Journal

How Nurture Leads with Customer Education Emails

20 Jan
2021
How Nurture Leads with Customer Education Emails

On average, 80% of sales cycle, new leads never translate into a sale.

Not just a few, not even half, but 80%...

Just to spitball the math on this, if every successful lead and qualified lead from your eCommerce website averaged 10 new email signup qualified lead scoring leads every day for a year that would equate to 3650 qualified leads.

If 80% of them failed to ever make a purchase, you’re looking at a loss of income from 2920 people in a single year.

And if your average order value for customers was on the low side of say… $35, then that’s a potential loss of over $102K.  

Oof… that hurts, right?

So how do you better equip your store to get sales ready leads and nurture these quality sales ready leads, to nurture quality leads that help your sales funnel keep that sharp drop from happening to you? Since these potential leads are coming to you through email signups, it only makes sense to use email to combat things.

But how, you may wonder? Let's dive in! 

In this article, you will learn: 

In this article, you will learn: 

  • Why customer education is an effective lead nurturing strategy to build trust with your customers.
  • How to use the H.A.S. approach to provide valuable, relevant content in your marketing campaigns.
  • 5 customer education strategies eCommerce brands incorporate in their lead nurturing campaign.

Customer Education: The Lead Nurturing Emails Your Marketing Automations Need

InvespCRO found that companies who excelled in their lead nurturing strategies generated 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost.

And what channel did they find was the most effective for effective lead nurturing of programs and impactful for effective for lead nurturing programs of programs?

If you guessed email, then ding, ding, ding!, we have a winner!

Lead and nurturing programs through email marketing is an automated, email marketing campaign buying process or workflow that (hopefully) personalizes the email marketing experience to the person receiving them. Customer education emails go the lead nurturing process a step further.

The best way to describe a consumer education email sequence is to say they help you to maintain relationships and build relationships foster a relationship with consumers by building relationships and providing valuable content and information which educates them about your brand and products.

Through building relationships and offering value, you earn trust, make sales process increase consumer loyalty, and build meaningful relationships that can help guide effective lead your shoppers through the pain points of the buyer's journey.

But the question is, how? How do you create this type of email content? What types of emails work? What can your emails include? Below we’re taking a look at helpful tips as well as some examples to answer those questions for you.

Customer Education Emails:
Help, Answer, Show (The H.A.S Value Approach)

If you’re having a hard time figuring out what these types of emails should say, try to brainstorm around these three ideas:

  1. Help. How can you help your customers? What do they need that your product can solve their problem? What information can you give that would be helpful to them and help your brand become the go-to source for that help?
  2. Answer. What questions do they have about your product(s)? What are common questions or problems in your industry for the people you serve?  
  3. Show. Can you show the value of your products? Would a product, explainer, or tutorial video help?

Your product has value to these same, potential customers, new customers, prospective buyers, and new paying customers, too, and the H.A.S Value Approach is a fun little exercise to help you figure out what that is.

The other really important part of nurturing process of brainstorming ideas here is to look at what makes your brand and products unique. Perhaps you’re like Pura Vida, where you have a very interesting story and your business model supports others’ work.

Or maybe the way your business handles customer support and shipping is what sets you above the rest. You can really dig in here to find what makes you stand out.

And when you find it, use that to your advantage to boost sales funnel and your brand awareness to educate your subscribers about who you are to create an emotional tether.

But I get it.

Seeing something like this done well, makes it easier to understand where you should take your own emails. 

Thankfully, there are many great examples out there that have managed to find their value-prop to use in their sales teams marketing and sales team customer education align their marketing team sales efforts with align sales and marketing strategy.

Colorescience: A Little Can Go A Long Way


Oftentimes, when we think of “education” we consider it as something long-winded or a step-by-step process, that sort of thing. However, it doesn’t have to be so “in your face” when enlightening people about your products.

Colorescience is a great example of a brand that mixes customer education into every avenue of their own marketing strategy — from email marketing campaigns, and social media campaigns included.

Their various other content marketing and marketing strategies and efforts highlight all the different types of education digital marketing consultant on-based and content marketing you could create. On the surface, these two emails may not seem like they’re teaching anything, but each of them teaches something about the uniqueness of the products.

The first email shows and tells in very few words how their SPF Sport Stick really works and what makes it unique.

The second email highlights their lip balm product and also offers some lesser-known traits that the product has that the subscriber would likely find of value (buildable coverage, hypoallergenic, free of various allergens, etc.)

You can show the value and teach your subscribers important details about your products without being long-winded and, well, boring. 

A little bit of explaining and showing can go a long way, so you don’t always need to overthink it.


Moment: Teach Your Customers How To Perfect Their Craft


We often use Moment as an example for eCommerce brands to emulate regarding their email and lead nurturing campaigns, other marketing strategies and automation marketing strategies, because they do such a great job.

They sell multiple products for mobile photographers and travel photography. While their products offer quite a lot of value, their consumers are usually looking for new products and methods that improve their photography or videography craft.

As part of their overall email marketing strategy though, all content that is produced — even social media posts like the YouTube video and blog post that goes along with the image above — gets attention in an email.

While the most appropriate and relevant content of this is covered in the content that lives in person events and on their website, Moment goes the extra mile to condense that same page of information into this message. If the subscribers only have a moment to read something from them, they put enough helpful information into the email to be valuable without being overwhelming.

They teach and educate by being as helpful to their target audience on social media as possible. It's one of the things that helped them go from a Kickstarter campaign to a full-fledged company with 20+ employees and a huge social media presence.

//[inject:ad-ebook-cltv]

Burrow: Put Your FAQs In An Email


Every brand has a batch of questions they get asked all the time. 

Some of them are always the same, like, “Do you offer free shipping?” and, “What’s your return policy?”

Others may be unique to your brand.

Either way, these questions often pop up in the minds of someone interested in your brand, and sometimes, those seemingly small questions  — when they go unanswered — can be enough to keep them from making a purchase.

Burrow sidesteps this issue a bit by placing their FAQs in a pleasantly designed email. This helps them to eliminate thoughts that could hold a buyer's journey back.

Adding this type of email to your own welcome series and social media, is a great way to get new customers to do the same for your brand.


Pulp & Press: Dig Into The Value Your Product Has


Your product no doubt has a certain value to your own paying customers.

Once you know what that is (and it could be a variety of things) you can use that to create nurture campaigns and emails like this one from Pulp & Press.

As a health-focused brand with juicing products, they have certain things their potential customers will look for that pertain to good and nourishing food. But as you read the copy of their email, you can see that they’re purposely using their “insider” knowledge of their customer base to show their value.

Terms like “low sugar content”, “kick cravings to the curb” and “nourish your body” offer a lot of value to those who need or want to watch their sugar intake and who have a focus on getting healthy.

It’s subtle, but in the sales process, of going deeper and educating more about the product, they also show their value.

Using the terms and words your potential customers are using to describe what they need/want and placing those in your copy increase the value you have in their eyes.

Better features. Better support. Better customer experience.

Get all the same features you need with a more intuitive UI you’ll love. Experience the difference.

//[inject:ad-demo]

Customer Education Is Essential in eCommerce Today  

Some people move from one to one on one conversations to next faster than others, but most people need to get to know you, your brand, your values, and your uniqueness before they’re willing to give you their money.

Spending time to put together education-based emails that go into an automated email sales funnel like a Welcome Series can keep you from losing a large percentage of potential revenue.

The H.A.S. Value approach can drum up ideas for what types of emails you can create and add to your funnels.

And since this is all automated, once you’ve created these, they will continually run in the background and work hard for you.

It’s one of the reasons we love automated email marketing so much:

It makes life so much easier!

If you’re looking for an eCommerce-focused email marketing importance and other marketing automation tool platform, then check out Sendlane. You get 60 days for free with no credit card required, and our awesome team of customer success peeps are at the ready to help jump right in.

Click here to get started today!


How do I measure the effectiveness of my customer education emails?
How do I segment my customers for customer education emails?
How do I optimize my customer education emails for deliverability?

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