Reinventing email nurtures with on-demand

What are on-demand nurtures?

Nurtures on demand are email nurture sequences that you host on your website. This means the prospect can access the entire nurture at once, rather than waiting for your drip emails to arrive in their inbox.

Sounds like a blog page, right?

It’s not. Nurture campaigns, when done right, tell a story. They take the reader through a well-designed journey. Providing the perfect content to fill knowledge gaps and share information about your product.

And when done right, they can be content masterpieces.

Here’s an example of an on-demand email nurture we use at Cognism!

We love email nurture campaigns. If you’re reading this article thinking it’s a call to stop running email nurtures, you’re wrong! They’re an opportunity for marketers to flex their creative muscles, and they can be a joy to consume.

We don’t take issue with email nurtures. We just think that, in a customer-centric marketing model, the traditional email nurture campaign needs a bit of work.

What's the problem with traditional email nurtures?

How many times a day are you ready to read a nurture email?

This means at least half of your prospects use mobile to check their emails.

One? Maybe two? 

Most of the time at work, you’re pretty busy. That’s kinda the point. So when a nurture email lands in your inbox, you’ll either ignore it or find it annoying. The things you’re working on are more important.

So you miss a nurture email. Big deal, it’s still in your inbox. You can get back to it when you’re ready. Right?

Be honest, how many times have you scrolled through old emails to find a nurture you missed?

Maybe for a newsletter. Not a nurture.

Every time you send a nurture email, you’re gambling that the recipient is ready to read your content.

Even after you’ve researched the best times to send an email, more often than not, it’s a bet you’ll lose.

That’s problem one.

Problem two is that the story you think your nurture email tells often gets lost.

If you’re drip-feeding information to a recipient over the course of a month, they’re (probably) not waiting with bated breath between emails.

Even though we’re sure they’re really good!

The recipient is losing a lot of the value your nurture campaigns deliver. That's because they’re waiting too long between them and missing essential steps.

The time and effort put into creating a masterpiece of an email nurture is often for nothing. They haven’t seen the full picture.

What’s the alternative to traditional email nurtures?

Email nurtures on demand.

We choose to make fewer assumptions about our audience. We don’t assume they’re ready to read our email, and we don’t assume they’ll read every single one.

We also choose to treat our prospects like people, rather than numbers. We’re happy to lose people from the marketing funnel, as long as we provide a great experience to our engaged audience.

If it’s not for them, then they’re not for us. If it is, we’re going to leave a great impression.

We still send nurture emails, but we also include a link to our nurtures on demand page. At any point, readers can access the emails they missed and the content they haven’t seen yet.

What about the leads?

The traditional nurture email is a key part of the lead generation marketing model.

• Discover prospects through gated content, sponsored events, e-blasts, etc.
• Warm them up with an email nurture.
• Offer them a demo at the end.

Everything can be tracked, reported on, and optimised.

But this forgets a vital aspect of marketing. The customer experience.

Lead gen marketing teams will generate a huge number of demos, and will convert a tiny number of them. 

Prospects get rushed into demos they’re not ready for.

We’re happy to generate fewer leads and convert them at a higher rate.

We’d rather create an awesome customer experience. This means ungating our content, offering nurtures on demand, and putting the customer first.

Saving us, and them, from B2B boredom.