Inbound marketing is an innovative strategy that draws people by interest, not for consumer goods supply. It works closely linked to content marketing, creating unique and targeted content to attract your audience by the quality and relevance of the material and encourage engagement with your brand. To retain a lead with inbound marketing, you will increase its lifetime value (LTV), i.e. the period in which it relates and makes business with your company.

Since inbound marketing aims to attract audiences with relevant content, the best is to establish a connection between email marketing and inbound marketing, so that together they can keep your leads or prospects well-informed and in contact with your brand.

Alignment of strategies: the key to success

The basic principle of how to use email marketing to lead nutrition is the email focused on conversion, based on conversations. Developing personas, content planning, increasing visits and start generating leads are the first steps in the inbound marketing strategy. The most advanced steps are targeting nutrition through email marketing and aligning both marketing and commercial teams.

Actual results, with good opportunities for the sales team and newcoming inbound customers, will only start to appear when all these strategies are aligned and well-functioning. This is the main step, but many companies and educational institutions fail to get good results, by expecting instant results and give up the strategy.

Fundamental aspects in an Inbound Email Marketing campaign

• Having a well-defined sending frequency and strategy with primary and secondary objectives;

• Using a credible email sending platform with high deliverability;

• The HTML must be in perfect balance with the text, images and codes;

• Always make available the opt-out option on all your campaigns;

• Periodically uptdate your contacts list, leaving it increasingly organic;

• In the "Subject" field, choose carefully the terms to avoid your email being recognized as SPAM, and be sure that the message is clear and objective;

• If possible, leave in the “Subject” field some benefit shown to who opens it.

The highlights of leads nurturing

For being a powerful lead nutrition tool, a communication vehicle that keeps your prospect informed about your brand, when email marketing ally itself to the Inbound strategy it takes more and more relevant content to your leads, evoking their curiosity on how to solve a common problem.

To learn more about the problem and the solution, the lead comes to a conclusion: he should solve it himself or look for someone to help him. And in this case, no one’s better than you to do this! Your company has demonstrated, over a certain period, that is an expert on that field: choosing your business will be something natural and obvious enough for the lead.

For being extremely flexible, email marketing is used to send different types of content:

• newsletters, promotions and discount coupons;

• content from your company’s blog;

• links to other platforms on the Internet;

• messages for different commemorative dates;

• birthday messages, demonstrating that your brand is attentive to the client.

Nurturing and segmentation - the perfect combination!

Remember that every nurturing action starts with getting key-information from your base of leads. You must get these informations when the visitor converts into a lead, by using specific fields on sign-up forms to qualify and segment your base. These fields must take into account what are the basic information you need to customize, qualify and target your base with nutrition actions through email marketing.

Inbound techniques for different types of email marketing

Leads nurturing emails - They are personal emails that come from someone at your company and look more personal emails than the designed template emails. These are set up in advance to go out at regular intervals and are triggered by key events, for instance the download a rich content like an ebook or an infographic.

To achieve success with lead nurturing, emails must be strategically thought in order to conduct the lead through all the buyer’s journey. These emails cannot be too long and must be relevant to the reader. One simple hot tip to check if the email’s size is okay is to calculate the time needed to read it, which cannot be longer than 30 seconds. Content any longer than that runs the risk of being ignored. Another crutial point to achieve success with lead nurturing is to keep the consistency of the messages - they must slowly tell a story with beginning, middle and end.

Newsletters - Short snippets of educational information, with three or four items, typically is derived from a company’s blog. You can also publish other rich content such as ebooks, infographics and webinars. The main objective here is to generate traffic to your blog and, of course, educate your audience about themes related to your products to reheat your contact base.

It is important to remember that on the end of the journey of the nurturing flows and on the reheating of your contact base, the lead has to identify that your company can help him to solve a problem and supply his needs. In other words, the final objective is to convert him into a customer!