Developing a well thought-out converting lead nurturing email campaign is not easy. The process can take three plus hours per landing page without a good plan in place. This post will help you develop that plan in order to efficiently deploy, track and adjust lead nurturing campaigns.
- Take an inventory of every piece of content on the website that requires a visitor to opt-in or fill out a form to access. This content should solve people’s problems.
- Put the content into three piles. Pile number one represents the top of the sales funnel. These are pieces of content that require a reletively small time commitment to consume (i.e. one page guide, cheat sheet, free widget, contest, survey, etc.). The second pile should be content that would take more time to consume (i.e. white paper, ezine, slide show, short videos, etc.). The final pile should contain content that when downloaded would require an hour or more of the consumer’s time to ingest.
- Create new content which fulfills any missing top, middle or bottom of the funnel requirements.
- Take the first pile (top of the funnel) and write short emails offering the consumer content from the second pile (middle of the funnel). Next, you’ll want to write short emails which offer content from the third pile (bottom of the funnel). You can make a separate lead nurturing campaign for every piece of content at the top of the funnel or you can put them in logical groups and make one campaign for each group. If you group your content try and group them by the problem they solve or type of content.
- With the middle of the funnel content write short emails similar to the step above which nudge the consumer towards the third pile (bottom of the funnel).
- The emails written for bottom of the funnel content may continue to offer content from the third pile, but don’t forget to ask for the appointment or sale within three to four emails. The consumer of this content has already committed some time to consume your content. If you’re short on content to offer it’s ok to use some top of the funnel content before asking for the appointment or sale.
- After the emails are written out for each piece of content make an email drip schedule which is appropriate for the industries targeted. Given the busy world we live in it is recommended for most to drip the first email within one to three days of the original opt-in. The second email should be two to three days later. After that, spacing them out over five day increments should suffice.
- Write short enticing and welcoming subject lines.
- Once the lead nurturing campaign is live make sure to track its performance at least weekly. Some analytics to monitor include opt-outs, click-through rates and conversions. Also, score the leads that continue to engage your content via the lead nurturing campaign by how much and how often they do.
- Based on the analytics adjust the campaign accordingly by changing offers, content, headlines, etc.
- Repeat the process for every new piece or group of opt-in/advanced content developed.
The above represents a general approach to developing lead nurturing. Over the course of the campaign you’ll begin to understand your potential client’s wants and needs better. By continually fine-tuning the campaign your results should improve and the lead nurturing you start with today will look nothing like the campaign you have a year from now. For more help with lead nurturing strategies feel free to leave a comment below.