Using email marketing to nurture your audience

Nurturing is one of the most powerful skills you can master in business, but it’s often treated as an afterthought. 

You might have a magical ability to make a sale, or be the unrivaled champion of meeting deadlines, but what happens when your audience isn’t ready to buy? Your amazing sales skills, and time keeping wizardry won’t matter to the person who doesn’t know, like and trust you yet. 

That’s where email nurturing comes in. Many business owners make the mistake of skipping over it to get straight to marketing. They often forget that nurturing is marketing, and a vital step in building a relationship with your audience. 

Choosing to skip that step, means missing out on a huge opportunity to have a client for life.

Imagine having a client or customer who not only wants to spend money with you, they want to shout your praises from the rooftops long after a project is finished. Doesn’t that sound like something you’d love your clients to do?

Sending a promotional email a few times per year won’t evoke the kind of loyalty that nurturing will. 

Here’s five reasons why you should take the steps to nurture your audience right now:

1. Nurturing builds stronger relationships 

If you can build a stronger relationship with your client, you’ve struck gold. Not in the sense that they will be an endless stream of income, but that you won’t be a “one and done” business. Instead, you will be the trusted agency that a client returns to again and again.  

When you communicate regularly with your subscribers through email marketing, you’re building a relationship with them. You’re not bombarding them with pitches and promises. You’re simply having a conversation with them, and that is invaluable. 

Your audience will open your newsletters knowing they won’t be some poorly disguised generic pitch. They know that what they read from you has true value, and that you actually care about what you’re sharing with them.

You’re creating a stronger connection through email marketing that encourages communication, engagement and trust.

2. You stay front of mind with your audience

Clients are busy people. Staying front of mind is crucial to maintaining a strong relationship with them. You could deliver some of your best work during a project, but if you’re not staying memorable, you will quickly fade from your client’s mind. 

Many digital agencies will work with a client once, finish the project and never follow up with them. It’s all too easy to move onto the next client and the next project. This is where you should be using the opportunity to stay memorable to your client. Regular communication is the key to making sure you don’t become a distant memory. 

Your clients are receiving sales emails on a daily basis. Their inboxes are overflowing. 

Imagine how refreshing it would be for that client to receive an email that isn’t selling them anything. Even better, that email is talking with them, rather than at them. 

You immediately stand out as the person who isn’t trying to pitch something, but is actively engaging with them. People will remember that. 

3. Delivering value gets you noticed

When you deliver value to your audience, you instantly stand out from the crowd. 

There are so many ways that you can provide value in your emails. This could be an email sharing your knowledge with your reader. You could send them an actionable tip that they could use in their business. 

You don’t even have to limit it to “business talk” either. You could recommend a book to them, share a story with them, or even ask them a question. Value based emails are the ones that your subscribers will remember most.

A value based email is the cornerstone to establishing a stronger relationship with your audience. Keep value central to your communication, and when the time comes to pitch your services, they will be much more readily received. 

4. You establish yourself as an expert

Your audience is made up of your existing clients and also those who you haven’t yet worked with. In both of these situations, it’s important that you’re seen as a valued and trusted expert. 

Sharing regular email content helps to establish and strengthen your position as a trusted advisor. This will be through value-based emails that teach actionable steps that someone can follow, as well as thought points that can provoke conversations. When you share content like this, you will be seen as a leading expert in your industry. 

Think about the businesses you buy from. You more than likely make sure they know what they’re talking about before you spend money with them. Your audience will be no different. They will want to know they can trust you to deliver. Expertise is memorable.

When you share your expertise in a value based email, you’re establishing yourself as the person to approach when a client needs help. This could start out as a small question that you can answer, and can quickly turn into a big project.

5. You learn more about your audience

This final reason is one that many digital agencies forget to take full advantage of, even when they are sending out regular, value based emails. They lose out on the opportunity to learn more about their audience. 

Nurturing gives you valuable insight into your audience that you won’t find anywhere else.

When you communicate consistently with your audience, you gain a window into the minds of potential clients. By simply engaging with them, and encouraging conversation, you gain a deeper understanding into how you can help them. 

Never underestimate the value of a conversational email. Being on the same page as your audience is essential to building better relationships. 

Not only that, when your subscribers are actively engaging with your emails, you gain a wealth of feedback that can drive the future content you create. 

Start to nurture your audience today

The best part of nurturing is that you already possess the skills to be able to take action. You have everything you need right now. You just need to use your fingers and send an email to your audience.

As I said at the start of this post, nurturing is one of the most powerful skills that you can have. 

Nurturing is more powerful than sales. 

Of course sales are great, but if you aren’t able to nurture and build a relationship you fail to establish trust. Without trust, a visitor will struggle to turn into a customer.

When you choose to send out regular, valuable content to your audience, you’re creating strong foundations. Your audience feels closer to you and your brand. They pick up helpful information and tips. Most importantly, you’re staying memorable.

What happens next time someone in your audience has a problem? They reach out to you. That happens simply because you chose to nurture and build a better relationship with them.