Swimming, as your audience does, in a sea of endless content, creating emails that people actually read can feel like you're drowning; fighting a losing battle. The answer however is simple.
Build compelling content.
That's it really. Three little words. Thank you and have a nice day!
If only it was that easy. Of course, those three little words are deceptively simple But with some clear thinking and planning it's perfectly possible, to maintain and indeed increase your email nurture open rates.
Nurture emails play a specific role in marketing. To support your target audience with the right information as they work their way through their decision making process.
"Deliver the right information at the right time."
Here is a 5 step recipe we use when we are building email nurture campaigns for our clients.
- Segment Your Target Audience: Obvious, you might say. However, the narrower you can define this list the better, the narrower the definition the better chance you have of writing personalised, relevant content. Demography is the first filter. Industry segment, job title, country or state are examples. But to pique interest and engage someone we need to go further. We suggest where possible to speak to people's personal pain points, what's holding them back from achieving their goals, or appealing to their aspirations. Then segment your database into as small segments as you can realistically manage. You will end up with multiple segmented lists, but now you have the ability to speak with them in a much more relevant, personalised manner.
TIP: Agree what this segmentation criteria looks like for your organisation and set up these fields in your CRM. Ensure that when importing data or setting up forms on your website, that it asks for this core data. Data cleanliness is next to godliness for B2B marketers!
- Set Your Campaign Objectives: The next step is to define your campaign objectives. What do you want to achieve with your email nurture campaign? Are you trying to generate brand new leads, increase engagement and build loyalty with existing customers? Or if you are a non profit, perhaps it's to get past donors to become advocates for you. It's easy to see how different objectives would radically alter the content and messaging of your emails and make them correspondingly more relevant to the reader. Be careful not to "try and kill two birds with one stone," mixing objectives will mean mixed messages and fluffy copy that's trying to cover all bases.
- Develop a Content Strategy: This is probably the key step and where it's worth spending some time getting it right. Nurturing sequences of emails should aim to provide the answers to the questions your readers are asking themselves. To help them step through their decision making process. Our biggest enemy is often, simply inertia, our biggest competitor is "do nothing" i.e. keep the status quo. Your nurture stream of emails should aim to move them along their journey to making a decision. Let's take a typical B2B purchasing scenario. At each stage the buyer has quite different questions. So each stage might have, say, three nurture emails. Your content flow might look something like this:
- Trigger: Content that troubles buyers, articulates their problems succinctly, helps them understand the cost of inaction, shows them how their industry is changing, describes the big picture trends to which they need to pay attention. Definitely no pitching here.
- Learn: Helps your audience understand "what good looks like." Shows them examples of organisations, like theirs, who have solved the problem. Considering offering tools that help them self diagnose their specific situation. Still no pitching here.
- Try: Answers the question: What do different solutions look like? What are the key elements or features that I must include in any solution I buy. Explains why your solution is uniquely positioned to help. Yes, now is the time to pitch!
- Buy: Reassures prospective buyers they are making a sound choice. Content might focus on testimonials from other organisation like theirs. From other people who do the same job as them, or calculators that reassure them that they will achieve ROI by a certain date.
- Create workflows: Don't kid yourself, creating this content can be a lot of work. Keeping it organised and flowing to your target audiences, in the right sequence, at the right time is nigh on impossible unless you have marketing automation software to do the heavy lifting. Imagine a scenario where you are focusing on two industry segments, trying to influence 3 people in a buying centre, across just two of the four stages and each stage has three nurture emails. This alone could mean creating 30-40 personalised emails aimed to move them through their decision journey. Configure the software correctly and it will do this work for you.
Note: Some of the Try and Buy stage content might be better utilised by your sales rather than marketing team. Automated email sequences from a sales person are often more powerful than those from marketing. Good CRMs will include a feature such as this. - Monitor and Optimise Your Campaign: Almost no campaign is perfect out of the box. But by keeping a close eye on your nurture emails, running some controlled experiments (eg A/B testing different headlines) you can identify what's working and what's not, and make adjustments to optimise your open rates. Time spent here on a regular basis can radically increase your open rates and the number of leads flowing through your funnel.
- So, in summary:
- Segment your data
- Decide on a single objective
- Build the right content for the right stage
- Use marketing automation to do the heavy lifting
- Keeping a close eye on what is and isn't working, experiment and tweak.
These are the secrets to building compelling content that people actually want to read. We would be delighted to discuss your current content strategy and offer some advice, (gratis,) on best practices you might want to consider adopting.
