With competition for attention increasingly fierce, simply acquiring leads for your business credit card program is not enough.
A well-defined nurture process is essential to maximizing the conversion rate of leads you acquire into customers and increasing the ROI of marketing campaigns, particularly for business-oriented financial products, as purchases (or sign-ups) for these products are rarely one-touch endeavors.
Without a nurture process in place, you’ll be unable to get prospects that abandon the application process to come back and finish their application, for example. And if you’re using a content offer to generate leads, a nurture process is essential for converting those content leads into applicants.
Rather than focusing on immediate sales, the nurture process emphasizes a long-term approach, fostering trust and credibility. For business credit cards, this means consistently communicating the benefits and value of your product, addressing pain points, and positioning your card as the best solution for their needs.
Using Email Marketing to Nurture Prospects
An effective nurture process uses a mix of personalized email and retargeting ads to build brand recognition and nudge your leads into action. Of the two, email is by far the most important and powerful tool available because it can deliver personalized, targeted messages directly to your audience's inbox (retargeting ads, by contrast, have to be more general due to audience size requirements set by advertising platforms).
With B2B products, these nurture campaigns can involve a mix of sales and marketing emails. For example, prospects who abandon your credit application could receive three emails from your sales team before being transferred to a marketing mailing list. Regardless of the mix, the goal is to keep sending them content for several weeks to get them to complete their application.
While it may seem like a tactical tool, the nurture process should be seen as a strategic approach to guiding prospects through the buyer’s journey through relevant and timely information. Your content should involve educating, engaging, and building relationships with potential customers over time.
In addition to such “evergreen” nurture flows, setting up targeted ones around big-budget campaigns is valuable. When planning a major direct mail campaign, for example, you’d want to create a custom nurture flow with messaging that matches the offer in the mailer.
Tips for Successful Email Nurture Campaigns
Here are some tips to help maximize the effectiveness of your email nurture campaigns:
Segment Your Target Audience: Divide your audience into segments based on factors such as business size, industry, and stage in the buying journey (awareness/consideration/decision). This allows you to tailor your messages to each segment's specific needs and interests and meet them where they are in their journey.
Leverage Personalization and Customization: Don’t send generic marketing emails; these will not generate results. Instead, personalize your emails by using recipient names, business details, and personalized recommendations to make your message more relevant and engaging.
Test Timing, Frequency, and Content: While you don’t want to overwhelm prospects with too many emails, staying top-of-mind with regular, valuable content is important. Test a variety of send frequencies until you identify a consistently effective cadence. Continuously test different elements of your emails, including subject lines, content, and calls to action. Use A/B testing to identify what resonates best with your audience and refine your strategy accordingly.
Stay on Top of Metrics: To gauge the success of your email nurture campaigns and the tests that you're running, track key metrics like open rates, click rates, and conversion rates. Also stay on top of delivery and spam rates to ensure that your emails are arriving in inboxes and that they’re not annoying your audience to the point of them complaining (and if your domain starts to look spammy, this will inevitably impact deliverability).
Treat Nurture Efforts as a Long-Term Investment
The importance of a marketing nurture process in driving applications for your business credit card cannot be overstated. By implementing strategic email marketing nurture campaigns, you can build strong relationships with prospects, educate them about your product, guide them through their buying journey, and convert them into customers by getting them to complete their application. While your nurture campaigns may not pay dividends immediately, it's a long-term investment that will compound the growth of your customer base over time while significantly lowering customer acquisition costs.
Launch a Successful Business Credit Card Program With Torpago
Launching a market-leading business credit card program can be an expensive and time-consuming affair. But you don’t have to go at it alone. Our Powered By Solutions were designed to make it easy for banks to launch compelling business credit card offerings by leveraging our feature-rich white-label platform. With powerful spend management technology, full-function mobile apps, and hundreds of integrations with key business software, our platform lets banks offer their customers a high-value credit card without making a significant technology investment. Read more about our PoweredBy solution suite, which includes our credit card platform and a range of support services, or request a demo to learn more about our platform and it’s benefits for banks and their customers.
