Transform your Email Automation for
Lead Nurturing Excellence

Before you build your workflow, analyse how “cold” leads transform into “hot” ones within your business, i.e., how do you convert leads. When you have a clear picture of how your sales funnel works, you’re ready to formulate your content strategy.

Group important concepts or “milestones” together into concise parts that correspond to the different stages in your sales funnel.

Refine your strategy by incorporating delays between messages to ensure contacts receive emails at the most optimal time and frequency, or when they take a specific action.

Not sure what we mean by “sales funnel” and similar lead nurturing jargon? No worries! Our Guide to B2B Lead Nurturing will clarify it for you.

Once contacts enter your email automation workflows, you need to maintain engagement by grabbing attention and offering value. You can do this by subtly positioning each email to sell in a compelling way, using the copywriting principle called “the four Ps”

1. Promise: Clearly explain the unique selling points of your offering and how it will benefit their business.
2. Picture: Create a vivid mental picture of how your solution addresses their relevant pain points.
3. Proof: Provide social proof through case studies, statistics, infographics, and testimonials.
4. Push: Present a simple call to action to move them closer to conversion.

By implementing the above, you will keep future customers engaged, interested, and more likely to proceed to the next step in your journey.

You can also adopt a storytelling approach that positions the prospect as the “hero”, yourself as the “guide”, pain points as the “villain”, and your offering as the logical end-destination.

The techniques you use to add potential leads on your email automation workflows will depend on where enrolment takes place. Do you have salespeople adding contacts to your lists, or use a subscription form? The key is to make enrolment as seamless and simple as possible.

Ensure leads keep flowing into your journey to reach your conversion goals. Depending on the automation platform you’re using, this can be done through methods such as having leads:

• Subscribe to your contact list
• Open the emails you send them
• Click on links in your emails
• Click on links on your landing pages
• Visit your landing pages
• Update their profile data on your database

To ensure data-privacy compliance, always obtain consent from potential leads before enrolling them on email automation workflows. One way to do this is by using double opt-in processes, where you prompt them to subscribe and send them a confirmation email before automatically adding them to your journey. Platforms like Everlytic can automate these opt-in processes for you.

Get our guide to Driving Conversions with Marketing Funnels for more on effective enrolment techniques for lead nurturing.

As prospects become more familiar with your brand, start weaving personalised content into your messages. Three levels of personalisation you can leverage include:

1. Basic text field personalisation like adding contact names to greetings, personalising “from” and “reply to” email addresses, and customising sender names.
2. Segmentation with logical operators: Determine how different contacts flow through your journey by specifying what happens when they take a pre-defined action or have given data associated with them. For example, send contacts that open your email and have purchased an item from you before down one branch of your journey, while ones that didn’t open it go down another branch entirely.
3. Data-driven personalisation tactics: Use subscriber data to display customised sections in your automated emails. This technique is called dynamic content.

Well executed email personalisation fosters rapport and recognition – increasing the likelihood of conversion.

If a prospect loses interest, offer them simple and accessible ways to unsubscribe. This is important since you want to prevent them from marking your legitimate emails as spam.

Platforms like Everlytic allow you to set automatic unenrolment triggers for events like:

• Unsubscribes: Remove a contact from your email workflow when they click an unsubscribe link in one of your emails.
• Complaints: Remove people from your list who are marking your emails as spam for the sake of your long-term sending reputation.
• Bounces: Chronically bounced contacts are either unengaged or aren’t receiving your emails and should be removed from your journeys.

Implementing these five steps will elevate your email automation workflows from adequate to excellent in no time. The key take away is that automated email journeys should function as a single, worthwhile, and compelling unit. If you achieve this all-round objective, then lead nurturing success is inevitable.