters and engage with the content (you can track this through your email marketing software). After showing them why you’re a subject authority, the next step is showing them how your product helps achieve their goals.
The biggest mistake you can make at this point is pushing conversion-oriented emails at the expense of providing value to your customers. Thinking that this will help your conversion rate is like thinking adding more buttons to a landing page will increase conversion. Spoiler alert – it won’t.
For example, sending an email that’s simply sales-based with the button: “Sign Up Now!” is far less effective than an information-driven email with an embedded signup call-to-action (CTA) at the end.
Most subscribers who are just on a newsletter email list, rather than a free trial or product-based segment are probably nowhere near converting. So any conversion-driven emails need to provide equal value to customers who simply want to learn more. The golden rule is 80/20 – provide 80% quality/useful content and 20% sales-based or product-based information.
There are a few ways you can drive interest while also encouraging people to take the next step in the buyer journey:
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Discuss the importance of a feature you provide to the market by asking what benefit and value this will give your subscriber.
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Offer gated content such as an ebook or free tool where they have to fill in a data capture form or click a link in the email itself. These are effective signup tools, but are also effective within the list itself.
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Providing access to a free webinar or event that has a deadline increases the sense of urgency felt by the reader to sign up.
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Temporary promotions are on the more salesy end of the spectrum (get 15% off before March 2022!), but can be effective when coupled with the above methods.
And don’t stop there! Many people think that once they’ve got the customer to enter the next stage of the journey, their work for that part is effectively “done”, but the next step is follow-up. Ensure you get some sort of commitment from the subscriber before moving them onto the next step of the buyer journey sequence.
Understanding your buyer persona and segmenting your audience is an important step in driving content to the right subscribers at the right time. In fact, it could be the most valuable thing you do with your potential customers.
These segments can be anything, but best practice is to base them on what’s important to your customers or buyer persona, rather than their place in the buyer journey or lead score.
The trick is to only choose a few segments for your list and review them frequently. For example, if someone signed up for a newsletter, they should receive more general information than a person who has registered for a free trial.
Look at your CTAs – each link should be different depending on the persona and segment. If two email sequences end in the same CTA, then these should be reviewed and merged.
By drilling down and personalizing your email message to specific segments or even individual customers, you can be sure the information is reaching the right buyer persona at the right time.
A marketing cadence essentially relates to balancing your subscribers’ buyer journey and your email frequency. Controlling your marketing cadence is all about timing. When is the right time for your subscriber to receive this specific information?
If you push too hard, they might unsubscribe or have a worse opinion of your brand than they did prior to signing up. If you push too little, your competitors may take your hard-earned spot in their inbox. Don’t put out communications for the sake of it. Think about the why and, importantly, the when.
Consider your email sequence in the broader scope of your marketing strategy. How can you coordinate with other channels to create a multi-channel approach? How can you keep your business at the forefront of your customer’s mind when they’re seeking a solution?
With the ability to automate comes the ability to overcomplicate. The more automated sequences you have, the more costly it can be, and over-segmentation can actually lead to a drop in subscribers and performance.
Keep your segmentation and automation to manageable amounts. With too many sequences, it can also be harder to spot human error, like a broken link or a mass email to the wrong people. The more we automate, the more we can lose that human touch and keep churning out the same errors over and over. If it’s too complicated for you to follow, it’s definitely too complicated for your customer.