Creating a drip feed email campaign is relatively easy, i.e. send one-size-fits-all messages to prospects, with the idea that if exposed enough to the company’s name and logo, we’d be top of mind when the all important buying decision comes.
However, awareness alone doesn’t lead to action.
A successful nurturing campaign is one that builds a better relationship with prospective buyers, and email is a great way to supply prospects with valuable content to help them move their decision process forward. Email nurturing or ‘Content Marketing’, is the technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage.This is achieved by a clever balance of relevant information that helps and informs the prospect, but also positions your business as the ‘answer’.
What makes a nurturing campaign successful?
Ultimately, we want a level of engagement with every prospect, regardless of their stage of the buying cycle – with a great nurturing campaign, it doesn’t matter where they are in the cycle. By staying in touch with relevant and genuinely helpful information as the buyer goes through their decision making process, we can even influence the direction of that’s buyer’s search for a solution.
By being prospect-centric, email marketing isn’t about the quick close, but building a relationship. Many of the prospects who fill out an online form may not give their number, nor are not looking to be sold to, so the key is presenting incremental information that actually aids the buyer’s decision-making process.
This is an example is the following method in practice:
1. Identify customer concerns
2. Identify customer pain points
3. Provide helpful content relevant to customer concern, that is of genuine interest as it’s not product specific.
4. At the end, position your business or product as the solution.
We’ve now created a problem for the client they identity with, and then successfully marketed the business as the answer. This is the level of ‘telling not selling’ that works with a nurturing campaign.
That way, when they receive the second email, they remember that it was interesting and relevant content and not simply a sales piece.
A good example of this that I’ve received from the buyer’s point of view that proves this approach works. A few years ago I searched for an External FD company, wasn’t really looking to make a decision, just sniffing around. I gave my details to ‘The FD Centre’ in exchange for a white paper document (can’t remember what it was for now), but either way, they’d successfully captured my details.
I wasn’t bombarded with phone calls, I didn’t receive ‘Sign up now damn it’ emails, but it did receive monthly articles and advice that would be of interest to an MD running a business. Without realising it, I actually read all of them as they gained my trust through providing timely relevant information without the hard sell. So when it did come to actually needed an external FD, we got in touch, we didn’t shop around, as they’d already formed a relationship with me as a prospect.
We’re now helping our clients make the most of their prospects. Not everyone is looking to buy – but that doesn’t mean the website can’t convert visitors into prospects. Moving the focus solely away from converting into customers, and playing the long-game will ultimately yield get results and a better return from any website.
For more information, please feel free to get in touch, and we’d happily talk through ideas, from data collection, to a full email nurturing strategy.