If one email to a new business lead is good, are more emails even better? Not so fast. Here’s why your email marketing could use a makeover.
Email marketing for professional services isn’t like product marketing. People don’t change service providers very often. They also don’t choose a provider based on one or two emails. But email does help you stay in front of them until they’re ready to entertain a change.
Email marketing is still an effective brand positioning strategy for high-growth firms. However, those high-growth firms are probably using email nurturing sequences to automatically stay in touch with leads until the lead is ready — and excited — to have a conversation.
What’s an email nurturing sequence? Read more here.
Email nurturing sequences are a conversation. You are pointing out common pains and providing informative ideas and resources by email over a short period of time to keep the lead interested.
As every good professional knows, timely nurturing of the relationship leads to more new business. Designed correctly, these nurturing sequences can be automated but still feel like a series of personal emails from someone in your firm or organization.
Try This: 5 Effective Nurturing Sequences
Here are five options to turn your email marketing into a nurturing conversation that drives lead conversion. If you have a CRM and marketing automation software, you can automate your email sequences to run 24/7 whenever a visitor is searching for your services.
1. Set up a welcome sequence.
Let’s say a new lead comes on your radar by downloading an article or signing up for your newsletter. Set up a nurturing welcome sequence that introduces them to other resources through a series of automated emails and links. Make the emails friendly, short and to the point, and schedule out three or four over a few weeks.
2. Add sequences to new resources and events.
Don’t miss the opportunity to keep the conversation going once people download your resources or attend a webinar. These actions can trigger a follow-up series of emails. Create these nurturing emails at the same time as your resource or event content so that they relate well and entice people to contact you.
3. Create nurturing sequences for stalled conversations.
Maybe a lead went quiet or didn’t engage as you had hoped. Create an “inactive” nurturing sequence that acknowledges, “Now may not be the right time to connect, but I still value your interests and want to stay in touch.” Send them links to content they may have missed.
4. Use a nurturing sequence to optimize your list.
Over time, your database may become stale with old contacts that aren’t a fit, but haven’t unsubscribed. Send a series of emails to invite people to re-engage or to let you know if they wish to be removed from your list. Sometimes that “invitation to part ways” is enough to get a new conversation going. But it also cleans up your list in a friendly way.
5. Segment your sequences.
To personalize your email marketing while also automating it, create nurturing sequences that entice leads for a specific service or industry niche. Address common pains that you see among existing clients, and then show these new leads how you solved the problem. Three short emails can offer links to case studies and representative examples.
Remember, email nurturing should not involve hours of long email writing — or more than a few emails per sequence. The content can be written like a short voicemail, but you and your team don’t have to spend time leaving hundreds of them.
Besides keeping the emails short, point people to their next possible step in the conversation. And be patient.
Written correctly and timed strategically, email nurturing sequences will get the right leads interested and contacting you!
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