How do you structure effective lead nurturing drip email campaigns?

I’m going to give you the answer you were dreading. And then I’ll give you a little more to go by. 😉

How do you structure lead nurturing?

… it depends!

(See, you were dreading that one, weren’t you?)

But that’s the only honest answer, because it depends on your customer and your product. It also depends on what you’re trying to do with the nurture campaign.

Let’s look at two key factors here: length, email frequency and content.

Lead Nurturing Campaign Length

As a rule, the harder it is for your prospect to reach the goal at the end of the nurture, the longer your campaign ends up being.

For example: the more expensive your product, the longer your nurture campaign needs to be. Expensive products take more research on the part of the buyer. He or she also needs to get their organization behind a purchase, they could be in another contract still…

In B2B marketing automation, where I’m at, long-term nurture campaigns can easily span months, to even years. This is okay, since every sale the nurture ends up generating is usually substantial, from a revenue perspective.

Contrastingly, if you’re following up a top-of-the-funnel PDF download to pitch the next download, it doesn’t need to be nearly as long. All it needs to do is provide actual value and it’s likely your prospect will pick up the next goodie in the funnel.

Lead Nurturing Campaign Email Frequency

How often should you send an email? I think there’s a couple of ways about this:

  1. Start out more frequent and lower it down over time. Oftentimes you’ll see the Fibonacci-sequence used here: send emails on day 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. The reasoning behind this is that people that make a decision leading to a conversion (such as downloading a whitepaper) are usually very interested in a particular topic. As such, following up with additional goodies is a good idea, but as their interest drops, so should the amount of emails you’re sending.
  2. Send out at a consistent interval. Especially if you’re planning to nurture a prospect for a longer period of time, space the emails out. For example, send them a weekly digest from your blog on Monday mornings. That way they’ll keep seeing you, but they won’t get annoyed at the frequency of emails.

I’ll note that I’ve heard plenty of examples where frequent emails over longer periods of time have been successful in generating sales. You really do need to experiment: set something up, run it, see how it does, adjust it.

I did say “it depends”, didn’t I? 😉

Lead Nurturing Content

While we’re on the topic of lead nurturing, let me comment on what to send.

  1. Short-term: send content directly relevant to the conversion that spurred the campaign. If they downloaded a whitepaper, expound upon it. Lead them to the next download in the funnel. If it’s a sales conversation, send some emails overcoming common objections and answering frequently asked questions.
  2. Long-term: pick something sustainable. It’s certainly possible to create an 18-month backlog of emails for a long-term nurture program. But you’ve got to be able to come up with all of it. The alternative is to sign someone up for your blog and send them updates, instead.

That’s what I got on that topic. Hope that helped!

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Henrik Becker

Marketing Automation Consultant