Not everyone is ready to buy from you right now. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be ready to buy from you soon.

In B2B marketing, we use email nurturing as a tactic to remain positioned with our prospective buyers even when they’re not ready to buy. Electronic Direct Mail provides us with an opportunity to remain at the front of a lead’s mind and shape their thinking until they’re ready to buy.

In today’s blog, I’ve got 6 tips for writing Electronic Direct Mail to nurture your prospects. Let me share them with you now.

Here are my six tips for B2B nurturing emails:

  1. Just do it
  2. Keep it short
  3. Make it mobile responsive
  4. Sell the meeting, not a product
  5. Start with the end in mind
  6. Build a deliberate flow towards that end

1st tip: Just do it

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is they don’t keep positioning their businesses after an initial interaction.

Rhythmic emails allow you to position again and again with leads, so when they’re ready to buy, you’re the first in line. However, there is no good argument for bad emails, so try to keep your content engaging and focused on the buyer.

2nd tip: Keep it short

People today are time starved and they’re consuming media on a variety of platforms. Nobody wants to read War and Peace on a mobile device and nobody has the time for wordy emails. If you need a lot of space to share your ideas, do so on your blog and use the email to tease the blog. Keep your emails nice and short.

3rd tip: Make your emails mobile responsive

With more people using mobile devices to consume content, I recommend making sure your emails are mobile responsive. For some great mobile responsive templates, visit Litmus.com.

But frankly, the biggest tip would be: don’t make any of your images a specific width. If you make an image, say, 600 pixels wide, then it’s going to require 600 pixels on all occasions, and that means that there’ll be lots of copy above it.

Just make it max width, not a fixed width, and that way when the mobile phone screen is smaller than the desktop screen, the text will shrink and wrap so that you still have legible text.

Image source: WP Beaches – How to make images scale for responsive web design

So again, to make it responsive, let the image be max width and then it will take up however much room there is, and then the text will look beautifully formatted on your emails.

4th tip: Sell the content, not the product

When you’re writing an email, try to keep the focus on the providing quality content and value to the reader. All too often, people turn their emails into endless product pitches.

In the nurture emails your write, buyer-centric content should be the main focus. If you sell the content well enough, eventually the buyer will engage with you.

5th tip: Start with the end in mind

Often when we write a nurture email, we get to the end and think “what’s a good call to action to put here?”, but you can’t have a good call to action and a good click through rate if the call to action is an afterthought.

6th tip: Build a flow towards that end

Always have your call to action in mind before you start writing. Structure your email around the call to action and make it the crescendo of the email. In the end, the call to action should be the only action the reader should be thinking about. Start with the action you want the reader to take and work backwards.

Remember, nurturing emails are just one B2B tactic

Across your marketing, you’ll have a myriad of tactics that you’re going to use to progress buyers. So, how can you keep track of which tactics to use, when to use them, and who best to target?

If you’ve seen our blogs in the past you’re already familiar with Funnel Plan, our comprehensive marketing planning solution. If you’re in need of a B2B marketing plan, or if you could use a means of tracking your marketing activity, visit Funnelplan.com.

I hope you found this week’s blog valuable. Until next week, may your funnel be full and always flowing.

Our thanks this week to: