You have a great lead magnet! People are signing up for your email newsletter left and right. You go to make the offer and… crickets… But that doesn’t make sense. You’ve built an email list of The Perfect Audience (see episode 3) and you know they need what you have to offer… they have even told you as much. It’s time to start nurturing that future sale. But more than that, it’s time to start building a relationship with each story represented on your list because you’re not looking for a sale — you’re looking for impact. What you need is a newsletter that nurtures that relationship and leads to a transformational decision — a sale. What you need is a Nurture the Sale Newsletter to help you connect with your subscribers, helping them see what life will be like when they finally step out and make the decision to work with you.
How to Nurture the Sale With Cyclical Email Marketing
When using email marketing to sell products and services, it’s essential to consider the long term. Email marketing is not only a profoundly effective sales tool, it’s a way to build relationships with your customers.
Cyclical email marketing is a strategy where you send a predetermined, pre-planned series of emails over an extended period. Each email contains value-packed content that helps the lead magnet nurture their relationship with you, your brand, your products, and your story.
Cyclical email marketing helps, especially around things like holiday promotions. Christmas will come around next year, and you’ll want to start marketing for it months beforehand. The same is true for New Year’s – start planning your campaigns early so that you can hit the ground running!
By the time the holiday season has arrived, you’ll have already developed relationships with customers if you’re operating on a cyclical marketing strategy. They will have been well-nurtured and fostered throughout the year. By the time your holiday offers and promotions are ready to launch, you’ll have an engaged audience that is more ready than ever to say yes to you and what you have to offer.
Cyclical email marketing is an excellent way to nurture your leads and keep them moving towards a sale. By providing valuable content and keeping your brand top-of-mind, you can increase the likelihood that they’ll do business with you when they’re ready to buy. A cyclical email strategy also is helpful for your business when it’s not a holiday because you can leverage your email marketing any time during the year.
Running email marketing on a cyclical schedule means planning your campaigns in a way that allows you to build on the momentum you have already created when you’re releasing a new offer or launching a new product.
Email marketing is more efficient and effective over a long-term period, using multiple campaigns to nurture customers and build relationships.
Here are a few tips for planning email marketing campaigns that will nurture the sale, connect with your customers, and help you profit from your proven product.
What is The Nurture The Sale Newsletter, and Why Does it Matter?
Email marketing is an influential marketing channel entrepreneurs can use to promote a business’s products or services. Email marketing generates sales by sending promotional messages to people in mass quantities.
The Nurture the Sale Newsletter is sent as a progressive newsletter. Every email adds another stroke to the picture of future success that you are painting for your customers. Consistent delivery of content allows them to take their time to learn about you and your product and decide to purchase over a more extended period.
And because 90% of sales conversions happen within the first three months of an email marketing campaign, it’s crucial to start nurturing your leads as soon as possible.
The Nurture The Sale Newsletter does just that – it nurtures sales by fostering consistent, value-packed messages into a very intimate space your customers have – their inbox!
By sending periodic, consistent emails with valuable content, you can keep your customers engaged and interested in what you have to say. Additionally, you can use email marketing to build relationships with potential customers and create a sense of loyalty among your customer base.
It is the literal newsletter-style email you send to your subscribers, in part or whole. This is different than emailing a customer directly who has perhaps submitted a support ticket or is asking you a direct question.
Email marketing originates with you, and you extend the digital handshake to your customers after they give you their email address.
Email marketing is a way to nurture a relationship with your customers and introduce them to the inside facets of your business and offerings. Your email list is a valuable resource as a marketer because it’s full of warm leads.
When used correctly, email marketing can be an extremely effective way to increase sales and foster customer loyalty. However, it is essential to note that email marketing should not be used as a replacement for other marketing channels.
Instead, entrepreneurs should use email marketing and other marketing efforts to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. Do you see the trend? Regularly providing valuable content to your customers keeps them engaged and interested in what you have to say.
Respectful Emails Set the Tone for Your Relationship
When sending out an email marketing campaign, whether, for the first time or the thousandth, it’s crucial to set the tone for your relationship. You want to make an excellent first impression, and the best way to do that is to be respectful.
Just as your front porch is an intimate space where you can welcome guests into your home, your email subscriber’s inbox is a unique place where they can receive messages from you. It’s a private space, and just as you would want to be respectful of your guests on the porch, you should be respectful of those who subscribe to your email list.
People receive personal emails regularly, like childcare emails, photos from friends, etc. When you send an email marketing campaign, you put your sales content in front of them as they are in relationship mode (regarding their brain’s perspective).
Email newsletters are a powerful aspect of marketing because you can place yourself in the same area of importance as those personal, non-sales emails above. Be very thoughtful about the kind of content you create.
Copy or copywriting – the words you write that sell things through your emails, website, and social media – is one of the most important aspects of email marketing. You want to ensure you’re thinking about the content you create and put your best foot forward.
When creating content for your email newsletters, think about the following as a whole, over your campaign. If it helps, use these questions to guide you while creating your year-long email marketing structure and sequence:
- What are your goals for the campaign as a whole? What launches will you have as a part of the campaign? What holidays, if any, overlap as a part of this? Will you offer something during a sales holiday like back-to-school time, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday, for example?
- Who is the target audience for this campaign? This should be easy to answer if you read this article.
- What is the tone of the campaign?
- How does it sound when you read it out loud? Is it affirming? Reassuring? Authority-based? Enthusiastic? Persuasive?
- What is the message you want to send?
- Details and copywriting matter. When you are clear about the message, you are clear about the details needed to carry the campaign over the finish line. As you think about messaging, consider the specific email messages you can send every two weeks.
- Bonus points if you write them out and start to notice when you’d like to send them out. (it’s a ballpark feel here, nothing is set in stone.)
- What kind of content will resonate with your audience?
- Again, this should be reasonably straightforward if your target market is accurate and well-researched. Note how technologically savvy your audience is and where they hang out online.
- If they congregate on Facebook, talk about your Facebook page in the email and include a CTA so they can visit and follow your page.
- If they congregate on a video-based site like TikTok or an image-based site like Instagram, include a recent video or feed post as an embeddable piece of content in your newsletter.
By thinking through these questions, you can create well-crafted content that will resonate with your audience.
Your emails should be well-written and error-free. That means ensuring that your subject lines are catchy, your content is informative, and your call to action is clear. You also want to ensure that your email design is attractive and easy to read on various devices.
One way to ensure quality is to use a proofreading service like Grammarly to check for mistakes before you send your email campaign. Your email content should be informative and provide value to your subscribers.
If all you do is sell them products, they will eventually lose interest in your emails.
Instead, try providing information and insights that will help them improve their lives. When you do this, you’ll be well on your way to building a solid relationship with them.
Why a Cyclical Marketing Strategy Is Key
You’ve probably heard that it takes up to seven exposures to a message before a person will take action. That’s why it’s vital to consistently send emails alongside other marketing strategy pieces. Consistency helps keep your relationship with your customers current and builds the momentum you need to sell your product or service.
A cyclical marketing strategy is a process by which leads are gained, nurtured, and converted over time, leveraging all aspects of a business’s marketing. The goal is to create a continuous cycle that results in more sales and customers.
When you cyclically craft your marketing efforts, every piece of it helps elevate the others.
Your emails will be supported by your branding and overall design aesthetic, which matches your website. That branding is also on your social media posts, which entrepreneurs and business owners should update daily.
Your consistent blogging content ranks your website higher on search engines, and your lead magnets bring more subscribers to your nurturing campaigns via email. Your emails continue the relationship and promote offers and launches throughout the year.
In a cyclical marketing strategy, all your marketing pieces work together to facilitate a relationship-building process with the customer and audience, building your brand’s reputation and consistently showing off what you offer.
You capitalize on the hard work you do in other areas of your marketing as well. Business owners and solopreneurs often have different strategies for different pieces of marketing, or they negate steps altogether.
Using a cyclical marketing strategy is a comprehensive approach that includes all of the crucial pieces of your process and helps them work together, honoring your effort while likely saving you some time and sanity.
Playing the Long Game Takes Patience
When you start your email marketing campaign, you must be patient and understand that not everyone will be ready to buy immediately. Often, people need time to become familiar with your brand and what you have to offer before they’re prepared to make a purchase.
There will be even more people who are not sure what they need, but they think you might be able to help them.
It’s important to remember that different people respond to being nurtured differently. You’ve signed up for an email list from a favorite entrepreneur. When you see an offer in your inbox, it might be easy to say, “yes, I like what I see, I think I’m in.”
Maybe you’re on the other end of the spectrum and you think, “Okay, I know you, I’ve followed you, and I believe you, but I’m not quite ready to commit my future to you.”
Playing the long game allows you to “wait it out” and live a journey with your potential customers who aren’t ready to say yes yet, while also being able to meet the needs of the ones who are ready right now.
You can’t expect people to buy your product or service the first time they hear about it. That’s why it’s essential to deliver emails to your list twice a week consistently. Keep their attention on your business; eventually, they may be ready to buy.
Stay patient and keep your expectations in check – that will help you stay consistent and motivated to keep delivering emails to your audience over the long haul.
Measuring and Managing Your Email Marketing
Measuring the success of email marketing campaigns is critical to understanding how well they are performing and what tweaks may be necessary to optimize them.
When sending an email, measuring how well it’s doing is vital. One way to measure success is by tracking analytics, which gives you a detailed view of how subscribers interact with your messages. This information helps you determine which campaigns are converting best and identifies areas needing improvement.
Analytics provide vital information.
Here are some ways to measure and manage your Nurture The Sale Newsletters:
- A/B Testing or Split Testing
A/B testing is a method in which two versions of an email deploy to a small group of recipients. The test results determine which version is more effective and should deploy to the remainder of the original, larger group.
Split testing helps ensure that the email the majority of your list receives is practical, highly converting, and has a subject line with the highest open rates compared to its competitors.
It’s an easy way to boost your effectiveness. And most email campaign providers offer split testing as a part of their built-in user interface.
- Click-Through Rate
The click-through rate (CTR) measures how many people receiving an email marketing campaign actually click on a link within the email. Entrepreneurs can use the CTR to determine the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign because you measure how many subscribers took action.
Making sure that you include a CTA (call to action) in each email is essential. Without a CTA, you cannot measure CTR (click-through rate)!
If you don’t, you’ll tank your CTRs and analytics. You’ll see a dip in your campaign, and if you review it without remembering that you forgot the CTA, you could think something needs to shift around your campaign or audience.
You could easily misattribute that dip in your statistics to something else. Misinterpreting statistics is a dangerous position to be in because you could end up scrapping the campaign or pivoting when it’s not needed.
- Conversion Rate
The conversion rate measures how many people who receive an email marketing campaign take the desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. Business owners can use the conversion rate to determine the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign.
Calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of people who took the desired action by the total number of people who received the email.
For example, if 10 out of 1,000 people signed up for your newsletter after receiving your email, your conversion rate would be 1%.
This information will help you gauge your email marketing campaigns. It’s important to know that for a serial copywriter and marketing professional, the goal is around 3-4% conversion. More than that, you’re doing a great job. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you aren’t converting at first.
If you are already running email marketing campaigns, you know using data is the best way to ensure their success.
The problem is that email marketing can be tricky to manage because there are so many moving parts—from aesthetics and design to copywriting and segmentation. Then there’s the delivery and timing.
Your best asset for effective management and measuring email marketing campaigns is looking at complex data and using that to help you see if your actions are successful.
Keep Your Email Marketing Design as an Asset, Not a Liability
Design and aesthetic considerations for email newsletters are significant, especially for those new to email marketing. If you have too many images, your email won’t be successfully delivered, which is called a “bounce.” If your campaign isn’t visually exciting or enticing enough, it can be left unopened, unread, or worse – skimmed!
Below are some tips to help you create a beautiful and effective email campaign.
1. Keep it short and sweet
The average person’s attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s, so keeping your email newsletters short and sweet is essential. Get to the point quickly and use clear, concise language that is easy to understand.
2. Use images sparingly
While images can help catch someone’s attention, too many pictures can make your email look cluttered and busy. Stick to one or two images per newsletter and ensure they are relevant to the content.
3. Use calls to action
Make it easy for subscribers to take action by including calls to action in your email newsletters. Whether you want them to click through to your website or reply to the email, a call to action will help increase your click-through rate.
4. Personalize your emails
Personalized emails perform better than generic emails, so it’s crucial to personalize your newsletters as much as possible. Include the subscriber’s name in the subject line and body of the email for a more personal touch.
5. Make it mobile-friendly
Since more than half of all emails open first on mobile devices, it’s imperative to design your email newsletters with mobile users in mind. Use a responsive design template, so your email looks great on any screen size.
When designing your email, you’ll want to stick to a simple layout that is easy to read. Too much text or complex images can overwhelm subscribers and result in them not reading your email.
Keep your design simple with a clear headline, body text, and a CTA (call-to-action). For these emails, aim for 400-500 words. These are short, concise, and value-packed.
In addition to your email layout, you’ll need to consider the images. When adding photos, ensure they are high quality and relevant to your content. Avoid using too many graphics in total. Subscribers get distracted easily!
Pictures and graphics increase the size of your email. If an email is too large, the chance of successful delivery is reduced.
Finally, when creating your email campaign, test it out before sending it out.
Send a few test emails to yourself or a friend and ensure everything looks good on different devices and browsers.
Once you’re confident that everything looks excellent, hit send and watch your open rates soar!
Conclusion
Email marketing is a powerful way to nurture customers and drive conversions. Email marketing can build strong relationships with customers and encourage them to return to your store or website when done correctly.
Plan your messages carefully and use a consistent tone across your communications to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns. Be respectful of your customers’ inboxes, and always provide positive digital experiences.
If you’d like to hear an in-depth podcast about email marketing, specifically how to create a Nurture the Sale Newsletter, make sure you listen to Season 1, Episode 5 of The Donut Shop Podcast! Click here to start the episode now!
Sources:
- Mailchimp: https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/email-marketing/
- Neil Patel: https://neilpatel.com/blog/beginners-guide-email-marketing/
- Send in Blue: https://www.sendinblue.com/blog/what-is-email-marketing/
- Optinmonster: https://optinmonster.com/beginners-guide-to-email-marketing/
- Campaign Monitor: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/why-email/
