How to Plan an Effective Email Nurture Campaign in 10 Steps

You’ve published amazing content, attracted new audiences, and generated leads. Now what? How do you get those leads to turn into customers?

Here’s where an effective nurture campaign comes into play.

The idea is to nurture leads further down the marketing and sales funnel, with the ultimate goal of turning them into customers. One of the most effective channels for a nurture campaign is email.

Here, we’ll explain how to create an effective email nurture campaign in 10 simple steps. Consider each of these steps carefully when creating a new campaign and mold them to fit your company’s specific needs.

How to Plan an Effective Email Nurture Campaign

1. Set goals. Outline objectives for each nurture campaign you create, setting specific measures for success. Remember that knowing where you’re going is half the battle!
2. Define your target audience. Who are you trying to reach?

   Explore your ideal customer by creating buyer personas, then create a target audience based on those personas. Those are the leads you’ll concentrate on turning into customers.

3. Segment your database. Once you’ve decided on your target audience, create a segment of leads that fit in that audience in your email database.
4. Trigger emails to follow conversions. Your nurture campaign can play a key role in turning leads into customers. Trigger emails to send after a conversion to demonstrate responsiveness.
5. Use targeted content delivery. Examine your buyer persons to identify your prospective customers’ goals, interests, pain points, and triggers.

   Select content to include in your email that caters to the specific buyer persona you based your target audience around, and their stage in the buying process.

6. Demonstrate the value and relevance of your offer. When crafting your email content, show why the your offer is relevant and valuable to your target audience at the beginning of your message. Keep your language short, clear, and to the point.
7. Craft a clear call-to-action (CTA). Ideally, stick to one CTA in your email, asking leads to take an action based on your offer.

   Limiting the number of CTAs helps to reduce choice overload. Choice overload happens when consumers are presented with too many options, they can become overwhelmed, leading to unrealistic expectations, decision-making paralysis and unhappiness.

8. Create a schedule. Set up multiple emails for your campaign, at different intervals, and spaced apart.

   The people you are trying to reach most likely lead busy lives. Give them more than one chance to respond to your campaign, without seeming spammy. You’ll have to experiment with the number of emails and the timing to find out what works best for your prospects.

9. Review the results of your campaign. Track important metrics, such as open rate, clicks, and click-through rate, to better evaluate the performance of your email nurture campaign.
10. Keep testing. Continue to optimize, test, and improve your email nurture program, using data from the past performance of sent emails.

    You can test things like subject lines, the length of your emails, the use of graphics, the cadence and timing of your email sends, where the CTA is located and the language that is used, and more.