Pull Marketing Blog

MAKE SALES NOT WAR: 3 Ways to Stop Blasting Emails & Start Nurturing Your Leads!

  

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Despite the relative new-ness of many of the inbound marketing tools available today, the methods many marketers are using appear surprisingly archaic.

If you’re still sending “email blasts” instead of setting up lead nurturing campaigns, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to engage your lead base.

Get Personal

One way to prevent your lead nurturing efforts from becoming stagnated is to personalize the experience for your leads. Most email software programs have a way to populate the first name into the email using a token which will generate the first name from your contact’s file. If you want, you can also use these built-in personalization tools to help drop other personalizing information into the email (company name, what compelling offer they downloaded, etc) to help make the experience seem more personal.

Segment, then Nurture Your Leads

To go beyond basic personalization tools, you’ll need to start segmenting your leads and creating specific lead nurturing campaigns for each of those lead groups. The first step in creating custom lead nurturing campaigns is to ask a question to your leads on your landing page which would help segment them into lead nurturing groups and qualify them for your business. For example, if you were in the countertop materials business, you might want to ask your prospect if they are a designer, consumer or fabricator since you’d want to nurture each of those leads very differently from the other.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can segment and email your leads easily using HubSpot’s new checklist feature for landing page forms coupled with the List Manager that helps you form lead lists easily based on different criteria. Once you create your list, you can assign it to the corresponding lead nurturing campaign.

Provide Clear Value

Though all email software now requires senders to adhere to the CANSPAM act, you should still do whatever you can to help better ensure that your contact list’s boundaries are respected. The best way to do this is to respect the fact that your lead has given you their email address and the opportunity to continue contacting them.

Remember, these are delicate relationships based on mutual trust, and you should try to keep them from regretting their decision by creating emails with clear value for the customer. If you’re sending email blasts that are more like bragging rights for your company or “news stories” – then stop right there. Instead, try sending your leads content that clearly addresses a key need that they identified at point of contact. For example, if you downloaded a white paper all about lead nurturing best practices, why would I start sending you emails describing web-design packages PullnotPush sells?

By keeping your lead’s interests in mind and by always asking yourself what need your lead nurturing email will fill, you’ll make sales and not war with your leads.