What is an Email Nurture Campaign? (Beginner's Guide)

Email marketing is a particularly effective way to reach new leads. In fact, companies who responded to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 benchmark report rated email newsletters as their highest performing type of content for securing and nurturing leads. Email nurture campaigns, like newsletters, are an important tool for guiding new subscribers to becoming purchasing customers.

An email nurture campaign is a series of emails designed to build a connection between a customer and your product or brand, “nurturing” them into a long-lasting and productive relationship. . The messages in the nurture stream are sent to segments of your audience according to data from their user behavior, such as whether they were interacting to learn, to research, or to purchase.

Nurture campaigns confirm credibility and build a personalized relationship with potential customers by offering the relevant content they need at every stage of the customer journey.

Email Nurture Campaign Timeline

A nurture stream does not offer random information or sales pitches. Because you are nurturing your relationship with the customer, you must craft thoughtful messages that precisely correlate with your user’s interests. Nurture campaigns must also be automated to trigger your targeted messages according to the user’s next interaction. For example, a common first batch of messages in many nurture campaigns is a welcome stream, sent to customers after they sign up for your newsletter. The welcome stream should guide the user to interact again, nurturing them to engage for the entirety of your customer journey.

A nurture campaign is an excellent way to guide customers through the funnel stages. Every nurture campaign should be highly personalized based on the indications of the user’s interaction behavior to target the next message in the nurture stream exactly to their stage.

Email Nurture Campaign Best Practices

To get the best results from your email nurture campaigns, it’s important to use marketing technology to optimize your email sequences for each user. Here are some tips for doing that successfully.

Automate a Sequence of Emails

Companies use automation tools to get the most out of email nurture campaigns. With automation, no leads go unnurtured. Set up your email nurture streams to be triggered to send an email after each customer action, nurturing the relationship without a heavy lift from your marketing team.

Triggered nurture emails connect with the user after an interaction. Common triggers for nurture campaigns include user actions such as subscribing to a newsletter, clicked links, pageviews, form fills, video watches, webinar registrations, and cart actions. Automatically sending a thoughtful email to the customer around their user interaction nurtures the relationship and engages them into further interaction.

Personalize Your Emails

Customers today only want to read emails that are aligned with their interests or add value. If they receive too many emails that don’t match their needs, they are more likely to unsubscribe or report the email as spam.

All email nurture campaign messaging should include dynamic content based on user actions or history. The customer may have shown a specific interest in a product or other information based on their browsing and purchasing data. That data can be used to trigger an email with product suggestions similar to those the customer has purchased in the past.

Create an Effective Subject Line

No matter how sophisticated the content strategy, nurture emails are less likely to be opened if they don’t have a catchy and relevant subject line. Let your audience know what they’re getting from each email and make sure to capture their attention while you’re doing it. If your company has a unique voice or point of view, make good use of that brand voice in the subject line of every single email.

Tell Your Brand Story

Create a storyline for each user segment. Providing a consistent brand experience means building each channel on the ones that came before. This consistency lets your customers know that you are competent and trustworthy. The brand becomes a regular part of their interaction, nurturing longer-lasting brand loyalty. Branding is integral to nurture campaigns as it targets the brand information and suggestions they need at that point in their customer journey.

Use a Template

Establishing your email nurture campaigns can be time consuming, and every marketer needs to work efficiently. Use a preset email template to create each email nurture campaign more quickly.

While implementing these best practices, always keep the goal of email nurture campaigns in mind. You want to reach your customer exactly where they are in their journey and nurture, or engage, them towards the next step.

Take Advantage of Cross-Channel Marketing

To maximize your chances of nurturing your customers down the funnel, consider cross-channel marketing. Cross-channel marketing is a type of marketing automation that features marketing campaigns that are integrated across digital and offline marketing channels, such as email, SMS, push, social, and direct mail.

Use a best-in-class cross-channel marketing tool, like Iterable, to centralize data from all your sources. Using that data, you can set up a sequence of cross-channel messaging triggered by your users’ real-time actions. This approach ensures you never miss an opportunity to maximize engagement.