First Email of Early Stage Nurturing - Best Practices

[Anonymous]

I'm just curious....What is the very first email you use as part of your early stage nurturing campaign. I don't mean the specific content you send, I mean more the messaging.

Do you introduce yourself/the person who is the 'from' on the email? Or do you just get right into the content you're sending? Both?

What are your best practices for beginning to build that trust and relationship with the lead? I wish I still retained the original emails sent to me from Marketo. I remember a "Business Development Associate" initially doing the nurturing until their sales handoff process. But I don't remember his initial outreach messaging.

In our early stage nurturing I'd like to utilize myself or another marketing associate as the 'from' rather than assigning to a sales person. My gut as a marketer tells me you can't just start firing off content, no matter how good, without a proper introduction. But I struggle with the verbiage to make it quick and meaningful before getting into the nitty gritty.

[Josh_Hill13]

Naor,

Take a look at what some of the probloggers do if you are thinking of a personalized campaign. They often introduce themselves in a series of pre-set "nurturing tracks" that can be 5-10 emails long. A company I worked for also did a similar program with 6 emails from a real marketer where the offers went from general industry issues to product/firm issues.

Maybe some combination of the two.

[Cecile_Maindron]

For us, it depends of the lead source.
For instance:
If the lead source is product adoption, we don't start by introducing ourselves but help leads get started with our product. However if lead source is content syndication, we start with a market message based on their initial interest and then we progressively match message with our company's offering.