Nurture Campaign Email Frequency

[EKnaack]

Hey all!

I am building out a new nurture email campaign for our company and making it the suggested 12 touchpoints. 

What is the recommended amount of time to have between each email in the workflow? We do have a weekly newsletter that they would be getting so I was planning on doing 5-10 days but wasn't sure if this was too long or too frequent. 

Thanks in advance!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @EKnaack,

This depends on your product / serivce, the content of your nurturing emails, and the touchpoint that triggers the nurturing.

For example, let's assume if this is a fairly late point in your buyer's journey, they're already well educated about a solution to their challenge. Your emails would likely be designed to get these contacts to reach out to sales, delivering arguments on why exactly they should purchase from you (case studies, return of investment calculation, references). Personally, I'd send 1-2 emails per week instead of 1 every other week – arguing that you should be top of mind for them at a critical moment in their buyer's journey. Of course, these emails would have to be designed to be helpful rather than pushy and aggressive as emails at a high frequency could lead to the opposite of what you're trying to achieve.

On the other hand, if contacts have just had their first touchpoint with your content and are early in their journey, you'd likely be focusing on educating them. Learning is a frustrating experience when content is provided at a faster rate than one can learn and here I'd lean towards the 'every 10 days' side of the spectrum. You want to build awareness over time, letting the contact educate himself on their own terms.

I'm not a big fan of generalizing email frequency, there are scenarios where daily nurturing emails make sense or emails spaced with months in between them. It really depends!

Hope this helps!

[EKnaack]

Thank you! Yes, this is so great. We will have two different campaigns for two distinct customer groups and this helps a lot with thinking about how to interact with both. 

[Ben_M]

12 emails is a lot in a single nurture is a lot. How long is the sales cycle?

The thought I would have is some random spacing of the 5-10 days as you are thinking, but you should put a step in before each email send for some type of verification or potential hold because if you did 1 email per week for 3 months, you are bound to cross a holiday or two have have some emails ignored and you might want to give yourself a chance to hold them for a few extra days if they are in that step.  Otherwise you could pause and resume the workflow although I've run into a few issues from time to time with that.

[EKnaack]

Our sales cycle is about 7 days. We are a subscription-based service. I was going off of the advice from the "The 1-Page Marketing Plan" book for the 12 touch points, to be pleasantly persistent 😁

Great point about the holidays, I didn't really think about how that could affect it. Thank you!

[TeodoraPirciu]

You can consider different campaigns — one for people who haven't subscribed for the trial and need the right information to make that decision. Then, go for a highly personalized nurturing campaign for the 7 days of the trial (to help them get the most out of this experience). About a week after the trial, you can enroll the folks who didn't buy into a different campaign to understand what went wrong and whether they're willing to try again. 

Of course, people who bought the product shouldn't be forgotten either. They deserve to be pampered with some fancy emails, too. 

[Ben_M]

If it's a 7-day trial, I would do more than 1 email during the trial and would consider 2 nurtures. If you only send one and it gets missed then you really lost them. Personally I would consider 3-4 emails during the trial to when it expires and once the trial is over, consider a longer nurture like you are building that starts at the end of the trial and runs for awhile to bring them back.