Relying on your email newsletter to nurture leads for evergreen high-ticket offers is a huge waste of time and attention. And it’s probably costing you good leads.
In this video, email strategist Paige Swaffer shares 2 huge reasons why newsletters are not the best lead nurturing tool, which email strategy you should use instead, and where your newsletter fits in the larger email ecosystem.
TRANSCRIPT:
What I’m about to say might ruffle a few feathers: newsletters are a backup plan.
They should not be your core lead nurturing and sales channel.
And that’s because the data consistently shows that automated lead nurturing emails earn 4 to 10 times more engagement than blast emails, which is what your newsletter is—it’s a blast email.
Now, that’s probably because automated email systems are built around buyer behavior or subscriber behavior, which makes them more relevant because they’re based on actions that your subscribers are taking, and you’re sending emails close to that point of taking that action.
So that means that you’re sending emails at a time when motivation is high, where there’s a lot of momentum, where they’re actively looking for information or taking some other type of high-priority action.
The newsletter, on the other hand, you’re sending on your timeline, not theirs.
So when you’re sending out emails, odds are people are doing something else. They may not even be thinking about this topic that you’re talking about. They’re living their life; they’re not necessarily actively doing anything important, as it relates to your offers. And so it’s logical that automated email systems would perform better than blast emails or newsletters.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying newsletters aren’t important. They do have a role to play in the email ecosystem. They serve an important long-term lead nurturing role, right?
So, of course, even if you have automated systems, not everyone’s going to go through. People are going to fall off because either they’re not interested right now, or not interested enough anyway, or it’s not a high priority. The timing’s not right. They may not have the funding yet, or they may not be fully a good fit for whatever it is you sell. And so they’re going to fall off, and that’s where you want them to land: on the newsletter.
Because if they’re engaging with your emails, there should always be a path for them, right? Because they’re interested enough to open your emails, that means that they potentially could be a lead. They’re learning from you; they’re interested, right?
And so I see the newsletter as a path to nurture those people. And sure, it’s a way to stay top of mind, but staying top of mind is not really the most important thing. You want to be actively educating and getting people ready for the next step in the sales process.
You can’t automate everything, probably shouldn’t automate everything, and it’s difficult to automate a long-term lead nurturing system.
And, of course, if it’s automated, then it’s not up to date with your new thinking and the new things that you’re teaching and the new content that you’re putting out.
And so the newsletter really is a better path for that type of content and that type of lead nurturing. And, of course, you can use your newsletter to pull people back into the sales process when they’re ready—the leads who weren’t ready before, as things change in their lives and their businesses, as the timing becomes more optimal, as they grow and they become a better fit to your ideal buyer profile.
So, as priorities change and things become higher priority, then they’re going to be more interested. And so you can use your newsletter and the content and the links that you include, the callouts that you include, to identify who potentially could have had a change in their life that now makes them a more active, engaged, better-fit lead.
And so that’s a great way to use the newsletter, in addition to just sharing your new content and providing ongoing education and information that helps them achieve whatever it is that they follow you for.
So, if right now you’re relying on your newsletter to do the bulk of your lead nurturing, I would encourage you to look into testing out some key behavioral-based automated email sequences and see if you don’t, for one, earn higher engagement, but also that engagement should turn into conversions or at least get people from wherever they are to the next step.
I fully believe you will see better results if you prioritize behavioral-based marketing and build email experiences around what’s relevant to your subscribers right now.
