You’ve captured contact information from prospects. But how do you turn those contacts into qualified leads and ultimately customers?
A marketing nurture track will allow you to effectively manage and engage potential leads. It provides a series of automated email content that guides contacts through a set of logical steps to an ultimate goal.
Nurture tracks are a type of workflow that help identify top prospects, build relationships and convert leads by moving them through a journey toward a specific action. You can use workflows for different types of marketing, including content, email, social media, online PR and search. Today, we’re looking at how to create an effective email nurture track to share content and engage leads.
Start with the end in mind. What action do you want your contacts to take once they’ve completed the nurture track? This goal should be concrete and measurable, and will likely be something like signing up for a program demo or requesting a sales call. It may also be focused on receiving a high enough engagement score based on your lead scoring framework to qualify for sales outreach.
Once you have set a goal, identify which contacts to add to the nurture track. You can segment your contacts based on the actions they’ve taken — for example, submitting a form, signing up for your newsletter or attending an event — or based on information they’ve shared, such as demographic details, company size and type, job title and other key attributes. Exclude contacts that are current customers, competitors or would find the action the nurture track will promote to be irrelevant.
Next, map out the steps in your nurture track. How will you guide these contacts toward completing the goal action? Outline each email you’ll send and the order in which contacts will receive them. This sequence shows how contacts will move through the nurture track, and what actions will trigger new emails to be sent.
The number of emails you send will depend on your contacts and your nurture track goal. How much time to build in between email messages should be based on the contacts’ email habits and any industry-specific standards.
The content within each email should be concise and relevant to the action the contact took immediately before. Educational content, such as useful tips, company news, your brand story or differentiating qualities will communicate value and build trust. When possible, personalize the content to the specific audience. Include links and calls-to-action, such as informative blog posts or your newsletter sign-up form, to engage contacts further.
Contacts can move through the nurture track differently based on whether they open an email, engage with the content or answer a call-to-action. Whether they do or do not take a defined action will determine the type of content and the specific message they will receive next.
At the completion of the nurture track, those contacts who completed the goal could move to a “welcome” campaign or another nurture track. Those who did not convert could be enrolled into a new nurture track that aims to re-engage them. Because nurture tracks segment your audience and deliver targeted, timely messages, a successful one will make your marketing communications more efficient and effective.
Marketing nurture tracks work best when they are a part of a broader marketing and communications plan, and we believe all organizations can benefit from an outside integrated communications partner. Read our newest white paper to learn why: Don’t try this alone — why integrated communications planning deserves an outside perspective.
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