Email is not the primary avenue for marketing professionals anymore. What email is, however, is a primary resource for feeding your leads pool with quality and viable potential customers.
“Even in 2017, email boasts some of the highest engagement rates of any modern marketing strategy.”
Like any tool, half of the job is figuring out how to best employ those tools. The impact of social media, video, mobile devices and other technology empowered platforms and mediums have changed the landscape of marketing. That doesn’t mean that businesses change the tools they use – they simply change the way they use their tools.
Email Lead Nurturing as a Tool
The world of marketing is all about the “customer experience” today. Enhanced by a myriad of options, from tweeting this to blogging that and various customer engagement tactics businesses are now generating leads like never before. That is the good news.
The bad news is, that with so many new and advanced lead generation options there will inevitably be more leads that go “cold.” Unlike those “warm” leads that we discussed earlier that have viable potential, these leads have been left as scraps to be thrown out or at best recycled.
What if…
What if those “cold” leads were just not ready yet? What if these leads were interested prospects who just wanted more information before making a decision? What if these were leads individuals who were going to become customers but became sick, became busy or something else demanded their attention and they simply forgot? What if lead nurturing is the solution and email is the answer? There is enough evidence to suggest that it could very well be just that for many businesses.
Charity Nurtures Leads
Lead nurturing isn’t designed or even expected to show immediate or instant results. Businesses will feel the impact of lead nurturing over the course of time and eventually those benefits will become obvious. Every campaign requires good planning and the right implementation in order to be successful. Email lead nurturing campaigns are no different.
The Non-Profit organization Charity: Water did more than improve the flow of donations and revenue to help their cause. They also engaged their audience, used mobile-friendly communications and used a lead nurturing plan designed to cover 18 months! That is serious nurturing with real results.
Shopify Doesn’t Sell
You don’t have to be a Non-Profit in order to benefit from and use a lead nurturing campaign though. The lead nurturing email campaign that Shopify employs isn’t about using their services to help set up an online store but about “…offering top-notch marketing and small business tips.” Sure, there is a CTA embedded in there and that’s fine. What you won’t find is a push, urgency or pressure to buy anything. Therein lies the secret of email lead nurturing – it just adds up.
The Lead Nurturing Math
If a company sends out two batches of emails per month to those who haven’t responded (the cold leads), an email lead nurturing program can 
deliver impact even with limited response. As an example, if only a 2% click rate came back on those two batches of sent emails those numbers will add up. To keep it manageable, assume there were 100 people on the “cold” list. That will equate to a mere 4 new viable additions to your lead pool that month but over the course of the year…
How many marketers, if they were told that they could revive 50 dead leads a year with minimal effort, would reject that offer? If you have a team of 10 superstar marketers, what could they do with 500 quality leads? Looks like you might need a bigger office, right?
That is the secret and power of email lead nurturing done right.