Lead nurturing campaigns are valuable strategy components for brands to stay in touch with their leads and customers. These campaigns help raise brand awareness by providing useful and relevant information to leads who aren’t yet ready to make a purchase. Lead nurturing campaigns can also be used for customers at all stages of the buyer’s journey.
When executed correctly, these campaigns can help you increase engagement and conversions.
Lead nurturing emails get up to 10x the response rate of regular emails.
How do you create a lead nurturing campaign?
Before you run your lead nurturing campaigns, you need to plan out exactly what goals you hope to accomplish. From there, map out specific touch points and determine what types of messaging you want to send.
Running a lead nurturing campaign manually can take a lot of time and work. It’s best to use an ESP that’ll automate the process for you. Campaign Monitor makes it easy to create a lead nurturing campaign by following a few simple steps within the platform.
Start by creating an automated journey.
The easiest way to build your lead nurturing campaigns in Campaign Monitor is by creating automated journeys. You simply go to the “Automation” section and click on “Create a new journey.” From here, you use select segments and choose triggers that start the journey. You’ll then add either a delay, email, or condition step which signifies the next action taken in the journey.
Source: Campaign Monitor
It’s important to note that you won’t be able to turn on your journeys until all steps are completed. If you want to edit active journeys, you’ll need to turn them off.
Customers already in the journey will still continue to progress, but they won’t receive any of the scheduled emails until you turn the journey back on.
Lead nurturing can be used for a wide variety of campaigns.
The best thing about lead nurturing campaigns is that you can run one for most of the basic segments in your email list. Most marketers run welcome campaigns for new contacts who sign up to receive emails. There are several other common situations where lead nurturing campaigns are useful, including:
- Re-engagement campaigns
- Onboarding campaigns
- Promotional campaigns
- Educational campaigns
- Renewal campaigns
Remember, lead nurturing campaigns can be used to connect with customers from the moment of first contact to after they’ve made a purchase.
How to measure lead nurturing campaigns
You’ll measure your lead nurturing campaigns like you would any other emails. Pay attention to common metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and conversions.
One area you’ll specifically want to track is unsubscribes. The average unsubscribe rate is about 0.17% percent, but that can vary by industry. If your rate is higher, it’s a key indicator that your nurture isn’t providing relevant information or is targeting the wrong segment.
Does it really matter?
Not every conversation you have with customers should be asking them to purchase. It would be like speaking with someone who only talks about themself. Your customers will get tired of it and begin to ignore you.
Lead nurturing campaigns are a way to remain relevant to your customers without giving them a continuous sales pitch. You can actually increase revenue in the long run by focusing on your customers’ needs. According to Invespcro, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases compared to non-nurtured leads.
What now?
The next step is to determine what type of campaign you want to run. Familiarize yourself with your current segmentation lists and see how they can be integrated into your campaign. From there, experiment with your options in Campaign Monitor to customize your campaigns based on your needs. While you’re at it, spend some time determining how long your nurture campaign should run so it has the best chance for success.