There’s a majority view in email marketing that you need to "nurture" customers until they’re ready to buy.
The logic goes something like:
- Only 5% of the market are ready to buy.
- It makes logical sense to talk to 95% of the market than 5%
- You should “provide value” until they’re ready.
But Like Mark Twain said:
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
The typical “nurture” strategy looks like me, overwatering the houseplants to bring them back to life because I left them alone for a month in July.
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If I’d solved the problem early by building a drip feed that actually solved the problem, I wouldn’t be here flogging a dead yucca.
But solving the problem is harder than writing another email about 10 ways to bring your business back to life after the summer holiday, where 9 are useless platitudes and the last one is a barely veiled pitch.
Here’s why the nurture approach is broken, in two ways:
First, let’s take a look at that 5% who are in the market and ready to buy.
5% of a market that’s ready to buy is the foundation of a serious business.
Why on earth would you follow a strategy that ignores them in favour of the 95% who are ready to buy, and when are you going to get round to selling to them when they are?
Your strategy should be built to capture the 5% first, and then work on the remaining 95%.
Next, let’s look at the 95% who aren’t ready to buy.
It’s REALLY hard to get someone who’s not interested in solving a problem to get interested in it.
Any doctor will tell you that the best cure for smoking is cancer. People will tolerate life-threatening conditions until something pushes them over the edge.
This strategy completely disregards how hard it is to keep someone engaged with your emails until they’re that time arrives. It’s not impossible, but you’ll likely burn a lot of your list while you get practice in.
Every list deteriorates, and it deteriorates fast when your list isn’t getting what it wants from you.
But, there’s an upside to all this.
Email is spectacularly good at turning buyers into repeat buyers. Once someone has bought from you, you’ll find it way easier to hold their attention.
You’d think it would be the other way around, that you can sell once you have someone’s attention, and that’s true, but it works the other way too.
(Your brain is weird like that. Try putting on a really big smile for 30 seconds and it’ll make you feel happier.
You don’t just smile when you’re happy, you’re happy when you smile.)
So, what do we do about all this?
The answer is to get as many people across the line as buyers as soon as you can.
Your emails need to sell from day 1.
Now, for all of you clutching your pearls and reaching for smelling salts at the thought of selling, take a breath.
When I say “sell”, that doesn’t mean “close”.
If you fill your first emails with “9 left” and “cart close tomorrow”, you’re going to come off like an arse.
But you should 100% let people know that there’s a solution available to their problem right now if they need it urgently.
I’m going to go through 3 ways to do this in my next email, but for now, tell me…
How long is it before a new email sign-up sees your first offer?
