Email is an excellent lead generation tool. It lets marketers send relevant messages to a highly-targeted audience, thus increasing the chances of marketing success. But not every lead that converts on your email offer is ready to buy immediately – some need nurturing.

Assuming you have permission to continue emailing your prospects past the initial conversion, consider using email as a lead nurturing tool. Here’s one possible process for doing just that.

Educate with content. Most of your prospects are coming in with little knowledge of your company. Your prospect might have responded to a webinar offer, which implies curiosity, but not necessarily a readiness to buy. So, continuing to educate these prospects is essential to lead nurturing success. Send offers for whitepapers and ebooks, or invite prospects to subscribe to your blog or follow your social networks. Just be sure to track their channel and content preferences. You can use that information to build customized offers.

Discover specific pain points. Use content and channel preferences to determine specific pain points your company can address. You might consider sending an offer for a free consultation or a reward in exchange for completing a survey. Basically, anything that doesn’t stink of sales, but allows you to gain more information.

Send offers. If your prospect has been swooned and delighted by your company, and is now interested, engaged, and ready to buy, it’s time to develop and deploy your offers. The offer needs to include some incentive that will encourage the prospect to buy. Remember, lead nurturing brought your prospect to this point. He probably needs one final push before transacting as a customer.

I hope you found this advice helpful. Email truly is an effective and exciting tool for lead nurturing. Just be sure to constantly test and measure your different messages, content, and offers.

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