Lead nurturing email campaigns are a great way to front of mind with your leads, but only if they are implemented effectively. Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship with your leads through multiple touches to move them down your sales funnel until they are ready to become a customer. So what are the essential elements of an effective lead nurturing email campaign?

1. Create compelling thought Leadership Content. Creating compelling, educational content is an essential aspect of your campaign. When you’re sending emails on a regular basis, you need to make sure that you consistently have something of value to offer them, like educational, thought leadership content.
2. Be Personal. Make sure that each of your emails is personalized based on your recipients preferences and past content interactions. 
3. Keep emails targeted and relevant. Each email you send should be targeted to a specific topic and should feature a prominent call to action.
4. Be concise and to the point. Your lead nurturing emails are just meant to keep you front of mind. Keeping your emails short and focused on one topic stops your recipients from getting frustrated and allows the purpose of your email to become clear as quickly as possible. 
5. Ensure your touches are well-timed.  Using a marketing automation tool allows you to segments your database according to buying roles and behaviors and to send out automated emails based on behavior or action triggers when a prospect enters a new stage in the buying process. This is an essential aspect because since you’re sending out a consistent flow of emails, you need to make sure they aren’t coming too often or inappropriately or recipients will become frustrated. 
6. Develop your campaign to have a natural progression. When creating your lead nurturing campaign it’s important that you carefully plan the flow of your emails to ensure that your overall campaign progresses smoothly to unobtrusively pull your leads through the sales funnel. 
7. Monitor lead activity to measure your campaign. The purpose of a lead nurturing campaign is to ultimately deliver qualified leads to sales. As with any other marketing campaign, to reach your goals (in this case, nurturing leads until they turn into sales) you need to measure the results of your campaigns and the effects that your campaigns have on your recipients.

Image by Dux_Carvajal on Flickr

Every email that you send should have a goal or purpose. Whether the email is just to stay in touch with a prospect or to inform your clients about a new product, the content of your email is a deciding factor in how successful your email campaign is. Writing effective email copy can be tough, to help out, here are 6 steps you can use to improve your email copy.

1. Analyze your subject lines. The subject  line is the shortest piece of content that you need to write for your email, but it’s also one of the main factors which determines whether your email gets read or not. Writing an effective email subject line is one of the most difficult aspects of your email. It's important that your subject lines are concise, that they create a sense of urgency and that they are intriguing enough to attract your recipients attention. You can read more about creating effective email subject lines here.
2. Create strong calls-to-action. In general, it’s a good practice to keep the calls-to-action in your emails to a minimum and to ensure that each of them tells your recipient exactly what you want them to do. It is usually easier to get your readers to convert on your campaign if you don’t overwhelm them with multiple calls-to-action. This post has more information about improving calls-to-action.
3. Include benefits to Inspire action. Telling your recipients what benefits they will get when they convert on your campaign is a key to inspiring action. If your readers don't feel like they have a reason to convert then they won't.
4. Ensure that you are promotional and educational. Many emails are sent with the intention of promoting a product or service, an upcoming event or company news. It's important to remember that you should provide readers with informational, non-corporate copy on top of your promotional copy (like a link to a thought-leadership interview on a related topic). This both adds credibility to the subject of your email and helps provide your recipients with some additional resources on a topic which, if you've done your email segmenting correctly, they are interested in.
5. Edit to be succinct.Your subscribers most likely receive hundreds of emails daily. By keeping your emails short and to the point, and directly explaining the purpose of your campaign it is more likely that your email will be read and acted on.
   
6. Proofread for errors! Having grammatical errors is one of the quickest ways to erode the credibility of your email campaigns. It's important to check for errors and to have someone else proofread your work before pressing send! 

Image by Mzelle Biscotte on Flickr.

Nobody wants to receive emails that aren’t of interest to them. Non-targeted emails and spam are a common occurrence within the B2B industry and are one of the fastest ways to decrease your email conversion rate. One of the best things you can do to ensure that your emails are going to be relevant for your recipients is to break your email list down into smaller segments for more personalized, targeted campaigns. The more a recipient can associate with the content of an email campaign, the more likely they are to act on it.

How can you get started?

The basis of segmentation involves achieving a better understanding of your subscribers. Segmenting, by definition, requires that you learn what makes your subscribers individuals and how you can group them into subsets. To determine the ways in which you are going to segment your list, you need to do some research into how your product is perceived by different groups. For instance, segmenting by gender is irrelevant, if gender has little to do with how buyers react to your product.

To get started, a good idea is to choose one single attribute to divide up your house list and to then continue to segment into smaller and smaller like-minded groups. A good example of a starter attribute might be, subscription date (older subscribers vs. brand-new ones). Once you’ve done this initial segmentation, then you can further break down these two groups based on more specific attributes like:

• Demographics (age, gender, occupation, income etc.)
• Geography
• Interest-based preferences 
• Acquisition channel (where did you email subscribers come from?)
• Purchasing history (what product lines have they purchased in the past?)
• Past email open or clickthrough rate (CTR)
• Online behavior
• Customer type (repeat, inactive, new etc.)
• Event-based
• Interest-based preferences (interest preferences chosen by the subscriber during the subscription process)

One of the easiest ways to segment your groups is by activity history. Breaking down your list by subscribers who have acted on an email campaign in the past (read, opened or clicked-through), is an easy way to target your subscribers based on their interest.  Once you move into more advanced segmentation you can begin to break these lists of interested subscribers into smaller segments based on which campaigns they interacted with and which they didn’t, to make even more specific target groups.

We know that it sounds a bit complicated, but proper segmentation is actually one of the simplest and easiest ways to create relevant interest from your house list and to increase the CTR for your email campaigns. Our advice is just to start small, and then to slowly graduate to a more in depth complicated segmentation process and remember to always test, to determine which segmentation methods work best for your organization.

Image source: www.emarketer.com

The subject line of an email may be the shortest piece of content that you write for your email campaigns, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. In fact, email subject lines are one of the most important elements of your emails, and they are often the deciding factor on whether or not emails are opened and read by your recipients. Unfortunately, they are often also one of the most difficult aspects of your email copy to write. The challenge when it comes to subject lines, is to create interest in your email’s topic and convey the purpose and content of your email, all in 50 characters or less (all the space that you have in a typical subject line).

We know this is difficult, we all face the same hurdles when coming up with interesting subject lines as much as the next marketers. To help make your lives a little less difficult, here are our  tried and true tips for creating effective, gotta-open-it subject lines for your email campaigns:

1. Know your audience and what they’re looking for. You know your target audience better than anyone else, so use that information to create targeted email subjects for your recipients. You know if your audience is more interested in informative, educational emails, e-newsletters or promotions (and if you don't, it's probably time to do some research). Utilize this information to give your audience what they're looking for and they will be more likely to open your emails.
2. Create a sense of urgency to drive action. People are much more likely to open your emails if you leave them feeling like they will miss out on a valuable opportunity if they don't open your email right away.
3. Be your own guinea pig. We all get hundreds of emails a day, many of which we don't bother to open and often barely even glance at. However, once in a while a email comes along and its subject line really grabs your attention and you feel a strong desire to open it. Keep track of what has worked on you in the past, and you can probably get a good idea of what works in general.
4. Be personal. Subject lines are an easy aspect of your email to personalize. You can target your subject line based on product or content preferences of your recipient, or on past interests, clickthroughs, purchases or actions on your website.
5. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Keep track of what types of email subject lines have worked for you in the past and stick with them. Email subject lines that have had success in the past are probably on the right track and are likely to continue to be successful in the future.
6. Be concise and get your point across.  When it comes to email campaigns, you only have one opportunity to make an impression on your recipient and you generally, according to size requirements of most email providers, only have 50 characters or less to do so. If you're email subject lines are too long, or the relevant information is at the end of the line, there is a chance that it will get cut off and your message won't be communicated properly.

Most marketers understand that email is still one of the most effective and inexpensive tools you can use for your lead generation, but, while email is important it has some specific limitations, one of the largest being that it is restricted to the size of your email list.

Social media on the other hand, another inexpensive lead generation tool, doesn’t suffer from this restriction. When it comes to social media, sharing content and information is its fundamental purpose, and so when you share content within social media you’re not only reaching your contacts (followers, fans, subscribers etc.) but also their contacts. 

So how come too many marketers don’t put these powerful mediums together?

When properly combined, social media has the power to expand your reach beyond your current marketing database and ultimately give you the opportunity to reach a much wider lead pool.  

Here are some of our tips for integrating your email and social media.

1. Figure out which social media sites your customers use. Do you know what social media sites your customers use? It’s important that you know exactly where your target audience likes to share their content and that you have active corporate accounts on those sites with links to your email subscription form.
2. Use your e-mail list to build your social media following. Your email list is a great place to start finding relevant social media contacts. People who have already opted-in to receive information from you and who are already using social media, are usually excellent candidates to follow you on social media. 
3. Add links in your emails to each of your social media profiles. This relates to the point above. Remember, it’s not just about following your email list, but giving your subscribers the opportunity to follow you on social media. This also gives anyone they forward your emails to the opportunity to follow you as well. 
4. Find out what your target audience is talking about. One of the best ways you can use social media is to listen to what your target audience is saying. Understanding current issues, conversations and topics of interest within your target audience, can give you the information you need to send out more targeted, relevant email campaigns, which in turn, can help you ensure that your emails get opened more often. 

Graph Source: E-marketer

Email is still one of the most effective marketing channels available to organizations today. We’ve spoken and presented in the past on the mistakes marketers make with email, and how to avoid them and most of those mistakes involved actually getting your email into an inbox and opened. However, once your email is opened, there are still many more problems that can arise based on your emails' aesthetic aspects. Here are our top 8 tips on how you can optimize your email's design for better conversions.

1.  Keep it simple! Emails should be relatively basic to ensure that your message gets across as quickly and with as little effort on the part of your recipient as possible. The simpler the design, the easier your email is to code, test, and the less of a chance there will be problems between different email service providers.
2. Design for preview panes. When designing an email it is safe to assume that the majority of your readers will read your email in a preview pane rather than actually opening it to read it (especially in the B2B industry). As a result, it’s important to keep your email design no wider than 600px. 
3. Include a link to the web version. Your recipients will be viewing your email in a wide range of programs, and using a variety of different devices. Some of these may have outdated or poor HTML capabilities. To avoid difficulties, adding a web version link can allow this portion of your audience to read your email as it was intended. 
4. Keep copy brief. No one likes to open an email and see huge paragraphs of text. It makes reading the email seem like too much of a commitment on the part of the recipient because of the effort involved to read the whole email and scroll down the entire screen. This is especially an issue if they are reading your email in a smartphone which has a much smaller screen resolution. 
5. Stay above the fold. This is a pretty standard design best practice whether it is for webpages or email. Keeping your key content above the fold ensure that regardless of smaller monitor size or preview panes the important content in your email will still be viewed. 
6. Keep images to a minimum. Remember, not all of your readers download the images you include in your email. It is important to make sure that your email still looks professional, and still conveys your message whether your recipient downloads the images or not. 
7. Test every time you send. Designing emails can be a long process, but that doesn’t mean you can cut corners and ignore testing. You need to make sure that every time you send your email, your links are working and your email is rendering properly in different email providers. 
8. Use a consistent template. This is a design tip that can save you time and convey your emails’ credibility. Creating a template once and using it consistently afterwards ensures that you minimize the errors that can occur (although you still need to test each time) and that your company’s branding and message are communicated properly.

There are many different reasons why a subscriber might start disengaging with your emails: your emails are getting caught in spam folders, recipients can change their emails or have dormant email accounts etc. For the most part, in those cases, there isn’t much you can do to re-engage readers.

Instead, it's important to focus on the subscribers that have stopped opening your emails because they just become disinterested with your content. These subscribers haven’t officially unsubscribed and they don't want to end their relationship with you, but their interest has faded. When this happens it is often called “list fatigue” and it means that your list has become less responsive to your communications over time.

While it  is unlikely that you will be able to stop list fatigue altogether,  there are some things you can do to decrease its effect.

1. Provide fresh, engaging content – the single most important thing you can do is to provide quality content in every email. Something new, fresh, educational and relevant will help to engage your readers.
2. Don't over promote – Promotions aren’t bad, but they need to be accompanied by enough relevant content to keep your list interested.
3. Regulate email frequency – if you’re sending your emails too frequently it’s easy to overwhelm readers. Only email them when you have something worth saying. 
4. Focus on subject lines – Your subject lines are the deciding factor on whether your emails will get read or not. Take the time to ensure that your subject lines give your readers a reason to open your emails.
5. Make unsubscribing easy – Making it simple for a person to unsubscribe from your list is extremely important. Of course you don’t want to lose a subscriber, but if they’re not engaged, it’s better to let them go and focus on subscribers who actually read your emails. 
6. Continue to grow your list – Demographics and interests change. There is nothing you can do to prevent this. The only way to keep a high percentage of active readers is to constantly sign up new subscribers who are interested in your topic.

If you want to learn more about common email issues, check out our recent webinar, “Top 10 Email Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.”

We just finished out latest webinar, "Marqui's Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them" and we're glad to say that it went off without us making any of the errors we mentioned in our blog post from earlier this week:  17 Ways to Screw up a Webinar.

For those of you who couldn't join us, here's a quick glance at our top 10 list:

1. Not optimizing for blocked images and preview panes
2. Having un-inspiring email copy 
3. Not testing for email client compatibility
4. Using broken / misleading links
5. Incorporating weak calls-to-action and landing pages 
6. Sending irrelevant communications
7. Not ensuring CAN-SPAM compliance
8. Not making it to the Inbox 
9. Not using benchmark data
10. Focusing on list size vs. participation size

If you want more details about each point, or to learn how to take your email marketing to the next level, you can check out the full recording here.

Image from Flickr.

Most organizations know that email marketing is one of the most effective mediums to build relationships with their customers and prospects. Unfortunately, many of these companies aren’t making the most of their email campaigns and don't know what to improve.

We recently came across a study by Forrester Research  which shows that while 83% of companies attempt email marketing, less than 5% are successful. This is a pretty intimidating statistic, and we wanted to share our ideas to help you get in the top 5%.

To help you understand whether or not you're using email marketing successfully, we're presenting a webinar to highlight our list of top 10 email marketing mistakes, and a how to guide on how to avoid making them in the future.

The webinar is on  Thursday April 29th at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern and you can register for it here. 

The presentation will help you recognize which email marketing mistakes you could be making, and help you optimize your email marketing tactics.

This complimentary, live webinar will cover:

• Marqui's list of top 10 email marketing mistakes
• Simple fixes to avoid these pitfalls in the future
• How to take your email marketing to the next level

Hope to see you there!