One of the questions you may repeatedly hit upon when it comes to developing effective email marketing centres around nurturing or selling to your customers. Should you be doing one more than the other? What is the best approach to upping your email ROI?
According to recent marketing statistics, the daily number of emails sent globally in 2024 will reach 376 billion. That’s A LOT of inbox noise. But is there a better way for your messaging to cut through?
Whether to focus on building relationships or selling to your subscribers. Or could you be better off using a combination of the two?
In this blog we’ll unpick both arguments and tell you about the merits and pitfalls in each. So you have all the knowledge you need to decide which route you want your strategy to go down.
Nurturing or Selling in Email Marketing: What’s the Difference?
Nurturing your audience is the act of send out informative content to keep them engaged – rather than simply using your email as a straight sales channel. Meaningfully engaging your audience is necessary to sustain their attention, generate interest in your brand, and engender trust.
Selling, on the other hand, is where you can go heavy on persuasion and compelling offers. Both tactics are critical to your business’s survival.
As such, the key to succeeding is working to build connections and make sales. This applies to your overall business strategy and every rung on that ladder, including email marketing strategy.
Combining nurturing your audience with selling to them through email marketing would require you to create a cohesive email marketing strategy. Two key elements to this are: audience segmentation and different strategic content pillars.
Nurturing Your Audience With Email Marketing
Your business’ currency isn’t just the valuable product or service you offer. It’s also trust.
This means turning those popup subscribers, collected emails and one-time customers into return buyers and then brand ambassadors requires more than just an excellent product.
It also involves meaningful and lasting relationships built on mutual understanding. There’s just one teeny-tiny snag: relationships don’t make themselves, you have to cultivate them.
So, how do you nurture relationships with your audience?
First of all, you can offer them free content and resources to educate, entertain, inspire or help them solve problems. Such efforts suggest that you care about their needs, and it breeds goodwill for your business.
Plus, sharing valuable content with your audience paves the way for two-way communication, which is also critical to creating and sustaining relationships.
Here’s how we leveraged the brand story for Loony Legs to help enhance those relationships with customers. If the consumer feels like they know the brand better, they will move closer to buying.
Focusing on building connections sometimes means generating long term customers that keep coming back for more; which can have more positive impact than if you were to only send promotional or sales based emails.
Selling to Your Audience
On the other hand, sending expertly crafted messages that highlight your value and hone in on your audience’s situation, is how you get them to care about certain unmet needs or desires. Then highlighting them in your emails can be a super effective strategy .
Even after convincing someone that your product is the real deal, you still have to give them that final push to place an order.
Those pushes are usually in the form of one thing; the command or call to action. And this is where human psychology kicks in.
With a combination of a well placed call to actions – “click here”, “buy now” and “get 15% off now”, plus other aids such as time limits, social proof, reviews and endorsements.
Sales focused email automations easily outperform nurturing based emails when it comes to bottom line revenue generation per campaign.
Our tailored email marketing campaign service employs a mix of nurturing and selling to generate an average revenue per client from email of 37.5%.
Importance of Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation is one of our eCommerce email marketing must’s. By segmenting your audience you can deliver the right content to the right audience group at the right time. This way, you’ll be meeting the most pressing needs of each group.
For example, newer prospects or those at the top of your sales funnel need more educational content than hard sales pitches.
In contrast, those at the bottom of your funnel are just a few steps away from closing a deal and require more product-focused and persuasive content to get them over the line.
One type of content will not work for both – you need to personalise your segments to ensure you only send tailored and useful content to audience each group.
It’s important to remember your customers are individuals.
How Can an Organised Content Calendar Help?
Delivering different forms of content through an organized content calendar for each audience segment means regardless of whether you’re dealing with top, middle, or bottom-of-the-funnel audience groups, you get to sell to them and connect in equal measure.
This way, you’ll give people precisely what they need without damaging customer retention rates, harming the relationship or overselling.
Finally, it would help if you delivered persuasive and clear offers to rake in sales. But sustainable selling goes beyond blasting out automated promotions or case studies, it also includes initiating and sustaining relationships with your audience.
If one can’t displace the other, the key is finding the sweet spot between them and using sharp email design to create sends which utilise a perfect – 50% selling / 50% nurturing combo.
Upgrade Your Email Marketing ROI With a Drop Zero Campaign
Here at Drop Zero Digital we revel in finding that happy middle ground for your business to maximise your sales and customer loyalty.
Check out how our email marketing solution can supercharge your brand communications now.
