I hate to tell you this, but your emails read like calendar reminders instead of valuable conversations with your customers and prospects.
You're probably spending hours debating subject lines and A/B testing send times while completely missing the fact that your entire nurturing email strategy is disconnected from how customers make decisions.
If you're in B2B, only about 5% of your prospects are ready to buy at any given moment. The other 95% are watching to see if you're worth keeping in their consideration set for when they do get ready to make a purchase.
Your nurture sequences aren't just competing for attention in the inbox. They're competing against other companies that may be centering their customers in all of their messaging.
The Real Problem with Most Nurture Sequences
So much of email marketing has become completely disconnected from business strategy and customer needs. You're accidentally treating prospects like numbers, and if they don't buy immediately, they're ignored or shoved out of any pipeline and completely disregarded when the reality is, they just weren't ready to buy at that exact moment.
But there's zero patience to nurture to the sale because of revenue pressures and team dynamics. It happens.
Then there's the second issue: You're making it all about you and your product, and how awesome it is, instead of centering your customers and connecting what's awesome about your product to their needs. Making it all about you is a total turn-off for your prospects, and they'll delete and unsubscribe as a result.
Finally, someone decided along the way that you absolutely, positively need to send out emails every Tuesday without fail. So you create content that sounds impressive internally, but does nothing for the people who receive it. Meanwhile, your prospects are juggling 47 different priorities, getting 150 emails a day, and trying to figure out which vendors understand their world, and which ones don't and need to be cut.
All of these issues pile up and show up in your lead pipeline. You're training your prospects to ignore your emails, or worse, just delete them.
Marketing sends emails based on what's scheduled, not what customers need. Your sales teams don't know what marketing covered, because the emails don't align with real customer conversations that are happening. Then prospects, when they do get ready to buy, have eliminated you from their consideration set because you never proved that you understand their challenges.
This isn't a subject line problem. This isn't a send time problem. This is a "we forgot our emails are actually supposed to help humans" problem.
Fix Your Foundation First
Before you can optimize any nurture email sequence, you need to understand how your customers buy. This is the foundation that supports all of your other work.
You can't build a house on a crappy foundation. Well, you probably can. But the house isn't going to last very long, and it's pretty expensive to do. The smarter solution is to build that foundation to last. And your customers have the directions to build that foundation.
What You Need to Know About Your Customers
- Who's involved in the buying decisions. Most B2B purchases involve multiple people, usually anywhere from 6 to 14 people in that buying committee. It's getting bigger all the time. Who is doing the initial research on all the different vendors? Who is the internal influencer winnowing down that consideration set, and who has final approval? Your emails need to serve primarily the person doing all of the legwork, but then also give them the information they need to take back to the buying committee.
- How prospects evaluate products and solutions. What is their process? Do they comparison shop? Do they need internal buy-in? Do they need to do demos? Documentation? Compliance reviews? And how long does this decision-making process take? Your email sequence should support their evaluation process and not interrupt it.
- What influences their consideration set. Is it peer recommendations? Industry publications? Do they go to G2 for reviews? Past vendor experiences? Do they hire a specialized consultant to help them figure out which product they should have? You need to know what keeps you relevant during that decision-making timeline.
- Voice of customer data. You need to know the words and phrases your customers use to describe your product and the value they get from it. How does your solution make their lives better? Help them achieve their goals faster? What do they tell their colleagues when they're working with you?
You need to align your tone and voice with the way your customers talk about your products. So when your email hits their inbox, it stands out in a way that grabs attention. When they read it, they get their heads nodding along with you, so they say, "Oh my gosh! They know exactly what we're going through and understand exactly why we're in the situation we are and have a solution to help us solve it."
This isn't marketing speak. This is how your real customers talk about real outcomes. And if you're not incorporating their language into your emails, you're missing the most powerful content you could possibly have.
How to Get These Customer Buying Insights
You can interview your most recent customers. Ask your sales team for questions that your prospects ask repeatedly. Look at your customer success stories and pull their exact words. Survey your customers about their buying process and use open-ended fields.
You can't write effective nurture emails without this foundation. Sure, you could guess and probably get lucky, but why would you guess when you have the opportunity to get the data that helps you make stronger, faster, and more confident decisions?
Your Email Tune-Up Checklist
Now that you understand how your customers make buying decisions, it's time for your email tune-up. Think of this like a diagnostic checklist for your car, except instead of checking your oil and tire pressure, we're checking whether your emails are actually serving the humans who receive them.
This isn't about tweaking subject lines or testing send times. This is about making sure every email you send supports your customer's decision-making process and builds the kind of relationship that keeps you relevant when they're ready to buy.
1. Connecting with Your Prospects
- Language: Are you using the words your customers use to describe the value they get? Or are you using marketing words and lingo that sound good internally? If a customer says your product "keeps us organized and on task," and then you turn around and say "our product optimizes workflow efficiency," you're probably going to struggle with creating a connection.
- Problem relevance: Are you addressing what your prospects actually lose sleep over, based on what they've told you? Not what you think they should care about, but what they actually do care about. If you're in the services or SaaS business, it's probably about working smarter, saving time, and increasing revenue.
- Buying process support: Does this email help them with whatever step they're at in their evaluation? If they're trying to build internal consensus, give them talking points. If they're comparing options, help them understand key differentiators. Remember, these are humans trying to make good decisions for their business. Your emails should make their job easier, not harder.
2. Sequence Alignment
- Purpose: Does this email advance their decision-making process, not your sales process? Are you giving them information when they need it to move forward? Are you helping whatever internal influencer is doing the legwork feel confident in bringing your product to the larger buying committee?
- Progression: Are you building trust and demonstrating expertise over time with every single email that you send? Every email should build and compound that confidence, showing you understand your prospects' world and can help them solve their problems better than any other competitive solution out there.
- Timing: Are you sending this because they need this information right now, and it aligns with their internal conversations, or because it's Tuesday? Your timing should revolve around their journey, not your content calendar.
The goal is that every email makes prospects think, "Okay, these people get it," and bonus points if they say, "I was just going to ask that question. It was like they were reading my mind." This builds confidence in your ability to help them succeed. Everybody wants to look good at work.
3. Human Engagement
- Easy response: Are you making it easy for them to respond, ask questions, or engage? If you send emails from a "no-reply" address, you're missing huge opportunities for making real connections.
- Personal connection: Are your emails coming from actual humans on your team? Preferably, people they might work with, like your customer success teams. Including content from the faces they're eventually going to be familiar with and working with is helpful in solidifying those relationships before there's an official relationship.
- Engagement loops: Instead of just announcing your latest ebook that compares your features to your competitors, invite your prospects to a webinar, an AMA session, or some way to extend engagement outside of just the email. Give them reasons to engage beyond just downloading more content.
Remember, these relationships are with humans. Treat them like humans instead of just a number on a list.
Measure What Actually Matters
If you're considering making some of these changes to your nurture sequence, you'll want to know if they're effective. Focus on measuring what matters, rather than simply regurgitating vanity metrics like opens or click-throughs.
Nurturing a relationship is a little bit more complex than email stats that you just pull out of a dashboard.
- Replies and engagement: Are people responding to your emails? Are they asking questions? Are they sharing them internally? That's relationship building.
- Sales conversation quality: Are your prospects coming into sales conversations better educated and more qualified because of your emails? Ask your sales team if your emails are making their job easier.
- Time to consideration: Are you staying relevant with your prospects who aren't ready to buy yet? Track how long it takes from first email engagement to a serious sales conversation.
- Customer feedback: Ask your existing customers which email or content was the most helpful during their evaluation and buying process. What would they change? Their insights can help you improve your entire approach.
The goal isn't just hitting email metrics. This is measuring the value of the relationships you're creating. Are you building trust and staying relevant with humans who will eventually need to make a buying decision? Or are you just pushing content for the sake of checking that task off your list? Your customers will know the difference.
The Bottom Line For Email Nurturing
Your email campaigns should make your customers think, "These people get it" every time they see your name pop up in their inbox.
Start with your customer insights. You can't do anything without understanding how your customers make buying decisions. Interview your customers, understand their buying process, learn their language, and then use what you learn in your emails.
Then run your existing nurture sequences through a tune-up process. Compare everything you learned about your customers to the sequences you have today, not against some generic best practices you read on some vendor website. Measure success by relationship building, not just metrics.
If you realize your emails are disconnected from how your customers actually buy, that's fixable. Just remember that your customers are humans trying to solve a problem, and you have a solution. Stay curious, and don't ever treat your prospects like a numbers game.
People buy from people.
Ready to diagnose what's really going on with your customer relationships? We help B2B companies understand exactly how their customers make buying decisions and connect that insight to email messaging that works. If your nurture sequences feel more like calendar reminders than valuable conversations, contact us for help diagnosing what your customers need most from your product or solution.