A Step-By-Step Guide to Building an Email Nurture Campaign

Leads are integral to your business, and nurturing them will help you turn them into loyal customers. Lead nurturing is a strategy to build a relationship with leads and guide them through the sales funnel. 

As you tell them more about your brand, you have a chance to warm them up until they’re ready to convert. You’ll do this by sending a series of email messages based on your customer behavior called an email nurture campaign.

You can include any type of email content in your nurture emails, but before we get into the specifics, let’s learn the basics of lead nurturing: definitions, importance, best practices, and take a look at email nurture sequence templates.

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What is an Email Nurture Campaign?

A lead nurture campaign is a set of emails you send to leads based on the type of action they take with your marketing touchpoints. As soon as a lead signs up for your list, or downloads content from your website, they become a part of your nurture campaign strategy.

These email sequences are an opportunity to introduce your uniqueness and show your leads why they should choose your brand. Send them content that educates, builds awareness, and increases trust in your business.

Your nurture sequences will be more effective when you add personalized elements. Personalization in emails improves click-through-rates by an average of 14% and marketing conversions by 10%. 

For example, customize the email subject line with your lead’s name and the topic of interest, include relevant body copy, and send consistent messages based on their behavior and past actions. This will ensure they open your emails and increase the chances of conversion.

To effectively use personalization in your nurture emails, you must know what your audience wants and needs. So, let’s learn about the email nurture campaign process.

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How Does Lead Nurturing Work?

Lead nurturing emails are part of inbound marketing strategy — a practice that lets you build lasting relationships with prospects. By providing valuable content, you ensure your leads succeed at every stage of the buyer’s journey. When you empower your leads, they’re more likely to share their success stories with others in their network. This can boost brand awareness and help you generate even more leads in the process. 

Lead nurturing helps you meet your leads’ wants and desires and provide them with the right information at the right time. Your potential customers can have different types of interactions with your brand. They may subscribe to your blog, add items to the cart, sign up for a webinar, or download a piece of content. 

To keep them engaged, you can send them abandoned cart reminders, coupon codes, or other relevant content to encourage them to make a purchase.  

Certainly, you can do much more with your lead-nurturing emails if you have the right email marketing strategy for your business.

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Does Your Business Need a Lead Nurture Campaign?

When people started using emails, they weren’t aware of the many marketing tactics to capture and convert leads. Today, without an email nurture campaign, your potential customers are likely to forget about your brand. As you engage them with product information and offers, you build a strong case for why your leads must convert. When you send more personalized offers and signify your brand value, it eventually increases conversions and sales. 

A great lead nurture campaign can also encourage people to forward your emails to others, maximizing conversions.

To accomplish these objectives, you can send your leads multiple emails, with the help of triggers; a certain action by the lead (such as signing up for your newsletter). This is called a lead nurture email sequence.

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How is a Lead Nurturing Email Sequence Helpful? 

Once a customer takes an action, you can send them relevant information in a series of emails. For example, when a customer signs up on your website, you can start with a welcome email and then move on to onboarding, product recommendations, and other useful content.

You can also do this in different ways, depending on the campaign type and objective:

Campaign Type	Objective	Key elements
Welcome series	Greet and onboard customers	Brand Introduction
Educational emails	Provide information about your product	Educational blog posts, videos, or webinars
Product highlights	Show your products and unique features	Include CTAs to guide customers to take action
Case study series	Build trust with your customers	Highlight challenges and solutions, show real-life customer stories, and testimonials and results.
Exclusive offers	Drive conversions through promotions	Share limited-time deals and offers
Feedback emails	Collect customer input for improvement	Provide an easy way to submit feedback and ask for customer opinions

Paying close attention to your leads’ behavior helps you filter the high-quality leads from the low-quality ones. When you educate high-quality leads through personalized content, it’s easier to move them to the last stage of the marketing funnel — conversion.

You may include questions in your email sign-offs to encourage replies from interested recipients. This two-way communication can further strengthen your lead marketing strategy.

To do that, you must know what elements to include in your email nurture campaign. Use the below pointers as a guide to help you design yours.

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What to Include in Your Lead Nurture Campaigns?

Your goal is to contact your leads and provide them with informative content throughout their buyer’s journey. This process can be time-consuming and challenging without a plan. 

The answers will act as the foundation for your lead nurturing campaign. Once you’re clear on your motives, you can focus on the following elements:

1. Purposeful Content 

For every email you send, you must have a goal and a purpose. Is your email an FAQ, a promotion, an introduction email, or a reminder? 

The email content, font styles, and multimedia will change according to it. If your email has abbreviations, clarify those next to them.very email you send, you must have a goal and a purpose. Is your email an FAQ, a promotion, an introduction email, or a reminder? 

2. Personalize Subject Line and Content

To create an impact with your email, use an attention-grabbing subject line along with a personalized greeting —- it makes the email more compelling and relatable for the lead.

3. Answer Their Questions

When you address a lead’s pain point even before they can ask, it shows that you have a genuine interest in helping them. Include answers to the most common questions that your leads have. Think about how your product can solve their problems and help them reach their goals.

4. Share Your Knowledge

Surf through your research and send your leads a useful piece of content. If you have separate lists for subscriber categories in your email client, put them to use. It could be a tip, industry news, or a product update. Whatever it is, it will help your leads remember this information through the next stage of their buyer’s journey.

5. Include Testimonials 

Showing your leads that you have a positive track record will help them trust you more. Include testimonials and quotes from your past clients and reviews from your social media channels.

Below, Surreal does a wonderful job of including customer reviews to promote their cereal. It’s worth noting that they include customer stories instead of showing the star ratings.

6. Use a Clear CTA

Include a compelling and clear call to action that’ll encourage your leads to interact with your business. A well-done CTA holds the power to convert your visitor into a lead. Your CTA can be a button, a form, a banner, links, or pop-ups.

A compelling CTA will have action verbs and would like this: ”Sign up and save $20” instead of ”Click here to sign up”.

7. Add Unsubscribe Option

An unsubscribe option must be clearly visible and accessible to your subscribers. When leads have a way out, you reduce spam complaints and increase the chances of high deliverability and sender reputation.

8. Measure the Effectiveness

Track your email campaign metrics to understand how your leads react to your emails. Use this information to create tailor-made emails in the future.

Building a strong relationship with your leads takes consistent efforts, and the above is only a starting point. To fully engage your leads, you also need to know the email nurture campaign best practices. 

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Email Nurture Campaign Best Practices

To help you foster meaningful connections with your leads, here are 8 recommended best practices and methods:

1. Qualify Your Leads

Qualifying your leads helps you identify potential customers close to your ideal customer profile. This gives you more room to target consumers who are most likely to convert. 

2. Lead Segmentation

An email segmentation strategy allows you to create more personalized emails since every lead has different interests, needs, and pain points. You can segment leads through various categories such as buyer personas, smart forms, or site analytics.  

You may also define key attributes about your leads: psychographic, demographic, sociographic, or corporate. Your landing page can give you more insights about your leads, and help you follow up with email sequences. 

3. Provide Valuable Content With Expert Insights 

Your leads are looking for content to help them make informed decisions, and you’re the expert in your industry to deliver that information. Think of your nurture emails as a sales pitch — including critical information that can solve your lead’s problems or teach them something new.

For example, if you’re a SaaS business, tell them how to choose software that’s cost-effective and productive at the same time. 

4. Write One Topic Per Email

Your leads are likely bombarded with similar nurture emails all day long. Ensure you cut to the topic immediately and include a compelling CTA. For instance, if your lead downloaded an e-book on email marketing software benefits, it means they’re nearing the conversion stage. Your next email should focus on addressing the next aspect of this — telling them how yours can help.

5. Keep it Short and Engaging 

The attention span for email marketing has been increasing over the years, currently close to 12 seconds. While this may be true, your leads mostly skim through your emails for the information they need. Keep your emails crisp and use subheads and bullets to convey information quickly. Include one CTA that expands on your lead’s interests based on their previous interaction.

6. Ensure Your Emails Flow Naturally  

Your nurture emails must progress naturally. For example, your first email can be a welcome message, but your subsequent emails must educate and move the lead across the sales funnel. This is also an excellent space to provide a free trial or a demo to give your lead a sneak peek into your business. 

7. Maintain Brand Consistency

Familiarity creates a safe space for your leads and increases trust in your brand. Stay consistent with colors, fonts, and other collaterals that will help your potential customers distinguish your brand. 

8. Automate and Test Emails

Email automation allows you to send appropriate information to your leads at the right time. You can set up drip campaigns or trigger campaigns based on your leads’ journey, and measure email metrics to improve your future nurture sequences.

In addition, A/B test nurture campaigns to identify the key factors that resonate with your audience.

Tip: If you’d like to know more about collecting quality leads and converting them, we urge you to download the Lead Magnet Multiplier Course. The guide breaks down crucial strategies to increase your lead magnet consumption by as much as 8x. 

There are different types of email nurture campaigns you can send, but they follow similar structures and rules. So, let’s start with the basics.

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How to Write a Nurturing Email Sequence?

The nurturing emails are more about what your subscribers need and not what you intend to sell. You can visit Facebook groups or research user intent on Google to find out a popular pain point you can solve through your emails.

Follow these tips to write effective nurturing emails:

Step	Description	Key Considerations
Define objectives	Determine the goals and objectives for your email campaign	What do you want to achieve with this campaign? ( ex: educate, re-engage, or convert)
Identify target audience	Segment your audience for nurture email series	Demographics, behavior, and interests
Plan sequence flow	Outline the email content flow	Decide the number of emails, timing, and content for each email
Write compelling subject lines	Craft relevant and attention-grabbing subject line for each email	Use personalization and urgency
Address pain-points	Create content that resonates with your leads	Use a conversational tone, include images, and other interactive elements
Include a CTA	Include specific CTAs aligned with email goals	Use action-oriented language – ”Learn more”, ”Get Started”
Automate sending	Use ESPs to automate nurture emails	Set up triggers based on leads’ actions

With an average open rate of 16.97%, you have limited time to capture your prospect’s attention. A solid way to attain that is to write engaging and conversational emails. Let’s look at nurture email templates to get you started.

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Examples of Email Nurturing Strategy 

Out of your extensive lead list, only 3% of them are actively looking to buy. And that number can further decrease with your email content performance. But you can use these tested templates to delight your prospects and increase conversions. 

1. Emails That Initiate Interaction 

Not every lead is ready to convert immediately. Configure the best time to send emails. Here’s a template to help you do that.

2. Direct Communication Emails

If you have resources and a skilled team, you can invite your prospects to communicate directly with you through chat options. These individuals are hot leads and are more likely to convert. 

3. Content Suggestion Emails 

By sending content suggestions to your leads, you create a positive feeling by addressing their pain points and solving their problems through helpful content. 

4. Gift Emails 

Free giveaways are a great way to create interest in your leads and build an offer they can’t refuse. You can create a free playbook download, a free tool, or offer promotions.

Now, let’s take these templates and build nurture campaigns that will convert.

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Build Credibility With Your Email Nurture Campaigns

Through your nurture campaigns, building credibility is key to turning a lead into a repeat customer. To smoothly guide your prospects through the sales funnel, you need to make all elements work in sync.