What Is an Email Sequence, and How Can It Help You Nurture Leads?

Leads, leads, leads. When it comes to marketing your business, nothing is more important than attracting and fostering leads that will *fingers crossed* turn into long-term customers. However, nurturing leads may feel like a big task, especially since it can take time to build a positive relationship.

Luckily, there is one fantastic lead nurturing strategy you can use to consistently engage your leads without breaking a sweat: an email sequence!

You heard us correctly… emails are still a very relevant marketing tool in today’s electronic age, and they’re also great for building relationships with potential customers! So, how can you use a lead nurturing email marketing strategy to help develop a lead into a dedicated subscriber to your brand?

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about lead nurturing, including how to write a stellar email sequence in 5 easy steps to guide your leads through your marketing funnel.

What Is Lead Nurturing?

Before we dive headfirst into the really good stuff, it might be a nice idea to explain what lead nurturing means in the first place. So, without further ado, here’s what it means to nurture a lead in the simplest terms:

To nurture a lead is to inspire, empathize with, and build a strong relationship with a potential customer. Let’s break down each of these pieces for you.

Inspire to Engage

At the very beginning of your sales funnel, you want to gain the interest of a potential customer. You need to inspire a lead to look at your brand and choose to openly engage with it. At the end of the day, if you do a good job with this in the beginning, then you will be able to gently guide a lead from the top to the bottom of your funnel.

You can do this by fully understanding your target market’s unique set of pain points and positioning yourself to solve these pain points, which leads us to the next piece of the lead nurturing strategy puzzle.

Empathize With Your Lead’s Pain Points

When you understand the deepest desires of your target audience, you will unlock the key to building a strong relationship with them. Not to mention, you will be better equipped to offer them a valuable solution to their problem in a more customer-centric way.

To do so properly, you will need to conduct extensive research on your ideal customers and then create a lead nurturing campaign that puts them at the forefront of your business. For instance, you can use storytelling to put the customer first and show them that your brand understands and empathizes with their needs!

The end result? You will…

Build an Impenetrable Bond With Your Lead

Welcome to the family, valued customer! Even after a lead converts to a paying customer or user of your services, you will still need to engage with them.

After all, you wouldn’t want a close friend to ditch you after you grant them a favor… so why would you stop nurturing a customer after they give you their money? When it’s all said and done, your lead nurturing strategy should not only seek to pull leads to your brand, but to also RETAIN customers in the long term!

Why a Lead Nurturing Strategy is a Marketing Must-Have

Lead nurturing is synonymous with fostering a relationship with your ideal customers. With that being said, a lead nurturing strategy could be argued as one of the most important, valuable, and vital aspects of your marketing mix.

Think about it: Even if you are able to promote your business so well that you sell a ton of products and services in the beginning, wouldn’t it be even better if you could get these customers to come back again and again?

And wouldn’t it be best if these customers loved you SO much that they recommended you to friends and promoted your brand through positive reviews?

This is what lead nurturing could do for your company. Foster now to prosper in the future! So, now that you know what lead nurturing is, let’s talk about how an email sequence is one of the best ways to take care of your leads from start to infinity.

What Is an Email Sequence?

An email sequence, sometimes referred to as an email drip campaign, is an automated series of emails that is sent to your leads once they give you their email address. This type of digital marketing practice is commonly used to introduce and welcome the new lead to the brand and then cultivate a relationship with them over time.

But, before you can start an email sequence, you have to be able to attract the right lead and gain access to their email address! Keep reading to learn how to do this.

How To Detect a Good Lead

As a marketer, you probably want to attract as many leads as possible, right? Well, what if we told you that not all leads are created equal.

In other words, instead of casting a giant net and hoping you scoop up as many leads as possible, sometimes it’s better to target and attract only quality leads that will actually convert into real customers. You can do this by targeting people that fit your specific niche market and offering them an incentive in exchange for their email address.

An Example of How To Attract a Good Lead

For instance, if you are a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, you might offer a free demo or an exclusive webinar of your service to interested leads (usually through a landing page or a link on a social media post). In order to experience the free demo, the lead will need to enter their name and email address to access the incentive.

And just like that, you have a quality lead that is truly interested in your service, and you also have their email address! Now, you can begin to create a lead nurturing email marketing strategy that aims to build a bond with this ideal customer.

5 Steps To Write a Killer Lead Nurturing Email Sequence

With some high-quality leads in tow, it’s time to set up an email sequence that will inspire them to act and engage with your brand.

In this section, you will learn how to choose the right type of email sequence for your lead nurturing strategy and what elements you need to properly write each email in your series.

1. Know the Ins and Outs of Your Target Audience

Without a doubt, understanding your target persona should be at the absolute forefront of your marketing efforts. And the same goes for email marketing.

When you know exactly who your customers are, what their pain points are, and how your product or service can meet their needs, then all you need to do is learn how to properly construct an email that will speak to them!

Speak the Language of Your Leads

With that being said, you need to research your audience to learn how to speak their lingo. In other words, you need to be able to walk their walk and talk their talk.

You can learn the language of your leads by creating a buyer persona, which is a detailed representation of someone who represents your ideal lead. Put yourself in your buyer persona’s shoes and think about what their daily life looks like, what matters to them, and most importantly, how your brand would impact their life.

Then, you can begin to formulate power words and build sentences that positively reach and nurture your leads.

Segment Your Email List To Target Content

Once you define your leads, you should start to segment your email list and put leads into the correct categories so you can target them effectively.

For instance, you should figure out how many leads are new to your brand and put them into one group, and then put current customers that you would like to re-engage into another group. That way, you will have all of your leads organized, and it will be a lot easier to automate your email sequences to the correct inboxes.

2. Choose the Right Type of Email Sequence

Email sequences come in all shapes and sizes. They range in time, duration, and number of emails per series. Furthermore, there are several different types of email drip campaigns out there, including:

• Welcome campaigns
• Educational campaigns
• Promotional campaigns
• Renewal campaigns
• Re-engagement campaigns

And that’s just to name a few! In fact, you can get creative and use email sequences to connect your customers to your brand for just about anything.

How To Choose the Right Lead Nurturing Email Sequence

When it comes to choosing the right type of campaign to fit your lead nurturing strategy, it really depends on the specific audience you are targeting and how far along in the sales funnel they may be.

For instance, if the lead is brand new to your company, consider onboarding them with a welcome series. In the email, you can provide them with an introductory video, access to your company’s blog, or a “first-time customer” coupon code.

On the other hand, if the lead is already a paying customer and has been involved with your company for months, or even years, then a re-engagement campaign might be a great idea to implement. You can continue to foster a strong relationship with these customers by providing them with exclusive offers, webinars, or other engaging content that they might enjoy.

3. Craft an Inviting Subject Line

Here’s a statistic that is sure to shock you: 47% of people open emails based on the subject line alone, which means impactful subject lines are extremely important for email marketing.

For starters, your subject line should be brief, easy to understand, and strategically written to entice the recipient to click on the email. Furthermore, it is always a good idea to put the main incentive of the email at the front of the subject line.

For instance, if your email is part of a promotion series, include the discount rate, coupon, percentage off, or other buzz words at the beginning of the subject line. As for welcome sequences, make it clear to the recipient that the email is welcoming them to the brand and may include valuable resources or information that they should want to read.

Personalization Is Essential

Recipients of emails that have personalized subject lines are 22% more likely to open the email than those that do not. And why stop at the subject line?

Think about it, are you more excited to read a generic email that doesn’t even address you by your name… or are you more attracted to one that does? If you are able to tailor your emails to personally address your lead, then they will feel more connected to your company because they will feel seen as an individual rather than just another number.

4. Make it Easy To Read

When it comes to the actual meat of your email sequence, you will want to make sure each email is concise and easy to digest. After all, how often do you actually read emails from companies that are lengthy, disorganized, and difficult to read? That’s right, never.

For quality email copy, you will want a balanced format that is harmonious with any banners, images, or links that are included in the body of the email. Make sure the font, style, and color scheme are also easy on the eyes, so you don’t accidentally distract your readers’ eyes.

Finally, be sure that all of your emails in your email sequence follow in an organized manner and make sense if they were all read in order. This should be reflected in the subject lines and the bodies of your emails.

If you are having trouble writing your email sequence, consider onboarding a professional agency like Chatter Buzz Media to help you develop meaningful and targeted copy for your leads.

5. Write a Phenomenal Call-to-Action

Last but not least, every good email in your email sequence should have a strategic, well-placed call-to-action (CTA). The CTA is the main incentive of the email that your lead will click on to redeem and/or get more information.

For example, a CTA could be as simple as a link to a recent blog that you wrote, a webinar, or a case study. Or it could be a redeemable incentive like a special coupon code that takes them straight to your products page.

When you construct your CTA, make it brief, easy to see, and enticing to click. You can even make the CTA in the form of a button or an image!

Need Help Attracting the Right Leads? Chatter Buzz Can Help!

At the end of the day, it’s about finding the right leads that fit your niche market and constructing powerful content that will help them bond with your brand. And with all of the elements of a strong email sequence now in your pocket, you can start nurturing your leads and building lasting relationships with them.

Need more expertise? Whether you need a skillful copywriter to masterfully write your email sequence or you would like help with your overall lead nurturing strategy, Chatter Buzz Media is here to take your marketing efforts to the next level. Contact us to talk to a strategist today.