Crafting Effective Long-Term Nurture Email Campaigns for Senior Care
How to use automated emails to turn a client lead into a senior care sale.
Your senior care sales strategy must be a long-term one: Only 2% of sales are closed during the first meeting with a potential client. Between becoming a client lead and becoming a new client is a critical time for your agency sales team to build meaningful relationships.
There are many ways to do this. One of the best methods — because the ROI is outstanding — is the lead nurture email campaign.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the practice of building a relationship with your potential senior care clients using email, phone calls, text messages, social media, long-form content, and face-to-face contact. The lead nurturing process includes learning more about your potential client’s needs, concerns, and limitations, and educating them about your services and philosophy of care.
Lead nurturing is time-consuming, and it requires investment, but it’s also how sales are closed: Clients that are nurtured buy almost 50% more than clients who are not.
One of the most cost-effective ways to nurture your leads over time is through automated email marketing campaigns. The ROI is hard to beat: Nurturing leads with email campaigns can return a 4,400% return on investment, according to one calculation by Campaign Monitor.
Even though speaking with clients over the phone or face to face is a necessary part of building relationships, lead nurturing of any kind requires marketing automation as well, and that’s where email campaigns can help.
How to nurture leads with email
To nurture your client leads with email, you need to build a drip campaign. This is a series of emails delivered at predetermined intervals that contain information about your agency and its services. A drip campaign can also be designed to collect information about your ideal clients so you can improve your marketing strategy over time.
These emails are triggered by your marketing automation engine—a major time-saver.
How to design a lead nurture email sequence
To guide your leads smoothly through the customer journey, take the time to design a helpful and meaningful lead nurture campaign. Here’s how:
1. Identify the goal of your campaign
Ostensibly, the goal of any marketing campaign is to increase sales, but when nurturing leads, get more specific than that. Maybe your goal is to add new clients for your companion care services or even to get existing clients to add more services (yes, you can nurture your existing client base too!).
2. Gather existing content and identify your gaps
Gather all the content and information you think might help you reach that goal: videos, webinars, polls, quizzes, informational sheets, long-form content, and new service announcements. Take inventory of what you have and look for ways to make your asset library more engaging and multifaceted. You might even try diversifying your media types by adding video or interactive landing pages.
3. Segment your audience
Though your ideal clients will share many things in common, some will have unique needs. Group your clients based on things like location, payment method, or the service they’re interested in. This will help you deliver targeted messages and speak directly to their interests and concerns.
4. Lay out your sequence
When laying out the sequence of your email campaign, consider how you can teach your leads about your agency and learn more about them as you go.
Consider these best practices:
- Personalize the experience by using your lead’s name, referencing the service(s) they’ve expressed interest in, or sending well-wishes on local holidays and events.
- Provide them with value. Lead nurture campaigns should do more than just push your services, they should also provide your leads with information they can use, whether or not they become your clients. Try offering tips for staying healthy during flu season or notify leads about upcoming changes to Medicare. Build trust by proving your agency to be a subject matter expert.
- Make the experience as engaging as possible: Sequence emails so your leads get a diverse experience with the content. Try a video one week with a poll the next, followed by a tip sheet of home healthcare tips.
- Offer information about cost and ways to afford your services. Cost will be a concern for many clients, so show them how you can make your services more affordable via private insurance, Medicare/Medicaid, payment plans, etc.
- Consider seasonality and upcoming holidays and events. You may want to run Mother’s Day or Father’s Day promotions or celebrate local festivals or events in your emails.
- Include an incentive, like limited-time discounts, free trial periods, or in-home consultations.
- Use client testimonials. Show your potential clients what your current clients say about your wonderful agency. Text reviews are great, video reviews are even better!
- Always include a call to action. Tell your clients what you want them to do next and give them an easy way to do it (like a button or a phone number). Promoting new meal prep services? Try a CTA like Learn more about our healthy in-home meals or Speak to a client nutrition specialist.
- Sign up for your own email campaigns to experience them along with your leads. You might see opportunities you hadn’t thought of before.
5. Track performance and optimize
As your campaign runs, use your marketing automation engine to monitor engagement and learn which emails get the highest open rates and what messages lead to the most CTA clicks.
To optimize, you can A/B test subject lines, calls to action, or even days of the week when emails are delivered. The more you measure, the more you can optimize.
6. Follow up on newsletter engagement
When your leads show interest in your email nurture campaign, capitalize on it. Respond quickly to lead outreach so you can push that sale over the line.
The goal is not surveillance (don’t call someone just because they opened the email or watched a video). Give them something meaningful to engage with: Ask them to opt into a phone call or email exchange with someone from your agency. Give them a reason to reach out.
Start nurturing your senior care leads with CareFunnels!
Home Care Marketing Pros' CareFunnels platform makes everything from nurturing leads to tracking engagement and more a breeze! Find out more by watching our demo here!
