Lead Nurturing for Teen Programs: 5 Best Practices for Follow-Up Emails

Finally, after much strategic planning, you've come up with a good marketing strategy to find and target both teenagers and their parents. Additionally, with the help of TeenLife, you’ve just received 100+ new qualified leads from your TeenLife listing. So… Now what? Well, you can’t just leave these leads floating in the wind! It’s time to focus on lead nurturing with follow-up emails.

To ensure that your new leads have a greater chance of turning into long-term customers, an important step to take is sending follow-up emails. As a matter of fact, the IRC reports that leads are 80% more likely to convert into customers/clients by the 5th-12th follow-up. So, we decided to list out the 5 best practices for follow-up emails to help our clients get the most out of their TeenLife listing. From a simple "Thank You" message to guiding them to calls-to-action, here are the 5 best practices for effective follow-up emails:

1. Be Prompt with Follow-Up Emails

Effective lead nurturing is all about getting your teen enrichment program in front of your best-fit audiences on a consistent and timely basis. When a teenager or their parent is interested in your event or offer, your program is only fresh on their minds for a limited amount of time. Think about it. How often do you keep a brand’s event or program at the forefront of your mind? To combat this, lead nurturing tactics like follow-up emails ensure that your leads are being reminded of your program, its offerings, and its value in a timely manner.

For example, let’s say you obtain a new lead from your TeenLife listing. This is the perfect opportunity to send a follow-up email with more information that will keep the lead interested in your program. But timing is everything. In fact, the most ideal timeframe to respond to a lead submission is within 5 minutes. If you wait a few hours or days to follow up with a lead, you may lose an opportunity to turn that lead into a customer/client. By sending the email directly after they become a lead, you ensure that your audience stays interested in your program all the while moving them through the sales process. 

Finally, did you know that by upgrading your listing on TeenLife, you can actually trigger your own automatic response to inquiries you receive from your listing? This automated feature helps to further qualify leads and saves sales reps time by ensuring a quick response to all leads. Basically, once a lead comes through your TeenLife listing, an automated email (that you’ve previously written content for) will be sent out to the lead within 5 minutes to ensure prompt lead nurturing. 

2. Provide Exactly What You Are Offering

Too often, marketers promise the world to get their audience to fill out a form but never deliver. To convert leads into customers, it’s crucial to deliver on your promises. Effective lead nurturing techniques make certain that your follow-up emails always include a link to the promised content or the information requested. 

Let’s put you in the shoes of your leads. Say you filled out a form to receive information regarding a STEM summer program. However, when you opened the email, the information was about the best STEM colleges. Not only are you — the lead — confused, but the business’ credibility dwindled in your eyes, didn’t it? So, when it comes to your marketing efforts, always provide the most accurate and relevant information to your leads based on the information they requested.

3. Personalization is Key in Follow-Up Emails

Personalization is crucial for overall email marketing success. But personalization is especially important for follow-up emails. In fact, 98% of marketers say personalization improves the relationship with their leads. So how can you take personalization beyond using the lead’s name in an email? Once a person submits their contact information into a form to receive content or information from your business, you gain valuable data. With this data, you can send leads content specifically personalized to them. 

For example, say a student downloaded a guide on the best summer programs to learn French by adding their information to a contact form. Depending on the submission form’s fields,  you know their name, email address, and age, and you know that they are interested in learning French. With this information, you can practice good lead-nurturing tactics by following up with an email leading to a blog post listing the top reasons to study French in Paris. This is a personalized follow-up email that speaks to the lead’s desire to learn French and is a great way for you to showcase why your immersive French program in Paris is the best way to learn the language.  

By using the right email marketing software like HubSpot, you can further track this lead’s behaviors and demographics to continue creating hyper-personalized follow-up emails, motivating the lead towards becoming a customer.

4. Be Appreciative

Teenagers and their parents want to be appreciated, so thanking them should be a central theme of your follow-up email. This step is more important than most marketers think. We don't suggest going overboard, but mentioning a short sentence of gratitude near the beginning of the email goes a long way. Below is an example of an effective form of gratitude towards your audience.

As mentioned, it should be brief, followed by the promised content to deliver. When people feel appreciated, they'll be more likely to continue learning more about your business and program.

5. Offer a Call-to-Action

Always remember that obtaining leads is not your end goal. It's only a milestone to your ultimate goal — gaining a loyal customer base. That's why it's crucial to use the follow-up email to offer a call-to-action (CTA) to “contact us.” Including a secondary CTA to schedule an appointment with an advisor or to “contact us” is a great way to offer leads a way to contact you directly. 

Take a look at the example below. Here is a snippet from a follow-up email providing an eBook. As you can see near the bottom of the email, a secondary CTA provides the recipient with a link to schedule a meeting. 

Feel free to get creative with the secondary CTA you are offering. Some recipients move faster than others and know exactly what they want. Ultimately, the focus of your efforts should be how to entice the people who are on the fence about applying for or joining your program.

Final Thoughts

Following these five best practices will help ensure your follow-up emails accomplish their goal — to keep your audience interested and "nudge" them further toward becoming customers. By sending personalized content that interests the individual promptly, your lead nurturing emails will generate 4-10x more responses than one-off email blasts. 

Reach out to us to learn how TeenLife’s automated follow-up email feature for upgraded listings can help you convert more leads into customers.