How to use HubSpot's free email to nurture leads

Lead nurturing or lead nurturing is a technique belonging to Inbound Marketing that focuses on creating valuable links with users. The aim is to accompany leads during the buying process until they completely go through the sales funnel. It seeks to build relationships with customers regardless of the stage of the sales cycle in which they are. To achieve this, it is necessary to provide them with valuable content that encourages them to continue advancing along their journey. In this way, lead nurturing is a link between the marketing and sales departments. Increasing conversions will be key to improving the results at the end of a marketing campaign.

The HubSpot platform has free tools to carry out lead nurturing actions. In addition, it also qualifies them with lead scoring. This process is the prelude to lead nurturing, where education, information, involvement and conversion of contacts is initiated. For B2B marketing it is a priority to improve the quality of the audience in order to turn your campaign into the safest bet. There are three types of lead nurturing programmes: interaction, educational or active cycle programmes. From HubSpot you can create and work each of them starting with your buyer persona. However, the free email that the platform offers has multiple possibilities to reach the leads and convert them into final customers.

why is it important to incorporate lead nurturing into your strategy?

Nurturing potential customers with quality information will make them feel connected to your expression. The process of attracting customers will increase sales from a softer approach. It is about approaching leads and based on the information we have about them, offering them quality content. It is essential to incorporate it into your marketing strategy for the following reasons:

• Increased ROI: Lead nurturing can be carried out with an automated tool, therefore, the investment is lower, increasing the profit in each marketing action.
• Immediacy: It is a quick method with which to get leads to improve their relationship with the brand. It is necessary to take advantage to interact from the welcome message and lose the attention until the end of the sales funnel.
• Simplicity: It is easy to implement as it does not require great knowledge to incorporate it into the marketing strategy. Tools such as HubSpot automate all the processes.
• Improves the customer-company relationship: It is the basis of Inbound Marketing: Thanks to the messages and follow-ups, a communication channel is opened with the lead through which he/she can have a relationship with the brand and humanise it.
• Segmentation: By maintaining communication with the leads, new valuable data can be acquired that allows contacts to be segmented into large groups. This will help in future marketing campaigns and will save previous work time.
• Increased opportunity: By obtaining extra information from leads, you can create repeated patterns of behaviour to achieve new sales opportunities.

Basics of a lead nurturing strategy

Defining the lead nurturing strategy will be the basis for developing clear content. Leads interact with 6 to 8 types of content before going through lead scoring. HubSpot's marketing automation software that includes email or social media can drive the lead nurturing strategy. In this strategy, three main elements should be considered:

• Contact management: With HubSpot's software, you can store and manage contact information to create marketing actions. This data typically reveals name, history, email or phone number, among others.
• Segmentation: Use segmentation to make use of your contacts' data. Lead nurturing works if you combine context with content. Having your contacts segmented will reveal where they are in their buying journey and what their context is. It's a good idea to divide users into groups with similar characteristics.
• Buyer journey: From HubSpot you can define the different audiences to send mailings to. Knowing your buyer persona is the first step to understanding what kind of content they need. The stage of the journey can be recognition, consideration or decision. Lead nurturing is especially done in the first stage by launching educational content.

How to use HubSpot's email tool in 6 steps

1. Manage and analyse emails

The platform's free email offers a multitude of actions to carry out. The first step to enjoy them is to access the email tab from the main menu Marketing > Email.This will automatically open a panel containing all the information related to your email activities in HubSpot. From the Manage tab in the bottom left corner you can see the drafts, scheduled, sent or archived emails. Each one corresponds to a different colour icon that will help you identify the desired email in the shortest possible time. In the top right corner you will find Manage columns. These columns can be edited and allow you to filter the information for a specific search.

In the Analyse tab, you can review the overall performance of the email, collecting information on send, click, open, delivery and bounce rates, giving your company an overview of the impact your email marketing campaigns are having on your users.

2. Create emails

To create an email go to the top right corner and click on the Create email button. A pop-up window will open allowing you to choose the type of email you want to create. These can be:

• Normal: This is the simplest option, the platform offers to create a visually appealing and simple email to impact any of your contact segments.
• Automated: Allows you to create a personalised email for the marketing campaign that is sent to your contacts when the workflows are activated.
• Blog/RSS: This is a useful email if you want to send information or updates to your blog subscribers. The RSS email is published and sent once.

3. Select template

After choosing the email type, a new window opens, allowing you to drag and drop to optimise your email marketing efforts. It offers the possibility to select the type of template you want to use in your campaign. It has several pre-designed and specific options:

• welcome: You will select this email if you want to welcome a new subscriber or customer, these emails are intended to achieve a first approach and gain the user's trust by showing the benefits of the company or product.
• Simple: This is a simple email with a simple template that does not intend to impact on customers, simply communicate a news, update or information about the brand.
• Promotion: This type of mail aims to capture the user's attention by promoting the latest news of the brand, exclusive offers or discounts.
• Simple email: It will be a simple format that will serve to transmit information to the reader in a close way. It is the most personal type of email if the objective is to strengthen ties with the client.
• Newsletter: It serves to share content of value for the customer and the company. Due to its interesting template, customers feel invited to interact with the brand.

4. Edit the design and content of the email

After choosing the type of template, an editor opens, which intuitively allows you to modify the design and email marketing strategy. These are grouped into sections such as text, image, button or footer and should be designed according to the content of the message

5. Send email

From the top tab Send or schedule you can send the email to one or more recipients or schedule it to be sent at a later date.

6. Check performance

After sending, you can go back to the initial Marketing > Mail dashboard and click on the Analyse button to check its performance. Clicking directly on the email will display its statistics and feedback received.