Nurture Campaigns: What Are They?

A nurture campaign is a marketing campaign designed to build the relationship between your brand and a customer, and encourage the customer to complete a desired goal. The goal may be a newsletter sign-up, app download, a subscription, or a purchase, among other options.

Customers have many choices for which brands to engage with, and often do a lot of research before making their decision. As a brand, it’s important to put a nurture campaign in place to facilitate high-value customer interactions and help them build trust as they continue to engage with you throughout each phase in the marketing funnel.

By developing a sequenced nurture campaign to engage with customers across a variety of marketing channels during the course of days, weeks, or even months, you’ll be able to encourage—a.k.a. nurture—more customers to complete the desired action, and develop a sense of loyalty to your brand.

Why Nurture Campaigns Are Important

Nurture campaigns are named as such because their primary goal is to “nurture” the relationship with the customer. They serve to build familiarity with your brand, and get customers to trust that you understand them and are looking out for their best interests.

As customers engage with your brand throughout your nurture sequence, they should have the opportunity to learn more about your brand and its values. For example, one message in the sequence may promote your travel brand’s commitment to giving back to charities that support environmental initiatives. And, with a customized sequence, you’ll be able to use personalized details to give them an improved experience. If, for example, your customer has viewed your webpage about a trip to Alaska, your nurture sequence might include a link to a video about that trip and additional FAQs for travelers interested in exploring.

With any nurture campaign, your goal is to foster higher engagement with your customer, so that they’ll be ready to convert when you eventually present them with an offer.

Get to Know Your Customers First

To build a nurture campaign, you need to understand your customers as individuals. Tie each customer to one of your marketing personas so you have a good sense of their pain points and what will motivate them to make a purchase from your brand over another. For instance, some customers may be more motivated by price, while others are motivated by understanding a brand’s sense of social responsibility and values.

It’s also important to recognize where each customer is in their customer lifecycle. Some customers may be just beginning to explore their options, while others may have been referred by a friend and already have a sense of trust in your brand. Your nurture campaign messaging will vary based on the level and depth of interaction and how engaged they already are.

To gather all this data, you need to make use of a centralized data solution like Iterable, which can pull together data from all of your marketing tools into one location to develop 360-degree customer profiles, which you can then use to develop highly segmented and personalized nurture campaigns.

Build Your Nurture Campaigns

Once you’ve segmented your audiences into different groups based on both their personas and where they are in their individual customer journeys, you can develop sequenced workflows that incorporate marketing messages across a range of marketing channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messages, direct mail, and social.

Your campaigns can be personalized down to the individual level, including dynamic content fields for details such as the customer’s name, favorite brands, and content they’ve previously clicked on. For example, if they watched a free makeup tutorial on your website, your nurture campaign might include links to the products featured in that tutorial.

Every step in your nurture sequence should vary based on how your customer responds. For example, if the customer opens your email featuring cosmetic products and decides to purchase one, you can end that nurture sequence and shift to transactional messaging to confirm their order and shipping timeframe. But if the customer doesn’t open the message, your nurture sequence should trigger a follow-up message from another marketing channel, such as an SMS message that includes a link to an online shopping cart with the products featured in the video. As you continue the nurture campaign, you might add incentives to encourage customers to engage, such as offering a limited-time discount, or free shipping on their first order.

Using Cross-Channel Marketing for Your Nurture Campaigns

Cross-channel marketing is an important strategy for driving engagement through your nurture campaigns. By going beyond a single channel, like email marketing, alone, you can create relevance by engaging with your customers at any point in time, optimizing your channel delivery and sequencing based on their reactions.

By customizing both your content offerings and your channel usage based on your customers’ needs and preferences, you’ll be able to develop personalized nurture campaigns that will help to engage and convert more of your customers.

Nurturing is all about building loyalty and trust. By developing highly personalized nurture sequences, you’ll be able to build brand affinity, so when a customer is ready to convert, they’ll choose your brand instead of a competitor.