How to Nurture Your Leads:
A Simple But Effective Evergreen Email Marketing Strategy
Last updated: 08 May 2023
Introduction
In this article, I will show you how you can nurture your leads, ultimately leading to sales, by walking you through my personal simple yet powerful evergreen email marketing strategy.
What does Evergreen mean?
Evergreen means something that runs all the time, so in the context of emails, it is your strategy that runs on autopilot.
It’s not like a launch that you do three or four times a year.
It’s something you can create, set up and leave it, letting the tech do its thing. In basic terms, in effect, you can set it up and leave it.
Just a note: when I say leave it, I don’t actually recommend this – you should always be looking at what is and isn’t working, and tweak and test to get the best results – but THAT is for another article another day.
If you work with or help more than one type of person, and what they need will depend on which person they are, you can start by segmenting them here.
Where does it start?
What we are talking about here in this email marketing strategy, is what you need to do once you have already got your potential client’s email address.
You need to have a lead magnet; something you give for free that motivates someone to give you their email address in return for that freebie.
You might have a landing page on your website, you could have a form with your email marketing software, or you can do it via your Facebook Messenger Bot.
We don’t just take their email addresses and let them sit and collect dust.
We need to nurture our audience and what we mean by that is we provide them with value.
We want them to get to know us so they can know, like and trust us – because people buy from people they know, like and trust.
Email Marketing Myth Busting
In email marketing, less is more is an absolute myth.
On average, only about 30% of your emails get opened.
That’s about a third.
So if you send three emails they’re probably going to open one. If you send one email a week, then they might open one in three weeks.
The big dogs who get the best results with email marketing are those who email every single day.
The more emails you can send, within reason, the better.
Back to the emails! Before you can sell to your leads, we need to contact and nurture these people.
Who are you selling to?
First of all, what you need to do is think about who is taking your lead magnet.
So when you set up your funnel or whatever it is that you’re using to collect these email addresses, you will have already made a plan of who it’s for and what they want.
The first thing we need to do is brainstorm three to seven things that people might want to know to either:
- support them
- tell them a story about you that’s
- going to help them know you better
- show you are the expert
- provide value to them
So while you are brainstorming this, think about the end goal that you want to achieve, or the steps you want your audience to take.
What do you want all these people who are emailed to eventually do?
Where do you want to drive them?
Do you want them to sign up for something high ticket?
Do you want to get them onto a one-to-one call?
Do you want to offer them something low ticket or do you just want to get them in your group?
What do you want them to do?
Keep this in mind as you’re brainstorming these ideas of what you’re going to email them about.
What happens when they sign up for the freebie?
First of all, we are not going to add them to our main newsletter list.
We will only add them to a list that is unique to this lead magnet (freebie) because we don’t want to overwhelm them with too many emails, or more than 1 email on any day.
We are going to send them one email a day from the moment they sign up and then every 24-48 hours.
I recommend one per day during this period (because of what I said in Myth Busting above) and then how many days will be dependent on how many emails you came up with above.
We are not going to be selling to them at all during this period.
Planning the emails
For each email, you will need to write:
- Subject line
This is the bit that someone looks at to decide whether or not they will open your email - Description – also known as the preview text.
If they are on the fence about opening your email, this part should push them over the edge. - The email content
The actual juicy part of your email, which contains the ideas I mentioned above:
– Stories about you
– Lessons your learnt
– Tips and value you can offer
– Something that builds your authority
– Something to build a connection and trust
Plan that for all of your emails.
Designing the emails
Then you need to design a template to use.
Depending on what software you use, it will look different.
But when I say design a template, I’m not talking about some colourful thing with different columns and loads of images and loads of colours and stuff.
The idea is you need it to look like an email that’s come from a real person.
You want it to look like you’ve sat down there and you’ve written this email and it’s going to that one person and no one else.
You don’t want to have a header image other than at the top of the first email (so that they recognise your branding from when they signed up to the lead magnet and remember you).
After that first email, you just want it to start with your greeting, your email message in the middle and then your email signature at the bottom.
The email signature will be the only designed part.
Think about including the following:
- A photo of you
- Your name, job title, email address
- Social media links
- Postal address (this is necessary for GDPR)
- An unsubscribe link (also necessary, also normally included with your email marketing software)
The important thing is to brand it – choose a font type, font size, a colour for links and buttons, and use that each time.
Pro-tip: If your email software doesn’t allow you to create templates, simply duplicate and edit the last email you created
Email 1
We send the first email the moment they sign up for your freebie.
In this email, as I mentioned above, you could have a header image that matches your landing page or where they got your freebie, because then when they open it, they’ll recognise it.
They’ll remember it from the landing page, and therefore remember who you are.
If you don’t have an image you want to use then it’s not necessary either.
The first email doesn’t need to say a lot, it could be something along these lines:
The middle emails
You then need to set a 24-hour wait, so that they receive the next email a day after they signed up – there are no set sending times.
You send them all of the other emails that you wrote, each with 1 day in between.
The final email
The only difference with your final email is that after the 24-hour wait at the end, you then need to add them to your main newsletter list.
This way they will then continue to be nurtured by you in your weekly newsletter.
The difference is, that if you had only put them into your newsletter, and not sent a warm-up series, they would have forgotten about you by the time they read it.
An alternative ending to your nurture series
One other thing you can do before you put them into your main newsletter list, is you can do a mini launch.
You would basically send one sales email (again with the connection and nurturing style) and then offer your reader a one-time product with a one-time price, and a deadline to purchase it.
Make sure it genuinely is a one time price and you’re not being fake as a sales tactic.
Don’t say it’s for 12 hours when really they could just get it on the website at any time at that price.
You can use software like plugins and ThriveCart to create a countdown timer the moment they click.
After that, you send them more emails.
You don’t have to do all these but it’s to illustrate your options:
- 24 hours to go
- 12 hours to go
- 6 hours to go
- 4 hours to go
- 2 hours to go
- 1 hour to go
- 10 minutes to go.
Just remember that they most likely won’t pick up most of them, which is why it’s important to send more than one.
It’s important that they receive at least of them on time.
If someone is given a sense of urgency, they tend to act faster as they don’t have as much time to think about it and talk themselves out of it.
It can be a bit complicated depending on what software you use, but you can link up PayPal and Stripe to your email software so that when someone buys something it automatically tags them to say that they purchased.
You can then create a rule so that when they’ve had the tag added they will be removed from the sales email sequence, or use Goals in ActiveCampaign to achieve the same easily.
I won’t go into any more depth than that as this is supposed to be a simple strategy!
If they don’t buy at the end, you can offer them a down-sell if you want to, or just leave it and keep going basically – add them to your newsletter at the end as instructed above.
Don’t be disheartened if they don’t buy the first time, just keep providing value and building trust and a connection with them.
It could be a case of wrong-place-wrong-time, they may be in a different part of their journey, or the offer and pricing could be off.
The only way to find out is to speak to real people and get feedback, and also to try and test other things.
Your newsletter
I will just cover the newsletter briefly as it’s not the purpose of this article.
You can send a newsletter out to your audience as frequently as you like, but I wouldn’t recommend less than once a week, for the same reasons as above again.
I recommend once a week, on the same day each week so that your audience can expect and look forward to hearing from you.
And this is when you can also start to sell!
Now, read carefully when I say this.
Because unless you’re in launch mode, I wouldn’t recommend actually sending specific sales emails, with nothing but sales in there.
What I like to do is just add a p.s. at the bottom, or even you can mention it at the top – but just mention it and make sure you’ve still got your value in there.
Ensure to be always just light-heartedly (or whatever tone you prefer) telling your story, talking about what happened to you, basically building a connection.
That’s what you should be doing in these emails, telling a story about something that’s happened to you recently, or something that happened to you a long time ago.
Always relate it to something that you value and you want to teach so that you’re always showing them more of you.
Conclusion
So there you have it!
If you follow this simple but effective evergreen email marketing strategy then you will be nurturing your audience and leading them to sales in no time.
Want to know how it all fits together in the bigger picture?
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