Learn about your customer, inspire action, provide value

Your nurture sequence is generally how your prospective investor first gets to know you. You capture their contact information when they take some action, such as downloading your mobile app, filling out a form on a landing page, registering for a webinar, or signing up for your newsletter. Now you want to “drip” them more information — slowly over time so as not to overwhelm them — and develop their interest, knowledge, and trust so they’ll feel ready to invest with you when the timing is right.

Oftentimes, this nurture sequence takes the form of a series of emails talking about the company itself. In a competitive market space, the company may also make direct references to competitors to demonstrate how it differs and where it excels. That’s all good and fine.

A better nurture sequence makes education its primary goal. Many alternative investment products are complex, and certainly all involve risk. Most retail investors need a certain level of understanding of the product and risk factors before they’d consider investing, and your ability to fill that need will demonstrate your credibility, a good foundation for trust.

A great nurture sequence will leverage multiple channels and create opportunities for direct engagement. Beyond just email, your busy target customers with overflowing inboxes may be more apt to look at an SMS message or listen to a voicemail message. The lead you’re nurturing may be flattered by an offer to connect 1:1 on a phone call, or intimidated, in which case a group call or webinar option may seem more appealing.

Nurture sequence design

The initial design of the nurture sequence should take into account everything you know today about your customer, incorporating insights from anyone who interacts with your existing customers, including your marketing team, sales team, and even product/engineering if they can provide you with in-app behavioral data from any existing customers.

Ask the following questions:

• What are they most interested in learning?
• How did they first find you?
• What made them decide to seal the deal?

Tailoring your nurture sequence to your earliest adopters is a good place to start when deciding what to say.

👉 Click here to download a sample nurture sequence.

Automation basics

When you start building out your automation, you’ll need to carefully construct the logic to conform to some general best practices:

Ensure:

• Careful development and review of your enrollment criteria
• Personalization of communications to each lead using dynamic fields
• Logic branching to provide the correct specific follow-up once a lead has completed any CTA
• Incorporation of new channels with progressive onboarding (e.g. if you only have email address to start, work in CTAs to capture phone number so you can layer in SMS)
• A/B testing of email subject lines for some early conversion efficiency wins

Avoid:

• Enrolling the same lead in the same sequence more than once
• Prompting a lead about the same CTA again after they’ve already taken the action
• Communicating with such frequency that the lead unsubscribes
• Overcommunicating on any one topic or CTA such that the lead unsubscribes
• Using dynamic fields that haven’t been appropriately configured with generic defaults where the lead’s account data may be incomplete

Testing

After you have constructed your first nurture sequence, testing is critical. Test every single possible point of entry for a lead to make sure the right people get enrolled, while creating the right exceptions for non-leads whose contact information may find its way into your CRM, such as your company’s external legal counsel, accountants, and other service providers.

Once you think your system is thoroughly tested, that’s great… Test some more. Manually enroll internal staff’s email addresses and direct them to interact with the various CTAs to make sure the logic behaves as intended.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re ready to turn the nurture sequence on. That’s exciting! But the work doesn’t end here…

➡️ Check out our free nurture sequences guide.

Experimentation

With the nurture sequence running, you can start conducting experiments to test impact on conversion rates. Be sure to account for the pace of your lead generation and are testing with large enough data sets as you design your experiments.

What patterns emerge when you:

• Limit email sending times to mornings for one month, then change to afternoons, then change to evenings?
• Change one or more touchpoints to go out on a weekend?
• Change up the sender of some emails (e.g. sales team member vs. CEO vs. info@company.com)?
• Use graphic-driven HTML email templates versus plain text?

Make sure you’re designing your experiments carefully so that each variable is isolated and clearly signals causation, not just correlation.

Take notes on the various experiments you’ve tried and your results. Aim for testing at least one new variable each month — adopting this practice will also create a regular cadence of monitoring for errors. With any substantial changes, run more testing.