Why you need to use email nurturing campaigns 🌱 in lead generation

Email nurturing, using automated email sequences, allows you to supply people with highly relevant and personalised content to stay front-of-mind and keep them engaged.

When someone downloads a lead magnet, or fills-in a form on your website to enquire about a product or service you supply, what happens next?

Ideally, you want to treat them as a 'lead' and automatically capture their details in a CRM system or marketing database.

Next, you want to try and qualify them - is there a realistic likelihood of them ever becoming a paying punter? If the answer is 'no', then it's probably not worth the time and effort staying in touch.

However, if you decide there is a better-than-even chance of securing their custom, it's time to try and stike-up a meaningful dialogue.

And while you're doing that, you should add them to an automated email nurturing campaign, periodically sending them useful information about whatever it is they expressed interest in.

For example, if you sell machines that compress unwanted cardboard into bales that can be sold for recycling, and someone submits an enquiry form about your "PowerPress XL Baler", you could send them a series of emails over the course of a few weeks that outline the major benefits of baling, tell people about other things that may be needed (like baling wire or tape), provide guidance on what infrastructure will be required (like a three-phase and earth power supply), and offer advice on machine sizing (is the PowerPress XL right or would a smaller or larger version be better?)

The benefits of email nurturing are hard to overstate. For a start, you get your brand in front of leads and prospects multiple times, but in a non-salesy way. You get to showcase your know-how. And it builds trust. On top of that, by tracking who opens which emails, you can guage how interested someone really is (allowing you to focus on those leads with greater potential to convert into customers).

Not only that, but because they're triggered one-by-one to individual contacts, they don't get treated as bulk emails by spam filters, which enhances deliverability. On average, the email nurture campaigns we run for ourselves have a 98% deliverability rate which is much higher than ordinary email marketing campaigns that are sent to many recipients at the same time.

Open rates and click through rates are also higher than with conventional bulk mailers, and that's because the content is so tailored to the recipient, based on previously expressed interests.

If you don't invest in email nurturing (which works even better when paired with website remarketing) within your lead and opportunity pipelines, then you end up wasting some of the budget you're sinking into traffic and lead generation.