The Best Way to Nurture Leads with Email: Just DANCE.
In 2016 I had the opportunity to participate in a startup accelerator for my marketing analytics startup, Describli. I was struggling with building awareness for my fledgling product, and one of mentors gave me some simple marketing advice that I still remember today:
“There is no such thing as foot traffic online.”
This is a simple but powerful idea that changed my approach to raising awareness. It may seem like people wander by your website or amble past your social media page to take a look without any particular reason, but in reality visitors are always there for a reason. And in order to convert these people into paying customers, you need to understand those reasons and use them to engage with your visitors.
I've thought a lot about the purchase path since then, and applied it to hundreds of startups and small businesses as a coach, mentor, and course instructor. And to me, the best path to purchase is a DANCE.
It starts with Discoverability, and continues because of Added value, Narrative, Clarity, and Excitement. Without these things you'll lose customers as their interest fades and they move on to other things. But with these things, you'll have a compelling buyer journey that customers can't (and don't want to) resist.
Let's break that down.
Discoverability
Discoverability is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, but it's an important concept for raising awareness about your product and getting your initial group of leads in the door. And it's all about one thing: your product or service needs to be visible to your potential customers in places they are already looking for it.
No matter who your target audience members are, they will have certain online places where they tend to go for information, social interaction, and entertainment. Your job is to find those places and start providing value there.
You can boost your discoverability with paid ads on targeted platforms, organic social media content, blog posts, guest blog posts, on-site SEO, appearing on podcasts, answering questions in relevant forums, interacting in Facebook groups, posting non-sales content on Reddit, and collaborating with other brands that complement yours (among many many other options). What you choose to do doesn't matter as much as creating consistently engaging content and real interactions on the platforms that your audience cares about.
By boosting your discoverability you will get found by your target audience and increase traffic to your site.
Added Value
But what do you do with visitors once they are on your site?
I already talk a lot on this blog about the value exchange, and how important it is for a great lead nurturing experience, but it bears repeating one more time. Customers will only stick around if they feel you are providing value.
This means that your lead nurturing should start out with a value-added bang! This is usually in the form of an incentive or lead magnet that gets those initial visitors interested enough to give you their email addresses.
When you're creating your lead magnet, don't just think about the content you've already created or what you can easily write. Instead, think about the added value from the customer perspective.
How can you answer a common question, provide a useful tip, or teach your audience something new right away? The best lead magnets answer a customer question as quickly as possible with as little effort as possible required from the customer.
In practice, this means that videos are more valuable than text, templates are more valuable than long ebooks, and interactive tools are more valuable than pretty much anything else. The quicker and easier it is for customers to get their answers or solve a problem, the better your lead magnet is.
Narrative
Resources and information are great, but they don't give your customers a sense of who you are. Humans are narrative creatures, and more than anything else we connect to stories.
Stories make us feel big emotions, connect us with individuals and brands, and help us remember important information. Without a story to attach to, your customers will likely forget the key information you're giving them about their problem or your solution.
So after your initial value-packed lead magnet, you'll need to introduce some narrative structure. This means your sequences have a clear beginning, middle, and end (even if your leads don't see every email in the sequence).
To make a great story, focus on building the world that you and your customers inhabit. Some ideas to include in your world building include:
Characters - How would you describe your current community? What unites them?
Language - How do you and your customers speak about the problem and solution?
Setting - What is the current state of your industry or the customer's world? How would you describe the problem?
Time - Why is now the time to solve the problem? What recent changes enabled your solution?
Narrator - Who are you? What is your story? Why are you the right person to solve this problem?
After building your world you can focus on the plot. How will your hero (i.e. the lead) navigate the conflict in front of them and find a solution to their problem? What help can you offer along the way? Can you create moments of suspense, urgency, amazement, curiosity, or even anger to keep the plot moving forward and get leads emotionally attached to the journey?
Remember that a happy ending for the lead is a solution to their problem. If they feel that they've found the right solution for them at any point in this journey, they'll convert and end their lead nurturing story.
Clarity
Moments of clarity are few and far between in any buyer journey, but they're incredibly powerful. If you can help customers to see the problem in a new way, understand for the first time how a solution will help them, or even provide clarity about a related topic that they've been thinking about, customers will owe you a debt of gratitude.
You can create moments of clarity by talking to your current and potential customers and finding out what parts of the industry, the solution space, your process, or your approach are confusing. Then you can build clear explanations into your content and help potential customers see things in a new way.
You don't have to come up with these moments of clarity from scratch. Use voice of the customer data, testimonials, and reviews to describe how other customers came to see things in a new way, and your leads will start to realize how they can gain this clarity as well.
Excitement
The last part of your compelling path to purchase is a bit of excitement. You need something to pull leads over the threshold from "thinking about a purchase" to "pulling out my credit card."
Excitement can be because of an exclusive discount, a great testimonial, an inspirational example of your solution in action, a bundled offer, an announcement of a new feature, or anything else that would motivate your customers.
Just as in the clarity section, this can be driven by past customers and purchases. Ask current customers what ultimately helped them to make their purchase decision. Look at past data to see which steps in your sequence led to the most conversions. Ask current and past leads what they find exciting about your solution, brand, or story.
Try It Out
Armed with valuable content and some email automation, you can now add power to your purchase path by learning to DANCE.
Try adding discoverability, added value, narrative, clarity, and excitement to your lead nurturing emails using the tips above, and see how it affects your conversions and your relationships with customers. I'm willing to bet that you'll see a big change!
Want to learn everything you need to know about lead nurturing online? I’ve created a free email course to teach you how to effectively nurture and convert more leads without spammy sales tactics.
Click here to take the free Lead Nurturing Power Path email course!
