Email Nurturing for Businesses and Charities: Ladders of Engagement Using Automation
Fifty2M
December 13, 2024
Not all email subscribers are born equal. Subject them all to the same messaging and email frequency and you're sure to lose some. Instead, use behaviour and interest-based automation to keep them engaged and nurture them towards action.
Email marketing and the importance of segmentation
People subscribe to email lists for all sorts of reasons:
to receive your newsletter
to access deals
to hear about product reveals
to get exclusive event invitations
to download content that interests them
You may also add them automatically when they sign up to lead generation campaigns, submit enquiries, or make purchases.
If you're a charity, they might also be added to your lists when requesting information about volunteering opportunities, signing up to take part in fundraising challenges, or making donations.
As a result, your audience is not homogenous, it's a real mix, and treating everyone as though they are all identitical is a mistake.
What you need to do is segment people into distinct 'buckets' or groups.
The easiest way to do this is to categorise them first of all by how they ended up in your list, and then based on what they indicate regarding their intentions.
For instance, let's say you are a small charity and people submit their email address in order to download a guide to volunteering. Straight away you can see how you could categorise them based on two things: firstly, their interest in volunteering and, secondly, intent - someone who is willing to exhange their personal details for something indicates a higher level of intent than someone who isn't prepared to do so, but shows less intent than someone who also requests a volunteer application form.
This way, you can stay in touch with people in a way that's likely to be more meaningful to them, rather than bombarding everyone with a one-size-fits-all 'broadcast' approach.
Think about your email marketing goals for different segments
Once you've identified your audience segments, based on what's important to them, it's time to think about what's important to you.
There's no point collecting email addresses if you're not going to put them to good use in a way that advances your business or charity goals.
So, what are your goals?
You can think about them like this:
Brand marketing
keeping front of mind
showcasing credentials
building trust
Performance marketing
moving people towards taking actions
This is again where interest and intent-based segmentation work really well.
Everyone in your list should receive email communications with a brand marketing goal of staying front-of-mind. Your regular newsletter can be good for this.
When it comes to showcasing credentials, think about the interests that brought people into your list to begin with and focus on communications that specifically show off your expertise in that area. For instance, let's say you are a HR consultancy and people end up in your list because they downloaded a PDF guide entitled 'Managing the grievance process' you could send them further information that highlights your indepth knowlegde.
Building trust works best when you're able to not just point to examples of the work you do, but where you are able to do so through the positive experiences of others. This is where case studies come in, but they need to be relevant to the interests of those you're communicating with. For example, there would be little point a marketing agency sharing case studies about Facebook ad campaigns with people who exhibited an interest in out-of-home billboard ads.
Your performance marketing efforts then want to be a bit more direct, increasing in intensity depending on the intent shown by list subscribers.
Imagine you sell industrial machines. Someone who hands over their email address to obtain a downloadable PDF specification has shown a reasonable level of intent, but as a next step you might want them to also request a price list, so you'd want to nudge them towards that. Someone who obtains both the specification and pricelist has shown even more purchasing intent, so you might want to email them to encourage a call or meeting with someone in your sales team. But, equally, you may not want to jump ahead to that with people who haven't first asked for a pricelist.
We call this nurturing process a 'ladder of engagement' where the aim is to encourage people to keep climbing to the next step towards your ultimate goal.
Using automation to help manage email marketing
Keeping track of everyone in your list and managing them in the manner described above is hard if done manually, and gets harder as your list grows.
Which is why most CRM systems and email marketing platforms offer tagging to allow for easy segmentation, and automations that allow you to send emails automatically based on conditions you decide on.
We do it like this:
Everyone who enters our list is automatically tagged with 'Unzipped' which means they'll get our monthly e-newsletter where we share content from our blog.
If someone downloads content from a landing page about brand marketing, they'll be tagged 'Brand Marketing' and will automatically begin to receive emails relating to that topic. Then, depending on how they engage and the intent they show, they'll be added to other sequences aimed at nudging them towards starting a conversation and booking a discovery call. Likewise, someone who submits an enquiry is tagged 'Lead' and added to a different sequence.
The email marketing software we use also allows for date-based and activity-based triggers for automated emails. So, if someone opens a specific number of emails from us, we can send them a thanks. Likewise, we can send a thank you email on the anniversary of them joining our list.
🔗 There's an overview of the Top 10 email marketing platforms here if you'd like to know which offer automation.
It just makes staying in touch much easier, and ensures our communications stay relevant and targeted.
A use case for using 'ladders of engagement' in your email marketing
Picture this: you're a charity and your goal is to build your email list (see our blog on why this is important and how to do it) so that you can communicate with people directly and eventually get them to donate to your cause. You run some ads on Facebook with five campaign objectives:
Download a PDF about your cause
Just sign up to a newsletter
Sign a petition
Take part in an awareness raising activity
Donate
Anyone who downloads the document is signalling an interest in what you do, but that's all for now. Your email sequence could be used to deliver the download then, a few days later, encourage this segment to update their preferences to start receiving your newsletter. This is a low commitment 'ask', and something a large percentage of people will comply with. After receiving a couple of newsletter emails, you could ask them to put their name to your petition, a higher commitment ask that demonstrates a greatet alignment with your cause, but it requires barely any effort. If they sign the petition, now send them a pack full of ideas on how to help raise awareness of your cause, giving them hints, tips, and encouragement. If they do this, then it's time to directly ask for a donation.
Not everyone will move up a rung each time just because you ask them to, but that's fine; they can remain at a level they're comfortable with for a while - you can always try again in the future.
Key takeways on using email marketing to nurture audiences towards taking action using ladders of engagement and automation
If you're building an email list (read about why you should and ideas for doing so here) you need to make the most of it for brand and performance marketing purposes.
Use segmentation to personalise content and keep it relevant
Establish your own goals and align your email marketing efforts with them
Have some emails that are there to promote your brand, and others to drive action
Think of the process as a ladder, where your email marketing encourages your audience to keep climbing one rung at a time
Use automation to make it more manageable, streamlined, and so you don't forget.
Above all, structure everything around interest and intent, then match to your goals and what's important to you.
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