These are the people that you've connected with on social media. You've invited them to your email list, you've had conversations with them and they're not quite ready to sign up to learn with or from you.
The goal of nurturing is to make sure that you have done the groundwork so that you arethe first teacher that comes to mind for them when they are ready!
This goes way beyond sending studio updates via email, because let’s be honest, nobody outside of your studio families really cares about that! What we are looking for is to share value and to help the recipient get something out of your emails.
Nurturing is done both in automation and in broadcast messages.
The most common automation is an onboarding program welcome sequence. Someone signed up to receive whatever free download you are sharing and you deliver it via email. Then you send another two or three or four emails afterwards and that is the beginning of the nurturing. That is where you are giving them as much as you possibly can while making sure it still ties back to the freebie.
The idea here is that they start to believe that
That is the initial phase of nurturing.
With any other initiative that you have, such as a webinar, a challenge, a master class or a workshop. Anything you offer where people sign up we want to nurture them in those options. I'm primarily talking about people who sign up for something that is free because it's a low cost of entry, right?
There's no cost, it's just time. Therefore they are more likely to not show up and do the work, which then means that it takes us a little bit longer to get them on board to get them into the flow of saying, “okay, yes, I am worthy and my music is worthy of taking the time to do xyz.”
And this will make it easier to nurture them into our sales conversation. ideally we want to make sure that they are really ready to purchase, really ready to invest in themselves and into their music.
When we have people sign up for our freebie or any of our events, we want to include some kind of nurture sequence that helps them say this provider, this music teacher is doing something out of the goodness of his or her heart that is going to give me value, whether I give them money or not. We want them to always feel like they're getting something of value. The nurture sequence and nurturing doesn't stop at the time of the event. There are emails before, during and afterwards.
The longer that a prospective student stays in your sphere and open your emails and takes the steps that you lay out inside of your emails, the more likely that they are going to keep you top of mind when they are ready to purchase.
If your webinar led to a product that they're not interested in, that's okay. That's where our broadcasts come in.
Just because someone doesn't purchase on your conversion event doesn't mean that the nurturing of them was wasted. If they're opening your emails, you're still nurturing them, you can keep nurturing, keep motivating, keep inspiring every single step of the way.
Send broadcast messages on a weekly basis. I like creating those emails on the fly as opposed to batching or pre-writing them.
Broadcast messages can be structured any way you want. They can be long, they can be short, they can have bullet points, they can have paragraphs, they can have any structure you want. The idea with a broadcast message is to show up consistently in someone's inbox. “Oh, it's Thursday, there is an email from Jaime!”
Inside these messages we can send motivational content, inspirational content, informational content. We can also invite sales. We can invite for feedback. We can invite for a lot of things. The content of these broadcast messages is designed to help someone say, “oh yeah, that's right, I am interested in this!”
It's important to know the behavior of your audience, these people that one day are going to become students or sign up for your course or your workshop or your webinar or your master class or whatever it is that you are offering next, which is why it's beneficial to get to know how people actually are consuming your emails by looking at the open rates and things like that. Another thing that we can do based on sending out these automation as well as these broadcasts, is to cherry pick or hand pick people who have been regularly opening your emails and clicking on links and then connecting with them in another way.
Most of our nurturing is going to happen via email, through this constant stream of information that we're sending. But if you see that someone is opening every single one of your emails and that you’ve connected on Instagram, go ahead and send them a DM just to let them know that you see them! It’s another avenue to deepen the connection.
It's these little things that we can do because every single person on your email list is a person. They are not a machine, they are not a robot. They have feelings, they have lives, they have desires, they have passions, they are a full human being and when we treat them as that and we nurture them and build value into the relationship they are going to say yes!
It may take one week, it may take three years, but I can tell you you are more likely to get an eventual yes if you continue to nurture rather than just sending out promotional messages or messages that don't nurture their spirit and their soul.
That's what I've got for you today. I hope that you enjoyed this and are thinking about nurturing your future students today!
Be sure to connect with me.
https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/
