Whether starting an email marketing nurture from scratch or optimizing one for greater performance, a common question asked is 'how many emails should be in my nurture'? So today, I want to help you answer this.
Target Audience
The first thing you want to do is define who the nurture is for. And this is not just job title, industry, etc. I'm talking about the position in your funnel. Are you nurturing prospects to move them to MQL? Are you hands-off when sales takes over? Define this first. And your answer could be that you have a nurture for each stage progression too and that's great!
Conversion Rate
Next you need to look at the time it takes to move from one funnel position to another. How long, on average, does it take for someone to become an MQL from a Prospect stage? How about your sales cycle from Opp Created to Closed Won. Get this time-frame. If you don't have it - that's OK and we can still work with this! - ask your sales team for their opinion as a starting point.
Frequency
Now we want to consider job titles, industry, etc. and consider how many emails we want to send over a certain period of time. So let's say we are building a nurture targeted at Prospect to MQL stage and it takes about 10 weeks for someone to move from one stage to the next. So now we have our time-frame (10 weeks) and we need to look at the frequency and get to the number of emails we want to send.
What Else Is Going On?
Your future customers are getting nurture emails but what else is going on? Do you send a newsletter? Webinar invites? When you consider the frequency, take this into consideration. You don't want your prospects to say 'oh here comes that company again'. That is brand fatigue and the quickest way to an unsubscribe.
TIP: Nurture is not a one and done. You will need to look at your conversion metrics on a regular basis. Is this helping to accelerate the movements between each stage? Are certain emails converting more than others or perhaps some are just not getting any engagement at all? Keep measuring and improving!