Insider tips for email nurture campaigns that work

You’ve captured leads from an incredible lead generation campaign (nice work), so what do you do now?

You nurture them with some amazing emails. Email lead nurturing aims to warm leads up, move them through the sales funnel, and convert them into paying customers. Email marketing sends sequences of emails called nurture streams. These are pre-made emails carefully planned out to match audience segments, so to produce great nurture streams, you’ll need to use engagement data and get to the heart of what different leads want to read.

While nurturing your leads with your awesome emails, you’ll score them to see how engaged or warm they are. Once they hit the numbers you need, they can qualify for sales outreach. You’ll benefit from studying your email nurturing closely and adapting it alongside your scoring thresholds until you see sales are getting steady results.

Like a green shoot that needs water and sunlight to blossom, leads need TLC to transform into loyal customers. And what’s the lead’s source of nourishment? Meaningful, memorable content. Strategic distribution and strong workflow design are essential but without a bed of insight-driven content, your nurture streams are bound to run dry.

1. Figure out your email flow

Before you dive into content creation, solidify your product offering and how that makes you stand out from competitors. Ask questions like:

• How can our product impact our customers’ business outcomes?
• What problems does our product solve?
• What’s our unique value proposition?

Knowing these answers means designing a content sequence that brings leads on a coherent journey and convinces them why they should buy. Intercepting engagement spikes might mean sending conversion offers or passing leads to sales, for easier lead management.

2. Show, don’t tell

Study after study proves that pairing visual information with written makes a massive impact on message retention. So when you create content for nurture streams, work with human nature, not against it. 

Illustrate your product’s key features with videos, share research findings in infographics, and host customer success stories in visually engaging content formats. Whatever way you nurture, make it a feast for their eyes and minds.

3. Keep emails consistent

You’ve heard it a million times but it rings true; consistency is key. Scheduled outreach aligned with target time zones builds an organized, dependable communication cadence with potential customers. Just make sure your lead nurturing email frequency doesn’t overwhelm prospects.

4. Don’t be scared to experiment

Diversify nurture content beyond traditional emails. Try adding YouTube interviews, case studies, or entertaining GIFs. Use a content creation platform that allows rich media in your nurture streams, without being spammed out of inboxes.

Nurture campaigns or streams are often a series of automated emails based upon certain actions or behaviors by a lead. Workflows can be triggered so that when people interact with content on a certain topic, they are shown more content on the subject they’re engaging with or sent an offer that corresponds to their action. It’s the only way to manage high-volume nurture streams.

Why do email marketers nurture leads?

In the world of B2B marketing, email nurturing can mean the difference between making a sale and losing a potential customer. For B2B and SaaS businesses, an email nurture campaign is important because buying decisions take longer and aren’t as impulsive as they are in B2C.

Understanding the best practices for email nurturing is important. You want people to open your email, read what you’ve sent, and click your CTAs. So, let’s look at some common sticking points.

We asked Paul Fellowes, Turtl’s CRM Manager, to walk us through answers to common customer questions. Let’s hand over to Paul.

What’s a good email open rate?

‘Good’ entirely depends on your industry, customer base, and how a lead’s behavior affects conversions.

This differs by industry, whether you’re working in B2C or B2B, on the cleanliness of your data, and on what it is you’re sending. I see 20% as a base rate for newsletters, but like to get my data as clean as possible to hit 30-40%. More relevant comms, like abandon basket automations in B2C can reach incredibly high open rates (70-90%) so long as the data is clean and the timing is spot on.

What about email nurture tone and voice?

Every company has a certain tone of voice for outbound materials, often depending on their industry or customer base. Email nurturing campaigns are as much a representation of the company as how a salesperson might talk to prospective customers, so nailing the right tone of voice is essential.

If you don’t have a set-in-stone tone of voice, look at other businesses in your industry, and consider how they write and talk about their product. You may decide it’s too stuffy and formal and so choose to go with a more relaxed tone, or perhaps the exact opposite.

Decisions about tone and voice should be based on your customer base and how they communicate. Talk to your sales team, survey your customers, listen to them on sales calls, and look at your email analytics to inform decisions about tone.

What’s the perfect nurture cadence?

In terms of email nurturing frequency, you never want to overload your customer with too much correspondence. Eventually, they will stop reading emails if you send one a day, and likely never open them if it’s more than that. Here at Turtl, we find that emails 2-3 days apart yield the best results, however, this will change depending on your content and how well you know your audience. For instance in regards to newsletters, once a week is ample.

Automations should only be sent once, maybe twice a week, but that can intertwine with the newsletters – making sure you have a robust contact strategy overlooking everything you’re sending is very important. I’ve heard of businesses that send 5-7 times per week, and that is poor practice.

What about email content?

Before you start an email nurture campaign, ask: are we actually offering this lead anything? If the answer is less than a yes, go back and restart. If you aren’t offering a lead anything in your emails, no one will engage with, let alone open them.

Any tips on using offers?

You wouldn’t be completely off the mark to assume that offers for free trials, discounts, or other financially beneficial gifts work well. You can also send leads educational material about your product or industry, free templates for documents or emails, or event invites.

An offer is anything a lead can engage with, download, or use to help do their job better and understand your business and product. Let’s take a look at some examples.

• Watch our webinar
• Download our latest white paper
• Get your free templates

How about email copy?

No one wants to spend lots of time reading through a wall of text, especially in an email. Keeping your content short and sweet is guaranteed to help increase click-through rates.

Let your content do the talking; after all, you don’t want to spend hours creating a beautiful piece of content only for someone to read all they need to in an email and then not engage with the actual content.

Quick and concise descriptions are much more likely to get engagement. This also applies to CTAs and subject lines.

Should I use GIFs in emails?

GIFs work well for B2C emails and depending on your customer base and testing you may find these work in B2B. Best practice is to keep your information straightforward and on-topic. If you find GIFs increase engagement, keep them small and sparse to save on email load time, and ensure you have good alt text for accessibility.

What about emails with emojis? 🤔

It’s more and more common for emojis to be used in subject lines and the main content of an email. For subject lines, the maximum of one emoji is enough to be visually appealing to a reader. Remember that across different devices, OS systems, and screen readers, emojis don’t always show up the same or, in some cases, at all.

And video in email?

Videos aren’t possible inside standard HTML emails. Your best option is linking out to a third-party video hosting website, such as YouTube or Vimeo.

What are the secrets of better open rates?

Now that we know what kind of content to offer, and how best to write about it, we need to look at how to actually grab the attention of your lead in the first place.

The first thing someone sees when you send an email is the subject line, this is the make-or-break moment between whether or not they open your email. This will partially depend on your industry and customer base, however, there are certain dos and don’ts with subject lines that are worth considering.

Your preview text should be related to your subject line, but with additional context to give more flavor of what’s to expect. This can afford to be longer, but remember it’s only complementary to the subject line, not everyone will see, or read it. Preview text shouldn’t be necessary to understand what’s in the email.

Clearly introducing what is to be expected in the email will almost always work best. I’d always recommend SendCheckIt if you’re not sure how your subject line is likely to perform.

What makes a good email subject line?

There is no written rule about the perfect subject line, but staying concise and clear on the email’s topic is always best practice.

Under 60 characters is the ideal subject line length. This keeps your messaging short and promises that subject lines don’t trail off into the UI ether on any average email platform.

It is worth playing with A/B testing on this as you may find questions as subject lines work best for your customers, or perhaps they prefer a clear-cut phrase that explains the email’s content so they don’t have to second-guess opening it.

Paul helped us put together a detailed, free guide.