How To Nurture & Convert Leads With A Systemic Email Sequence?

Email is a communication medium that’s not going obsolete anytime soon despite its traditional facets. Amongst all the latest exciting tools marketers use to reach and influence customers, email marketing not only continues to hold its significance but often outperforms its counterparts. We live in an era where several social media platforms have come and gone without seeing much success. So how is email as a tool still holding its ground?

Well, email service providers aren’t exactly what they were in the early 2000s. There have been several technological advancements since the inception of Google and Youtube that drastically improved the performance and security features of the email marketing space. Studies suggest that the prominence of email marketing is only going up with interactive emails, voice assistant integrations, and the ever-growing number of email sign-ups today.

Since it is clear that email as a tool isn’t going anywhere, let’s look at ways to leverage its potential in today’s highly competitive marketing space. Of course, many factors come into play, such as knowing your target audience, writing great subject lines, and providing real value with relevant content.

While these are all crucial steps considered for E-marketing efforts, marketers often find it hard to hit the mark in terms of deliverability and conversions. Of course, different teams have different approaches, which is why it’s common for one to wonder about the success of another. This essentially means that you will need to mark strategy as a high priority in addition to the quality of content and context. Let’s look at an example scenario potentially experienced during such instances that are generally classified as unforeseen.

Email Marketing ROI & Potentially Adverse Scenarios

According to statistics, email marketing has an average ROI of an astounding 3800%. In contrast to social media advertising and other expensive media, emails promise you better value for money. Hence, it is clear that can rake in massive returns on investments.

However, despite being cost-effective and delivering high ROI, you might not see results with emails right off the bat, unlike some other channels. You will have to wait and see them help your business generate revenue over time, like your website’s SEO. It can take months, probably even years, before you start to see it performing at its best.

Let’s look at a number-based scenario. Suppose that a marketer has an email list of 10,000 subscribers. According to Return Path’s 2017 Deliverability Benchmark report, the United States experienced an inbox deliverability rate of 77%. Current reports suggest placement rates south of 80%. So let’s say out of 10,000, roughly 8,000 mails actually get delivered. Considering the emails are promotional, about 70% of them will land in the Promotions tab of Gmail. The open rate of these emails is less than 20%, which means prospects will notice only around 1400+ emails. Considering the average click-through rate of 2.5%, you’ll find that the number of people who really open your emails is less than one-tenth of the entire email list.

This calculation is based on an instance where the subject lines are great. It is a very important factor that directly influences an email’s performance. It would have been pointless if we assumed the subject lines to be poor or mediocre, which would incur an additional 47% cut in the beginning.

How Email Sequencing Works as a Solution

The above numbers aggregate a whole country’s collective marketing performance results. While the above numbers portray poor strategy and results, let’s look at disciplines that can provide you with much more fruitful results.

See it this way; if you expect to close deals toot sweet with your first set of mails, it’ll be like asking someone to marry you on the first date. Even the best brands in the world find it hard to impress new and recurring customers with their new launches. You need to take your time to nurture your prospects into trusting you, desiring your offering, and finally converting into a paying customer.

This is where an email sequence comes into play. If you are looking to include real people on your subscriber list and actually benefit from each other, you have to find ways to foster immense trust, affinity, and excitement with you, your brand and your products. A well-put-together and executed email sequence will nurture your prospects and audience to gradually turn into buyers.

This model will also allow you to measure what works and help you devise necessary modifications along the journey. Let’s look at a uniquely designed them, that can perform wonders if implemented properly.

In this sequence, we have six different email templates that will be used in rotation inconspicuously. You can take these same six templates and inundate them with different kinds of training, features, and permissions over time to nurture your audience.

For instance, large brands and businesses follow this practice for a whole year before restarting the cycle with updated information. They perform two cycles every month, followed by a single day’s flash sale or probably a week-long sales expo. Such well-planned sales activity will help you design email sets with precise information to garner your prospective audience ahead of time.

So let’s see how we can build a systematic marketing sequence that can generate interest, excellent engagement, and future conversions.

Warmup and Consent

This is supposed to be your welcome sequence. You are required to include as much information as possible in a short, crisp, and introductory manner. It should provide your potential reader with a sense of belonging. People receive a multitude of emails from an endless number of sources.

Your goal here is to warm up with your prospect by furnishing a friendly tone that explains a story that can build a healthy balance of interest and empathy. So how do we frame this type of mail? For instance, let’s take a food delivery giant as our sample. You must be familiar with their emails that say, “Don’t feel like getting out of bed?” or “Want your breakfast served in bed?”.

Here we’re consenting prospective buyers who are real people who may be running late in the morning. We’re also sharing the feeling by being empathetic and potentially offering them a solution while still in bed. It is intended for them to feel that it is okay to stay in bed by implying that others are doing the same. How else will someone text something that isn’t a common occurrence, right?

Doing so will help strike a connection, making them stick to the content longer. It will also better the chances for your prospects to recall your brand during similar times in the future.

The Power Stroke

Next up are the power stroke emails. Power strokes are extremely important and serve the purpose of public relations. To engage your potential audience and anchor them down with your brand’s essence, you need to prove that your business’s message is something that’s worth listening to.

There are a couple of ways to perform power strokes. One is to notify your prospects or subscribers with new updates or uploads on your podcast or Youtube channel. Social media will help a lot with such approaches. This will demand quite a bit of marketing and creative efforts apart from just using that.

The other way is to show that you’ve been featured in different media. Note that these platforms must be decently popular with the public. Both of these tactics will tell your audience that you are one of the best players in the respective industry.

Educationals

The third installment of the six-email sequence will take the role of educating your potential buyers with your brand and product information. The educational or training email is something you will frequently be sending either with a piece of special information or just as fillers.

Your email could mention a  specialty hack that would inspire a prospect to make a purchase immediately. You can either create an email that itself carries the training information or notify and redirect people to a video or web page where you posted the educational material. This will get your interested prospects into training mode.

Keeping your other channels live and updated is important to make this as well as the previous type of email effective. If your prospect opens this email and finds out your other channels are relatively mundane, chances are they will feel deceived and probably won’t buy from you.

Evocative

With the evocative type, you get to invoke the emotional aspects of your brand or product. For one, this type of email is used limitedly. Overuse it, and your message will be watered down.

The type of content included in such emails can be a personal message attached to your brand’s mission, manifesto or a thumbnail that redirects to your brand film. Here, the job is to evoke a sense of inspiration and vigor by relating to actual-world problems.

One important factor to consider here is that these emails should not look like sales attempts. Often such marketing materials are used for recall as well as setting the right brand image. Remember those ads Siemens frequently roll out.

The Hit

You will know when you have correctly nurtured and honed your prospect. Maybe you could send survey forms or give responsive prospects a phone call to see what they think about your product or service. Now all they need is a gentle push to advance to the next step.

The hit email will ask your prospective customer to place an order or sign up for a product trial. In contrast to other traditional options, an email can prove to be more compelling as well as a less pushy way to secure sales. While a phone call can be assertive, which is good for sales, people can get a first impression from an email and come back to it for visual reference. It is advised that a hit should be a discreet combination of emails and phone calls.

Reviews & Responses

Reviews and feedback emails are important before and after a purchase is made. Well, there are two sides to it. You can collect the best feedback from your previous customers and put it together in a way that can inspire your prospect to make a buying decision. There's nothing better than word of mouth, right?

Of course, the review collection can also be a part of other types of emails just to highlight the popularity of your brand. However, putting together a reviews and responses email with a personal touch can go a long way.

A message with the prospect’s name mentioned and says, “the product can suit or solve your needs in so-and-so ways. We are happy to let you know what our previous/current customers with similar requirements think about our product and services.” along with a set of reviews marked by customers that belong to the same demographic(s) can be really convincing. We will discuss the importance of segmentation in email marketing shortly.

Other considerations while using the above system

So now we have finished discussing a proven system that can constructively nurture your audience in a legit and exciting way. Additionally, a few fixed practices need to be taken care of prudently for running a successful email marketing campaign.

Mail Segmentation

As mentioned earlier, let’s look at email segmentation's important role in creating and sending out relevant emails. No matter what system you follow, no matter how well put together your emails are, it will be a total waste of your time and effort if those emails end up in the wrong inboxes.

You need a precise target audience or email list segmentation intel to decide which set of emails will go where. You clearly do not need to send every email to everyone. Without segmentation, you will be just doing that. Properly segmenting your prospects will tremendously help improve conversion rates and help with future deliverability and email scores.

Let’s look at an example. If you are a real estate marketing manager, you must have a long email list of people having homes, tenants, prospective buyers, etc. Now the company who you are working for might have some latest additions to their portfolio. There must be significant sales pressure to get all those new units booked which will be channeled straight towards the marketing and sales departments.

Of course, you will be preparing several channels, out of which is going to be one of the marketing staples. Email marketing is one of those channels which realtors heavily rely on more than newer media like Facebook or Instagram.

As we mentioned earlier, there will be all kinds of people on your list. Why would you send people who already own homes or just closed a deal the same email you intend to share with new prospects? That would just straight go to the bin or expire, which is a waste of time, effort, and resources.

Type of Audience Segmentation

The above example clearly shows the significance of segmentation. Now let’s look at different ways to segment your target audiences. Typically you can segment your list depending upon factors such as demographics, geographical location, common interests, online behavior, and buying history. Let’s loop through a couple of these and see how they can benefit open rates and potential conversions.

Demographics

- Age
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Income
- Occupation etc.

Geographic

- Location (country, state, zip-code)
- Timezone
- Climate
- Cultural Preferences
- Language etc.

Online Behavior

- Scrolling behavior
- Time spent on
- pagesPage visits
- Images clicked and more.

Conclusion

Last but not least, for all the above to work, you must focus on deliverability and authenticity. While the topics discussed in this post pretty much hold the authenticity factor by default, deliverability can be an issue. There are several technical as well as creative factors that heavily influence deliverability and spam rates. Messages that include too much of a sales touch are highly likely to end up in people’s promotion tabs, and the open rate of this tab is significantly lower than the primary inbox. Also, if you keep sending this to people on your list that generally don’t open them, consider scrubbing them. Doing so will help keep your open rates steady, helping your future deliverability and staying out of the junk folder.