WORKWEEK

Last week, we talked about how nurture streams work, where content comes into play, and how content marketing teams rely on nurture streams, and their variants, to improve content CRO and better track content efforts back to revenue. 

We covered a few different types of nurture streams:

• Automated emails: These are the emails you send to someone when they take an action on your site—most often when they download a piece of content.
• Dedicated emails: Dedicated emails are those sent to a dedicated segment or audience in your database (leads, MQLs, paid customers, mid-market customers, etc) about a specific message. Typically these are used in content to announce new research and reports, important webinars, product updates, etc. 
• Lead > MQL nurture streams: These streams are ones that work to convert leads into the next part of your funnel, typically an MQL (marketing qualified lead). Many organizations build content-specific lead > MQL flows that present content leads with even more content related to what they downloaded as a way to educate them more. It will be important here to know how your company classifies leads. 
• Newsletter: Most content marketing teams manage a weekly or monthly newsletter. A lot of these newsletters are just an RSS feed of the content most recently published. I’d encourage you to change this, but only if you have the time and have a solid content flywheel working (Which is, your content is driving decent organic search traffic and converting readers into leads). Content RSS feed newsletters aren’t incredibly effective, but of course creating a unique newsletter every week takes time. 

This week, I’m going to give you templates for the automated and the dedicated emails. Why not for all of them? 

Well, building out nurture streams isn’t typically part of a content marketer’s job, though it is a good skill to learn. That would require its own newsletter––or honestly, an entire course! 

And for newsletters––these are different for every single company. My best piece of advice here, though, is to subscribe to as many of them as you can and learn what you like and what you don’t. But I promise you, if all you’re offering in your newsletter is your already existing content—without any new formats or any real benefit for fold to subscribe to your newsletter, you’re going to lose them. 

Ok, now, into the templates:

Important!! 

• Always edit templates for your own brand and voice. 
• Leverage AI to help add more personality or your own spin to these templates. AI has been amazing for me and my team in email writing help! 
• Put yourself in your recipient’s shoes. What are they looking to get out of their email? How do they want to be spoken to? What is the point of the email, anyway? Make these things clear, make your wording clear, and by all means–-don’t waste their time. They signed up to get this. Make it worth it. 

The automated email

Automated emails are the easiest ones to write. These are typically test based, though some companies have light design on theirs. 

Automated emails are a great way to help maintain strong email deliverability, especially if you’re driving a ton of content downloads. Folks open these (because they requested the asset by downloading it!) and engage with them by clicking on the link to get the asset they want. 

Here is how I usually write mine:

Template:

Example:

Subject line: Here’s your guide: Ecommerce trends in 2023

From: Tracey at Klaviyo

Body copy:

Hi there, 

Thanks so much for downloading our ecommerce trends 2023 guide. You can find your copy here for safekeeping. 

Our goal with this guide is to surface some of the fast-growing trends in the industry, and help you and your team decide if they are ones you want to invest in for this new year. Quick hint: the answer shouldn’t be yes for all of them. Be mindful that as you go after new trends, you want to cross other potential tactics off of your list so your team has the time and resources to dedicate appropriately to something new (and make sure it works!). 

One key ingredient for doing that is having a reliable ecommerce CDP like Klaviyo in your tech stack. Collect customer data, track success, and more readily understand what’s working, what isn’t, and figure out where to focus next. 

If you haven’t already, you can start a free trial with us here. 

Thanks so much again, and happy selling!

Tracey

The yellow highlights are where you should link to your asset or your main CTA. 

The dedicated email

All right—dedicated emails! These are usually part of a larger go to market for content, and what you write will be dependent on the audience you are sending to. 

I like to send my dedicated emails to both prospects and customers––especially for really helpful content like tools, or calendars, or new research, etc. 

Why should only prospects benefit from that? This is a great example of how content can help with retention and build continued trust for your own customer base, too. 

Now, most dedicated emails are made to a custom template to account for your brand’s design. So you’ll be writing to that template. These templates usually have a:

• Headline
• Subtext
• CTA 
• Photo 
• Subhead
• Text block
• CTA 
• Related content or stats blocks 
• CTA

Let’s pretend that our template, and build something out:

Subject line: Ecommerce trend analysis: The ones worth pursuing and forgoing 

Preview line: New research from [your brand] on which trends drive revenue, and which just don’t (at least yet!)

From: [Your name] at [your brand]

Body copy:

Ecommerce trends analysis

We’ve broken down which 2023 trends are driving revenue, and which aren’t––so you know where to focus. 

[See the research]

[Photo]

End the analysis paralysis

In a survey of more than 5,000 brands and their marketing agencies, we’ve uncovered exactly which ecommerce trends are overhyped (and that you can ignore) and which ones deserve your attention, and why. 

Dive in for helpful analysis on each trend, and work with your team to see if it might make sense for your strategy and goals this year. 

[See the research]

Join us for a roundtable discussion

Are you investing in a trend that doesn’t see ROI? Well, ROI isn’t the only reason to do something. Maybe brand building is what you’re after this year, or maybe you want more insights into what experts think this data actually means. 

Join our roundtable discussion on [date] to learn more, ask questions, and put the data to the test.

[Grab your spot]

In these types of emails, I write basically the same thing no matter the audience. Sometimes the CTA will change for them, but for the most part, it’s about getting great content in front of a large audience and showing them that my company and my team is working on their behalf to answer hard questions on things that really matter to their organization. 

I also always like to include a CTA to a webinar. I know a lot of folks hate webinars, but I’ve found that they drive really great attendance and lead generation––and give folks a place to go to actually talk to people about something. Now, this webinar doesn’t have to be related to your content (kudos if it is!), but should be related to something having to do with what the content covers.