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Lead nurturing emails are all about building ongoing relationships with your subscribers.
Successful lead nurturing emails require a proven email marketing strategy, proper list segmentation, and automation with the help of the right ESP (ahem... Sendlane).
In this post, you will see examples of 5 excellent lead nurturing email sequences that are crushing in terms of lead nurturing.
What are lead nurturing emails?
Lead nurturing email is an automated email campaign or workflow that personalizes the experience to the person receiving them. Customer education emails go a step further.
How to write lead nurturing emails
In the following email content, you’ll see everything a good email service provider will offer you, including:
1. Personalize emails using recipient’s name and details for relevance
2. Use automation (CRM/marketing platform) to send lead nurturing emails based on actions/behaviors.
3. Identify target audience and tailor messages to address their needs/pain points.
4. Keep email design simple and clear, with easy-to-read text and a clear hierarchy of information.
5. Develop specific and clear CTAs
Before-purchase email examples
Let’s start with the bad news. Nearly 80% of new leads won’t purchase.
But, here’s the good news for eCommerce marketers like you. Stats also show that brands that rock at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads, and they do it at 33% lower costs. Not to mention, properly nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than those who weren’t nurtured.
1. Give new customers a warm welcome
One of the most critical types of automated emails is your welcome email. Once members of your target audience have opted into your list and you’ve sent them a quick “thank you for subscribing” email, you can follow up with a more robust welcome email sequence.
Here’s a good example of a welcome email from Casper.
This welcome email hits the lead nurturing nail on the head by providing a warm welcome and a call-to-action button that invites customers to browse products.
This welcome email also includes some other notable welcome email best practices:
- A quick explanation of what they will receive from Casper as a subscriber
- A helpful quick-tip
- A promo code to encourage immediate purchases
When creating your first welcome email automation, Casper is not a bad brand to copy.
2. Self-introduction email to new clients
For any new leads that sign up to your newsletter but have little information on your brand and business, self-introduction emails are key. It’s a way of breaking the ice and introducing who your brand is and what you offer.
With self-introduction emails, it lays the foundations of a customer relationship. It gives the lead something back for offering up their email. If the recipient shared their name, personalize this first email to grab their attention.
This email usually confirms their subscription to the newsletter, rather than selling them anything straight off the bat.
3. Offering a discount on the first order
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock but a survey done by BitBounce found that 77% of customers only open up brand emails to learn about discounts.
With click-open rates being fairly low and users receiving dozens if not hundreds of promotional emails per day, offering a discount has it’s advantages.
It’s typical for some businesses to offer a sizeable discount on the first order that the lead makes. While it may not be a freebie, getting a product or service for a lower cost at what it originally is, can be too much of a bargain for a lead to pass up on.
4. Celebrate with your customers on their anniversary
Make note of your customers’ special anniversaries and email them a congratulation. Anniversary emails include the anniversary of the year they joined your company, their birthday, their actual wedding anniversary, etc.
Stats show that open rates for birthday messages are 3X higher than promotional emails. Open rates for anniversary emails were also 3X as high.
People love anniversary emails. Every year, I get a birthday message from my dentist, and I love it. I’ve also stayed with my same dentist for over 15 years. Talk about lifetime customer value!
Here’s a great example of a celebratory birthday email from Puma.
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Not only does this email make a big deal out of a birthday, but it also guides this subscriber down the sales funnel. How? The email provides a 20% discount (aka present) on the subscriber’s next purchase.
The best news is 77% of consumers spend $10 to $50 more than they intended to when they are redeeming a coupon.
It’s safe to say that anniversary emails are a lead nurturing gold mine.
//[inject:ad-ebook-cltv]
5. Announce a new product
You may not have much success with some leads simply due to not having the right products stocked. Perhaps they’re waiting for a particular product to pop up and that’s when they’ll drive forward with a purchase.
Announcing a new product is something that is exciting for both existing customers and new email subscribers.
Once a product launches, it should be a part of your marketing strategy to reach out to certain segments of your subscribers that will be interested.
6. Engaging survey
Interaction content to your users is a great way of engaging and giving them a great customer experience. Whether or not they’ve bought from the site already, a survey can be tailored to whatever information you need for your business.
With data being a powerful influence for businesses, feedback of any kind in the form of a survey can be useful. To help nuture those leads who’ve not yet made a purchase, a survey on what they like and would be interested in purchasing can be useful for business decisions.
Post-purchase email examples
Once you’ve nurtured a lead to making a purchase, it’s important to continue nurturing to encourage further custom in the future. Here are a few ways marketers can use nurturing in post-purchase.
7. Send confirmation emails after opt-in
Requiring a double opt-in has two benefits. First, you make sure you’re only paying for subscribers that are real and are excited to hear from you. Second, you have an opportunity to start nurturing new leads from your first interaction.
A solid email marketing best practice is to trigger an automated “confirmation/thank you” message to let your readers know they have been added to your list and will be hearing from you.
You already have the attention of your subscriber, so take the opportunity to encourage them to further engage with your brand. Here’s a good example of a great confirmation email from Penguin Classics.
This thank you email from Penguin classics is awesome. The copy thanks subscribers for joining the email newsletter, but doesn’t just leave it at that. This thank you email also invites new subscribers to take action and “discover more.”
The invitation to immediately browse books targets avid readers in the “awareness” part of the sales funnel and immediately moves them to the “interest” part of the sales funnel.
This is lead nurturing at its finest. As you create your double opt-in confirmation email, think of an invitation you can include to get your new subscribers to visit your eCommerce store.
8. Related recommendation emails
Once the lead has made a purchase, it may be that they’re willing to spend more on similar items or recommendations made by the brand. You can’t expect any customer to know the ins and outs of your product catalogue. Chances are, they’ve missed out on something that could be perfect for their wants and needs.
A related recommendation email is useful for sending out in that initial period after they’ve made a purchase. It might also be an email you send out a week or so later, along with other recent product launches that fit what this customer desires.
This promotional email from Crate & Barrel is a great example of recommendations.
9. Reward your customers to increase loyalty
eCommerce brands can make excellent use of rewards programs and email marketing to lead customers down the sales funnel and increase how much customers spend.
Here’s an example from the Gap.
When you navigate to the Gap’s website for the first time, a lead magnet box appears on the landing page. You have the option to enter your contact information, including your email address in exchange for membership to the Gap’s rewards program where you earn 2 points for every $1 you spend.
Here’s where the lead nurturing comes into play.
Once you’ve entered your email address, the Gap adds you to its rewards program email sequence, and you’ll start getting emails like the following email.
Rewards emails are an excellent way to nurture leads. Why? Customers are motivated to spend more to get more points. And, you can continually send email follow-ups with point balances, extra discounts, and more opportunities for customers to buy.
Research supports the benefits of reward programs in marketing campaigns:
- 75% of consumers say they favor companies that offer rewards.
- Over 58% of internet users say earning rewards and loyalty points is one of the most valued aspects of the shopping experience.
- 87% of consumers are open to brands monitoring their activity details if it leads to more personalized rewards.
If you’re ready to generate more sales, consider a nurture email sequence with your rewards program.
10. Retarget abandoned cart shoppers with sleek reminders
Another prime opportunity to nurture leads is to send a series of cart-abandonment emails.
If customers have spent time on your website and added something to their cart, it means they are interested. Stats also show that well-intended purchasers get easily distracted, as global cart abandonment rates are as high as 77%.
A customer abandoning their cart doesn’t mean they don’t want to buy from you. It means they need a little reminder. Here’s a great example of a cart abandonment email from quip.
Quip does a great job with a gentle follow-up nudge for customers to finish their purchase. The email makes it easy for the customer to return to their cart with the images of products left behind and saved in the cart. All the customer has to do is click on the “Shop Now” button.
Quip also sweetens the deal by providing a $10 off first refill to encourage customers to finish their purchases.
The amount of personalization and customization that goes into a cart abandonment seems incredible. Here’s the good news. A stellar ESP like Sendlane makes it easy for you to create emails that save individual customers’ cart data and pulls it into an automated email follow-up.
What seems like magic is simply the smart use of a tool like Sendlane that allows you to automate your emails.
11. Product feedback request emails
Feedback is a must for any business looking to improve on their product quality and customer satisfaction. Customer retention is a lot harder than lead acquisition. According to SemRush, 44% of businesses focus on customer aquisition and only 18% focus on customer retention.
If anything, it should be the opposite way round. Sending out requests for feedback on products bought is a helpful way of understanding how impactful your products are. It’s also hard to get product feedback so if they’re willing to do so, it’s either going to be positive - or the opposite.
Data collected on your products and how well they’ve been received is useful for any future product creations and launches.
12. Cross-sell and re-sell emails
Similar to cart abandonment emails, cross-selling and re-selling emails are all about timing and relevance. By utilizing the information you have on a shopper’s previous on-site browsing, you can help users to pick up their interactions on the site to cross-sell and re-sell any items that they may have already purchased previously.
Cross-selling and re-selling are two methods that take away the hassle and work that a lead has to make when shopping online. These emails might be worth triggering for when a customer has made a purchase and they still might be in the spending mood for similar products.
How to create a lead nurturing email sequence
Your lead nurturing email sequence should be designed to provide value to your subscribers and help them learn about your brand. Here’s an example of what your sequence could look like:
Email 1: Thank you for signing up (+ any opt-in promise)
Email 2: Introduce yourself, your business, and/or your team
Email 3: Valuable content that matches your subscriber’s interest
Email 4: Present your product and its benefits
Email 5: More value (Social proof’s great here!)
Here’s how this sequence could look inside Sendlane’s automations builder!
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Ready to create a high-performing lead nurturing email campaign? Try Sendlane!
Here’s the truth. You can’t convert leads and boost open rates without lead nurturing emails. And, you can’t create an email marketing lead nurturing campaign without marketing automation, email list segmentation, personalization tools, and gorgeous email templates.
For this, you need Sendlane. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Sendlane offers a 60-day free trial. Take Sendlane for a spin for free today and take your content to the next level. Sign up for a free trial.
