In our first installment of this series, we discussed how to develop a strategy for marketing automation success and what you should consider during the planning of a nurture campaign to maximize marketing effectiveness.
To recap, start with the end goal in mind. Nurture campaigns are tools to help push prospects through the sales funnel with exciting content focused on their interest in your products or services. This isn't meant to be ‘one size serves all’ content. Segmentation plays a crucial part in successful nurture campaigns. Creating customer or prospect profiles based on things like demographics, interactions with your content, and other factors help to personalize the information and content you send so that it’s relevant to them.
Once you've taken note of all of your relevant content across segments - be it things you already have or things you need to create - it's time to actually turn those into emails. A strong subject line, clear call to action, and the stated goal of your email are good things to brainstorm prior to writing so that you know exactly what you want the prospect to do when they open the email.
How many emails should be included in a nurture campaign?
This is all dependent on your typical sales cycle length and the amount of content you have. If your sales cycle is generally 1 month from conversion, then 2-3 emails in that time frame could work. If your general sales cycle is 4-6 months, 5-8 emails in that time frame is acceptable. This piece of the puzzle is something you'll have to experiment with until you find the right mix that leads to successful results. It could be that one segment of your prospects respond quicker than others, so it is always important to test, analyze, and pivot, if necessary.
Let's get to actually building the campaign. For those more sophisticated in their email marketing, most email tools have features for automating these campaigns. If, however, you aren't ready to make that jump into automation software, these nurture campaigns are still do-able manually.
We'll approach this as if the sales cycle is only a few weeks long and will begin with the day of conversion. If you haven't set up an automated or manual "Thank You" email for downloading your piece of content, that is generally the starting point. We will wait a few days to see if the prospect opened and clicked on the "Thank You" note for reference. At this point, you would send the second email with content around a similar topic to the one that was initially downloaded. Wait another few days and send the third piece of content. If you see that they’ve downloaded or interacted with every piece of content you’ve sent, chances are they’re ready to be engaged by a sales person.
With an automation tool, you can set triggers and alerts in real time for any prospect activity so that you're always aware of when to engage. As said before, testing this process, tweaking the timing or messaging, and analyzing the results is paramount to your nurture campaign success.
Ready to get started on your own nurture campaign or some kind of marketing automation? Americaneagle.com's Strategy team is full of experts to help you hone in on what works for your business to convert more prospects and drive more sales.
