Article

Alex Embling
Alex Embling 24 June 2016
Categories B2B, Content, Email & eCRM

How to Create Effective Inbound Email Nurture Workflows: 5 Considerations

So your Inbound campaign is set, your blogs and offer content are live, your social messaging and channel promotion are in place - and you're seeing some relevant leads come in through your landing page.

But a few leads does not a sale make. Before you think about handing leads to your sales team, you must be sure they are a good-fit, qualified, and are consideration/decision ready. Having an effective nurture campaign in place is key to achieving this.

So your Inbound campaign is set, your blogs and offer content are live, your social messaging and channel promotion are in place - and you're seeing some relevant leads come in through your landing page.

But a few leads does not a sale make. Before you think about handing leads to your sales team, you must be sure they are a good-fit, qualified, and are consideration/decision ready. Having an effective nurture campaign in place is key to achieving this.

79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. Source: MarketingSherpa

How To Create Effective Email Nurture Workflows

Lead nurturing, especially for organisations with longer sales cycles, is key to progressing prospects through to purchase qualificationHelping to develop relationships with leads, nurture activity (such as implementing targeted email nurture workflows) works by keeping your brand and solution at the forefront of your persona’s mind.​ 

To achieve an effective nurture workflow:

1. Target Your Target Persona

At the campaign planning stage you will have developed content around your specific persona's challenges. Your nurture emails need to drip feed that information to the right persona, at the right time, in order for content to resonate. Segmenting your emails and content (by topic, challenge, or lead stage) will help to ensure the right content reaches the right prospects.​​

2. Keep Campaign Goals In Mind

What are you hoping to achieve with your overall email campaign? In Inbound campaigns, goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely (also known as ‘SMART’ goals). Typical email workflow campaign goals can be anything from trust building, to lead re-engagement. Regardless of your goals, it’s always important to monitor you email metrics (click-through rate, bounce rate, open rate) to ensure your workflows and content are on track and resonating.​

3. Make Sure Email Content is Buyer Mapped

Each piece of content you create should be mapped against an approprate Buyer's Journey/ purchase cycle stage, and the same is true of the emails in your workflow. Emails should also be mapped and segmented to target not only the appropriate persona, but also their specific challenges at each Buyer’s Journey stage; from Awareness to Consideration to Decision.

4. Understand Your Sales Cycle Length

Make sure your workflows map to the length of your sales cycle length to avoid stagnation in your nurture campaign.

For example, if it takes an average of 6 months to convert a lead into a customer, you need to have enough content in place and have planned your workflow to match that timescale. This is a seemingly obvious step, but one that is frequently forgotten.

5. Personalise, Personalise, Personalise!

Now with marketing automation, social media and content management tools, the approach to nurturing is increasingly more personalised and sophisticated making the identification of your target Persona all the more important - Weidert​

Personalisation is key to developing a progressive relationship with a lead. For emails to be successful, recipients must feel that each email you send, and the nature of the content contained within, has been picked for them personally to address their unique challenges.

Email segmentation by persona type and lead stage can help here, as will content personalisation.  Also ensure emails are sent from a recognisable  address - from a real person (i.e. not from ‘info@’ or ‘sales@’)

When combined, these listed points can make a dramatic difference to the effectiveness of nurture campaigns, helping to not only keep leads warm and progress them through their buying journey, but also re-engaging stagnant leads.

To learn more about how to build an effective lead nurture campaign, read more in this post: Poor Results From Lead Nurturing? Reconsider Your Inbound Marketing Plan’ on the Strategic Internet Consulting blog. 

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