12 Ways You Can Use Email to Nurture Leads to Conversion

For starters, let’s define our concepts.

What is a lead?

A lead is a user who is interested in your product: they have signed up on your website and subscribed to your emails.

What is the difference between leads and other users? Leads have already shown interest in your product and shared their contact information with you.

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is a process of turning your users into leads.

This is how a user’s path looks like: first, they visit your website, blog or social network page and get acquainted with your product. At this stage, they only get you to know, so most likely they are not ready to buy from you yet.  

Say, they like your product and decide to share with you their contact. You have a lead now! Yay! Actually, there’s not much to celebrate yet, as 50% of leads are not ready to buy from you right now, even more so, they are not ready to buy from you later as well. What to do next?

Next comes a hard and treacherous path of nurturing your leads.

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is a process of preparing and stimulating potential users to purchase.

How to help your lead make a purchase? How not to miss opportunities to do so? There are several ways to complete these tasks, but let’s not move far away from  the topic at hand (which is email campaigns).

What are the pros of email marketing? With a user’s email address, you get an opportunity to start personally communicating with this user and building a long-term relationship with them. With the right timing and message for your user segment, your nurture campaign will be even more effective.

Sounds enticing, but it gets harder the moment you get closer to the actual implementation. What kind of emails do you need to send to your users? What kind of emails will they be interested in?

You can choose subjects and settings for your nurture campaigns based on the chosen segment and other attributes. We are on a mission to help you. So here are the keystone kinds of nurture campaigns for every step of the marketing funnel. Just in case you run out of inspiration  

Types of nurture campaigns

The goal of every email campaign listed below is in stimulating users to make a purchase. Some campaigns will encourage users to buy something and other campaigns will build trusting relationships between you and your users. The end result is basically the same in every case, however.

Discount

Discounts will help you motivate your users to make a purchase. The goals of your discount campaign may vary based on the user segment you’ve chosen for it. If it’s a potential customer, a discount you offer them may be a friendly reminder to purchase. If you’re giving a discount to your active customers, this offer may be used to strengthen their brand loyalty.

Promotion campaign

Promotion campaign is a direct call to buy, signup or subscribe. An effective email campaign will help you increase sales. This kind of campaigns will work with both your potential customers and the active ones. For a promotion campaign to give you a sales boost, it should have a nice design and be aimed at the right audience, segmented by location, age, gender etc.

Reminder

Reminder emails will warn customers who have forgotten about their trial period, subscription or discount coming to an end. The goal of an email like this is to get your customers back to the purchase before you lose them completely.

An example of such email in Dashly

Left the website at the payment stage 

Sometimes users change their mind and don’t finish their purchase or don’t fill a leadform on your website. Probably, they misunderstood something and need some help? Emails of this kind are sent automatically and may boost your conversion on the same traffic. This is what Statista sends to users who left the website:

Feedback 

Such emails will gather feedback from your customers, and the feedback will help you increase the quality of your product and services. Besides, asking customers what they think about your product or service may help you increase their brand loyalty.

Feedback emails are usually the triggered ones, these are sent right after completing a payment or some time after subscribing to your platform.

The feedback you’ve gathered can be used in other nurture emails to increase brand loyalty.

Updates

Update emails are aimed at your active customers. The goal of such emails is to notify users about changes in your product. These also nurture both cold and warm leads because you’re telling them that your product is constantly improved. That’s how an Instagram planning app notified about its Instagram Stories update:

Content

Content campaigns are not about selling right here and right now, their goal is to build trusting relationships with users by sharing useful information like articles, videos and guides. Unlike promotion campaigns, content campaigns contain no direct call to purchase. With emails of this kind, companies demonstrate their expertise and implicitly push a sales boost.

Announcement

Announcement campaigns are basically any emails notifying about upcoming events, new projects, schedule changes, etc. Email campaigns of this kind are aimed at active users interested in such notifications. For example, we use these to remind our users about webinars and encourage them to visit our website again – probably, there’s something new?

This way Miro tells about the full agenda release:

Welcome email

Welcome email are sent to users after completing their signup. Subscribers open welcome emails more often than users of other segments. The goal of welcome  emails is to give users the best possible presentation of your company. At the same time, it’s important not to overload users with information in a welcome email.

Define the subject of that campaign based on your marketing goals, and don’t forget to make it nice and discreet enough too!

Greeting

Greeting emails will help you increase your users’ loyalty and reactivate them. There are two types of occasions to send a greeting email: greeting a user on their birthday and greeting them on any other significant date such as a commonly celebrated holiday or even “You’ve been with us for more than 30 days!”.

To send birthday greeting emails, your customer base must contain not only email addresses of your customers, but their birthday dates as well. The task does get harder because of this, but the CTR of this greeting email will be much higher than that of an impersonal Christmas greeting email.

Reactivation

Reactivation emails are aimed at users who have forgotten about you. Emails of this kind reactivate users who don’t buy anything from you. These emails may contain a discount or a free service license. The goal of a reactivation email campaign is to get your customer to purchase from you again and to find out why they had left you in the first place.

That’s how Coursera (an online learning platform) is trying to get me to learn with them again: 

Of course, the potential of email campaigns is not limited by this list alone. We’ve listed the kinds of campaigns that we think will be of the most value to you!

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what email campaigns to launch. Just make sure they meet your marketing goals.

Pay attention to the right segmentation as well. Don’t just stop at choosing what kind of a campaign to make. Without the right segmentation, you might end up sending your emails to the wrong audience. Without automation, your marketing specialist might waste a ton of time sending the emails.

That’s why we decided to tell you about how to make it easier for your marketing team, while also increasing the quality of your campaign and helping you make sure your emails hit the right segment. The following guide will help you increase your sales and LTV metrics.

How to make your email campaigns better

Qualify

Qualification builds your target audience. It also lets you rank them by their interests. With that information, you’ll be able to segment your customers easily, without a risk of wasting time and resources on those who are out of your target audience.

Qualification is usually done via pop-up windows or sales calls. The questions usually depend on your product and your target audience.

Dashly has ready-made qualification pop-ups like. They enable us to segment audience and send relevant messages to particular groups of people.

Segment

Segmentation lets you divide your leads and users into groups of matching features (such as gender, age, geography etc.) so that you can offer more personal and profitable deals to your customers.

By segmenting, you can get as close to your customers as possible, sending them the content they will be 100% happy to see.

You can use marketing automation, pop-ups and email campaigns to segment your customers.

Try segmenting outside of the standard segments. Your product defines certain customer groups that may be of a strategic value to you. 

Automate

Automated email campaign is set according to certain parameters (like time, date, event, segment etc.) that automatically fire after getting triggered. Automation makes emailing job much easier.

What you can do by automating:

• Plan email campaigns;
• Send emails to special customer segments;
• Send triggered emails;
• Create email sequences.

How do you automate? Using email marketing platforms, of course.

With marketing automation, you can also track your visitors’ behaviour. You can see who reads your email and who clicks a link in it.

Personalize

Personalization is a must of all email campaigns nowadays. It lets you drastically improve your email open rate too.

Another advantage of personalization is that it won’t take you too long to get it work. With automation and segmentation, you can set your personalized email campaigns that will be sent to specific user segments at a particular moment. Other than that, you’ll only need to make your emails look nice and make sure they deliver the good content.

Personalized notification from Hackernoon:

There you have it, a long list of nurture email campaigns for practically all occasions. Just remember that there’s no point in using every single one of them at the same time. Try starting a couple of basic campaigns, perfecting their quality. Choose what user segments to send emails to, automate and personalize them, and don’t forget to work on their design too.