Lead nurturing turns leads into customers through engagement and relationship building.

A typical lead nurturing campaign runs for about 2 months (60 days), though it can go longer if you have engaging content and a reason to be speaking with customers at length.

Perhaps your product or service has a longer buy cycle, like real estate or some home goods, which increases the consideration time your customer takes.

Your campaign should include at least three emails containing valuable content, highly visible CTAs, this way your leads can evaluate your offers, respond, and build trust and a lasting relationship with your company.

The benefits of lead nurture campaigns

Most customers these days don’t want to deal with a salesperson if they can avoid it. Purchases are made when a customer has taken the time to feel confident. This makes them predisposed to action or even purchase when you can offer them curated offerings that meet these requirements.

Targeting with customized content

A basic lead nurture campaign runs for about two months (again, sometimes more). We recommend sending an email every week or two. Don’t badger your audience and overstay your welcome or they’ll unsubscribe or may mark you as spam, and don’t forget to use contact data to personalize the content your sending to them, everyone wants to feel special and get what they want.

Contact segmentation

Based on their engagement you can segment your contacts so they receive regular, personalized, and relevant content.

Automate the process

The best lead nurturing strategies benefit from automation, so you reach the right customers at the right time.

Here are a few of the most effective campaigns you can start building today.

Welcome messages

Let’s say a customer has engaged with you in any way (e.g. purchased a product), You need to open the conversation in a way that invites them into a long-term relationship with you.

Here’s an example of a campaign that accomplishes this:

• Trigger when a product is purchased
• Then send a welcome email immediately
• A week later send an additional follow-up

Long-term nurture

To have long lasting relationships with customers, you need to look at nurture channels, like email as vital and living constants in your business plans.

Here’s an example of a long-term nurture campaign, sent weekly to customers that have entered your pipeline. Follow-up series:

• Customer stories
• Inside information
• Exclusive and personalized content
• Product updates
• FAQ

Keep in mind that you’re looking for valuable content delivered in short broadcasts, weekly at the very least. Don’t send endless emails in short amounts of time. It’s about value not quantity.

Targeted promotions

This starts the process of transforming your company from one that sometimes sends you emails to coveted “love brand” status.

Nothing helps build trust and long-term relationships better than tailored content. Not generic email broadcasts, and certainly not content that misses the mark. It’s all about sending the right content to the right customers at the right time, all done automatically with the help of segmentation.

Final thoughts

Everyone needs to be reminded about your product over and over before they buy. By building nurture strategies, you not only increase engagement and sales, but you build a long-lasting relationship with your customers so you can make them buy again in the future.