Adobe Summit 2022 - Email nurturing takeaways

I had the pleasure of attending a number of sessions at the 2022 Adobe Summit and one of those sessions was by Don Mayberry on the importance of email nurturing in driving business outcomes. Don shared many interesting perspectives on email nurturing and strategies that really resonated with me. Don described these concepts through the lens of Marketo Engage but they can be easily applied using other marketing automation tools in the market including Adobe Campaign Classic, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, etc. 

Photo by Richard Horvath on Unsplash

Here are the key three (3) takeaways:

1. Don compared the importance of nurturing email campaigns in generating sales to the nurturing of a young plant until it bears fruit. He highlighted that nurturing email campaigns may not lead to sales conversion right away however if done correctly it will sow the seed for future conversions.
2. Don shared six (6) nurture tracks for email marketing. 
1. The Red Carpet Track - An example of this is a welcome email once a user subscribes to a newsletter or signs up for a service. This is a great opportunity to welcome a new user or customer to the product and service.  
2. The Boomerang Track - An example of this is to re-engage prospects who are rejected by the sales team. The prospects may not be ready at that time for a sales conversion however by using the reason behind the rejection by the sales team a targeted engagement track could be orchestrated to convert these cold leads into hot leads.
3. The Gopher Track - We are all familiar with this track. An example is the monthly newsletter track or weekly flyer emails. The objective of this track is to pop up to the users at a set cadence and stay relevant even if the user is not ready to buy right now. This track can create a fertile environment for future leads to generate.
4. The Gorilla Glue Track - This is the retention track. This is the opportunity marketers should capitalize on to keep the loyal customers engaged and come back for recurring sales. This is the track to keep customers glued to your service or product. This is an opportunity to show customers that you value their business.
5. The Baby, Come Back Track - This is the track to win back your audience. This must be a targeted engagement campaign to bring back audiences who are not engaging with the email content by using targeted messaging and offers. A great example would be to send them a survey and use the responses to better cater the content in the emails.
6. The Detective Track - This is the track to reach out to users with insufficient data to score them. An example of a detective track will be an email campaign to carry out progressive profiling. For example, you have users who are attending your thought leadership webinars but you do not have their company or job title to accurately score them. This is the track to identify these users and send them a targeted campaign to capture these relevant information.   
   
3. Don also highlights the importance of curating the content of the emails based on the user’s position in the marketing funnel. Don emphasizes the importance of sending the right content to the right person at the right time. 
   Don emphasizes the importance of sending the right content to the right person at the right time.
1. Top-of-the-Funnel (TOFU): If a user is at the top of the funnel this may mean keeping the user engaged and the content relevant by sending the user relevant eBooks, blog posts and research data.  
2. Middle-of-the-Funnel (MOFU): If the user is in the mid-funnel then it may mean the user is close to making the buying decision and hence it’s relevant to send the user buying guides, service catalogue, RFP templates, etc.  
3. Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BOFU): If the user is at the bottom of the funnel then it’s crucial to support the user in his buying decision but sending the user content which includes pricing, demos, customer case studies, service or product reviews, sales contact and most importantly offers
   

Marketing Funnel - by BeolleBlog

In conclusion Don’s message is to build strong email nurturing campaigns within the marketing operation to nurture the hot leads and customers of tomorrow.  

You can watch the full session here.

We hope you enjoyed this article. In our next article, we will be talking about CDP (Customer Data Platform), and the value added when combining it with the elements mentioned in our “Email nurturing takeaways” above.