Nurture/Drip Campaigns: Lead Generation with Serious Value

When it comes to email automation, lead nurturing drip campaigns are a great method to increase engagement, stay top-of-mind, lead consumers through your sales funnel, and even segment your email list. So, what exactly is a nurture campaign? 

What Are Nurture Campaigns?

While there are many variations, here’s a simple example: Let’s say you create and launch a piece of gated content that requires an email address to access. Here, you’re getting emails in exchange for valuable content — the gated piece. The collected email addresses are then funneled or segmented into a list. You now have a list of people who you know are interested in what you have to offer. At this point, you’ll set up automation to start separating emails based on user action.

Everyone who entered their email address will get an email thanking them for their interest in the gated piece. If they don’t take any action (whether that’s clicking a link or visiting a contact page), a predetermined amount of time will pass before they receive a follow-up email. This pattern gently reminds those who haven’t acted that they can reach you “here.” If and when they do act, they’ll be funneled out of the automation. 

Essentially, you are “nurturing” your leads into taking a specific action and segmenting based on behavior. Some people refer to these as drip campaigns because of the nature of communication — like a dripping faucet, reminding users of the content or product they showed interest in, breaking them off into tiers of automated action based on behavior. 

Three Steps to Create a Good Nurture Campaign

  1. Define your audience upfront

This is not the time to be vague. Before you start a nurture campaign, you need to know who you’re nurturing. Once you have a general idea of your audience, segment those groups into more specific sub-groups. This way, you’ll be able to send super-specific campaigns, and these sub-groups could be the audience in future campaigns. 

  1. Avoid the sales pitch

Even if someone gave you an email address, that doesn’t mean they want to be inundated by advertisements disguised as emails. The goal of a good nurture campaign is to make the determined audience more ready to buy because you’ve offered them something valuable upfront. Again, this could be gated content, a webinar, a video, a how-to guide, or an e-book — you’re only limited by your own imagination.

  1. Plan your timeline

Plan for everything before your campaign starts — audience, goals, and timeline. Let’s revisit the aforementioned nurture campaign example with gated content in exchange for email addresses. Here, you’re giving gated content that might take more time for someone to download or sit down and read. In this case, it’s normal for people to not immediately act, but they also aren’t likely to continue putting it off again and again. 

In this case, 2-3 emails total is probably appropriate –– you’re giving them a reminder without begging them to respond. If the intent is to run the campaign for a month, you may want to schedule your first, second, and third emails to go out on the 1st, 10th, and 20th. Your timeline may differ with each campaign, but be sure you have one.

Nurture/Drip Campaigns with Cosmitto

There are so many ways to go about drip/nurture campaigns depending on the content you have, your audience demographics, and more. If you want to continue this conversation and get personalized recommendations, give us a call and we’ll help you determine whether your business or brand might benefit from a well-thought-out nurture/drip campaign.