Definition of a nurture campaign, with examples and guidelines that follow H&D best practice for creating nurture emails.
Let's reminder ourselves quickly, what are 'Nurture Emails'?
Nurture emails are meant to educate and nurture prospects or leads.
More educational than most drip campaigns, nurture emails are still a form of email marketing, but often convey the value of a company or teach recipients about subjects that they’ve signalled an interest in.
Nurture emails are great tools for shepherding leads through the sales process until they’re ready and comfortable making an initial purchase.
Source: https://sendgrid.com/blog/your-guide-to-nurture-emails/
Qualities of a good nurture email campaign
- Builds a relationship with the prospect
- Adds value by helping the prospect achieve their goals, overcome their challenges, and helps them through their buyer's journey
- Provides high quality, useful resources and content
- Builds a profile of the prospect through their actions
- Always provides a relevant CTA or asks a direct question in order to illicit the desired response
- To the point, respects the prospects time and values their interaction
What nurture emails are not
- Newsletters
- Purely promotional
- Hard sell, pushy or all about your product
- Long winded (any long form content should be gated or provided via a link), rambling or irrelevant
H&D Best Practice Guidelines for creating Nurture emails
Subject lines
The subject line and preview text of an email have one job: to get the email opened. That's it.
In order to get your email opened you should leverage the following as a bear minimum:
- Personalisation:
Alex, this new blog was written for Marketing Directors just like you - Call out the value of the content:
[DOWNLOAD] Cheat sheet to get more leads in 2020 - Ask a question you know your personas want answered:
What are the best 5 ways to ensure happy customers?
Or combine all three!
[FREE GUIDE] How can Marketing Directors improve the ROI of their efforts by 200%?
Types of content
The content you provide in your nurture series must align to the Buyer Journey for your target persona.
Top of the Funnel content: The "awareness" stage, is where people looking for answers, resources, education, research data, opinions, and insight and should be included in your welcome email.
Examples:
- Quiz
- White paper
- Ebook
- Checklist
- Educational webinar
- Video
Middle of the Funnel: This is the "consideration" stage is where people are doing heavy research on whether or not your product or service is a good fit for them. This content should cover most of your nurture content.
Examples:
- Case studies
- FAQs
- Comparisons
- Demo videos
- Product webinar
Bottom of the Funnel: The "decision" stage, where people are figuring out exactly what it would take to become a customer. This content should come into play towards the end of your nurture series, but also should be the focus of your CTAs throughout the nurture phase - as it's the action you ultimately want people to take to become a customer.
Examples:
- Free trial
- Meeting
- Demo
- Consultation
- Audit
- Money off or added value
- Free quote
For more examples of good nurture campaign content, check out: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/lead-nurturing-email-examples
Length and style of content
- Emails should be no more than 200 words (any in-depth content should be created as an additional offer or blog post and linked to from the email
- First two blog posts to be added to content schedule to align to nurture series
- Paragraphs should be no more than 3 lines. Make your copy short, easy to digest, and compelling to keep reading. Many people find the format of one line per paragraph annoying, but it's proven to keep people reading!
Would you rather read an email formatted like this:
Or like this?
