26. What to Write In Your Nurture Emails - Funnels 101

In this episode of Copy And, Samantha moves into the next level of her Funnels 101 series by breaking down one of the most important—but most misunderstood—parts of email marketing: nurture emails.

Nurture emails are the messages sent outside of launches or promotions to keep an email list engaged, warm, and ready to buy. Samantha explains why nurture emails are essential for maintaining trust, improving deliverability, and ensuring that future sales don’t feel abrupt or forced.

She introduces a simple framework for writing nurture emails when inspiration feels nonexistent. Instead of overthinking storytelling, Samantha encourages business owners to focus on five core angles: who they help, what they offer, where and when their audience is in life or business, and why their work matters. Each email only needs to answer one of these questions clearly and intentionally.

The episode also covers how storytelling naturally fits into nurture emails using a problem–decision–outcome structure, making emails easier to write and more relatable to readers. Samantha emphasizes that nurture emails are not anti-sales. In fact, consistently positioning offers inside nurture content makes future conversions easier and more natural.

Finally, she explains how nurture emails keep brands top of mind, even when subscribers aren’t ready to buy immediately. While every email won’t generate revenue, consistent nurture emails ensure that when the timing is right, the reader knows exactly who to turn to.

This episode is essential listening for service providers and creators who want to sell more without relying solely on launches.

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Transcript

Samantha Burmeister 0:01

Hey friends, and welcome back to Copy and the marketing podcast where you learn how to write copy that sounds like you, but converts better. My name is Sam. I'm the founder and lead copywriter at Nomad Copy Agency, and we are in the middle of Funnels 1 0 1. So really I should introduce myself as your professor because today we are moving into that 2 0 1 level content. This is what happens after somebody. Is out of your funnel and you need to send them engagement emails to make sure that they still know that they can buy from you and so that they stay in the loop. These are your nurture emails, but before we get into the nurture emails, I am going to give you my very own copy confession. If you would like to submit a copy confession, you can do so at the link in the show notes. It is a Google form and all you need to do is fill it out. It takes about two minutes and tell me your story of when you had a big old marketing oopsie. I am gonna tell you one of mine from corporate there was somebody that I was cold emailing when I was in my corporate sales career, I was copying and pasting different emails to different prospects, and I accidentally said, Hey, Mike. Hey Dave. And then went into my cold pitch because I had copy pasted Hey Dave, from the previous email and then it said, Hey, Mike, hey Dave. So he naturally responded and said, Hey, Sarah. Hey Amanda. My name's Samantha, so he did two of the wrong names. Ultimately I would love to tell you that it was a great start to a very human sales process and that he ended up buying my biggest deal of all time, and that's absolutely not true. He basically told me to f off and being in sales, I tried one more time and it didn't work out, but. It's okay to laugh at yourself. It's okay to make some mistakes. It is what make us human, and so much of what makes us human is being able to market when we can. When we can, is what comes out in our nurture emails. So today we're gonna talk about what nurture emails are and when to send them and what the heck goes in them, especially when you have literally no idea what to send to your list. So about a year and a half ago, I sent an email, a nurture email to my full list and said, here are three ideas of what to put in a nurture email. And somebody who was a client of mine inside of Copy on Demand, she had been with me for maybe three or four months at the time, replied and said, Sam, that's great, but what's a nurture email? And I thought that this was common knowledge, which it just isn't true. I have a marketing degree. I've been in this field, I've been writing copy for people for nearly seven years now. What is evident to me is not evident to everybody else. So what is a nurture email? A nurture email is simply a marketing email that you send, whether you're launching or not, just to keep your email list engaged. Why is it important to keep your email list engaged so that when you launch, they aren't totally taken aback by who the heck is sending me emails and so that you can continue to make sales throughout the year even when you're not launching? So that's a nurture email. How do you write them? Honestly, this is a big question and there are entire programs teaching you how to do storytelling and how to write a nurture email. There's a membership that is$9. I recommend it. I was in it for a while and for$9 a month, Liz Wilcox will tell you and even outline the emails for one nurture email per week so that you never miss a week when emailing your list. I think those are all great tools, but if you don't want to opt into a program teaching you how to story tell and you just wanna know, okay, but what do I write when I sit down and I know I need to write something and I have no idea what to write? I'm gonna tell you two things. One is classic third grade writing class. Who, what, where, when, why? And two is that every story has a beginning, a middle, and not an end, but an outcome. So when you're writing stories, I want you to think that your beginning is likely the problem that your people have, either how you've observed it in your real life, or something that your clients have lived. The middle is making a decision, which is typically the part where somebody buys from you and the outcome is what happened as a result. That is the storytelling pattern that most of us are doing in our nurture emails. So that's thing one. Storytelling is easy, beginning, middle, end, problem, decision, outcome. Then the who, what, where, when, why. So I'm just gonna go through a bunch of ideas for nurture emails that I have off the top of my head talking about who this can be, who works with you. Ask yourself who works with you and what happened as a result. These are case study style emails. If you already have them on your Instagram or on your blog, this is a huge opportunity to get people to click back out to your blog and also to have a call to action that says, if you wanna have a similar result, click here and we can talk about it. And it gets people onto a sales call with you. Who is also literally just naming the psychographics and lived experiences of your clients or people who would like to work with you. Again, we don't necessarily need to know your ideal client avatar and their problems more so than their solutions, and when you know what their ideal solutions are, you can frame up the opportunities to work with you as a solution. Tell them what you offer. Tell them a story about how it came about. Tell them how it's different from other people's offers. Simply just telling them what it is. You could also do a roundup email or a progression where you say, Hey guys, I haven't made it super clear recently what I do. So here are three ways to work with me. And you can make it a progression by budget by commitment or by their ideal solution. So if it was budget, you could do something like if you have$300, you can get a one-on-one with me if your budget is$3,000. There's this, or you can work with me all year long in this program for$10,000. You could also do it by progression of the level of their problem. If you have one quick question that you know you need help on, you can get into a one-on-one here. If it's something where you need a bit more handholding and wanna do this over the course of a month, here's the next option, et cetera. So just give them a progression and make it a roundup style of this is how you can work with me. I'm gonna give you an example here too, of a local company that did the what really well. My local oil change place starts sending me promotional emails like. A month before I need an oil change. It's at that stage where I know it's been a couple months since I've gotten an oil change. I don't really drive that much. I live in a relatively small town and when I go outta town, I typically fly. So they have started to notice the cadence at which I go get my oil change. So I don't even know what that cadence is, but they know when my car is probably at about 3,500 miles and I need to go get an oil change. However, this is for a single service. So they have an algorithm that knows that about every five months. So at five months after I make a purchase at a physical location, they send me another email. However, I moved a few years ago. I stopped going to one place and started going to another, which means that I was getting emails from the place that I used to live in Texas and now the place that I live in California. But what I noticed is that the content of the emails from the place in Texas changed. They were sending me emails that were more of surveys trying to figure out like, did you move? Did you get a new car? Is that why we don't have anything flagged for your VIN to send you emails? Also, they sent me emails with, if you moved here, all of our locations around the US see if we have a spot near you. So I could tell that they were segmenting me based on my buyer behavior, so often, yes, we do wanna see your personality. We wanna know what is it that you do and how can we buy it from you? But in this example, this was such a great way for them to showcase what their other offers were as far as, do you need tire rotation? Do you need a oil service for a different car? Do you need it in a different place? We offer these services in various places, so while they just don't have those locations or that business out here in California, I got a sense for how their marketing department saw myself and how they reached out to clients who changed their buying behaviors. You can do this too. In a service-based business, you can tag people for the last time they opened an email. You could tag people based on time of year. You could tag people based on the last time that they purchased from you with similar offers that would take them to the next step of what they may need now that they're five or six months down the road from working with you. But that series of emails that I got from my oil change place in Texas was a really good example of them showcasing what they offered and doing it nurture style. So that was who and what. Now let's talk about where and when because they go together. So I have a client right now in copy on demand, and she's a financial coach. She's absolutely brilliant at what she does, and she came to me and was like, Sam, I have literally no idea what to talk to people about. It's this post holidays thing we're talking about. Budgeting for Christmas doesn't really make sense. We're not close enough to summer break. Like I don't know what to talk about. So there's a couple ways to go about this. If you don't know what to write, you can think about where they are and what time of year it is. What season or phase of business are they in? Where do they hope to be? You could talk about that. Where will they be after working with you? This is a great way to showcase your results and this kind of ties back into who do you work with. What happens after they work with you? You could also talk about current events. I mentioned this with my financial person, is that she could talk about starting to budget for spring break. She could talk about setting yourself up for success all year long. They could start talking about. Saving for Christmas so that Christmas doesn't hit their credit card at this time next year. They could also talk about, especially in this March April timeframe of finally getting the Christmas credit cards paid off and then starting to save. So she would show that she deeply understands the phase of life that her clients are in so that she can target them with events based where when style nurture emails. I will give another example. The New Year's timeframe is the Super Bowl for Fitness Pros. So they're all launching like right at January timeframe. So their messaging around current events and resolutions during January is super smart. We also have just like general pop culture references that are totally available to us. Go scroll on Instagram and see what the current trends are. I remember last summer, it was the summer I turned pretty, was really trendy and a lot of people did the summer I blank. So a friend of mine here in town did the summer I started running and had a whole Instagram series of the summer she started running And it was just like a kind of a personal project for her, but you could do the same thing in your business. You can also look at trends like the Olympics are happening right now or during award season. You could do a series of awards for the best X, y, and Z in your industry. Show off your personality. So depending on the season or phase that your people are in, or the season or phase that like the world is in, just call out current events and how they tie into your industry. Another way to do this is to give them like heads up content on ways to stay ahead based on what you know is coming. So similar to planning for Christmas spending or something like that. An example here is that I work with a cottage in England and they sold out all of their rooms when they gave a heads up email mid-January that there were only four weeks to Valentine's Day, they sent it to people who had stayed with them in Q1 of last year and said, Hey. We hope that you come see us again this year. As a reminder, Valentine's Day is filling up fast. If you want that week or weekend surrounding Valentine's Day, now is the time to book and if you call us and book directly, we'll give you a 10% discount and a card with chocolate in your room to celebrate the holiday. So that heads up content helped them to sell, but it really just felt like nurture content that they were just looking out and reaching out to their customers. So that was who, what, where, when, and why is next? Why should people work with you? Talk about the outcomes of working with you. Again, this ties back to who is working with you, but give them your biggest impact stories and align those stories with your offers. Ultimately, every nurture email is gonna do two things, right? You're gonna tell them either who, what, where, when, or why. So if you're looking for ideas for what to send, I just gave you a whole bunch of them. And the second thing is that story is always gonna end with what is the amazing, brilliant, fun, beneficial outcome of working with you. So you wanna either persuade, entertainer and form in your nurture emails. Your goal, of course, is also to get clicks. We're gonna talk about deliverability here in a couple of weeks, but you want your. Emails to get clicks so that you show that you are a reputable provider to your email service provider so that you never get flagged down the road. How do you get clicks? I wanna see you have calls to action in the top half of every email, ideally buttons rather than in text links, so that we are getting more people to physically see those buttons than in text links, and they are bigger and easier to click on, you can also do things like get information from your people. You can see who's clicking. You can also add in surveys, you can incentivize replies. There are so many opportunities within your nurture emails, but ultimately. I don't want you to shy away from selling just because you aren't in a sales cycle. Just because you aren't in a launch actively does not mean that you can't position your offers. You are a business and you are here to make money. If you were just a person who wanted to send out a personal newsletter, great. Get a Substack. You can get a Substack and tell people what you're up to. You can go back to Zenga and get a blog if you wanna tell people what you're up to, you are a business. You pay for an email service provider, and it is expensive to live around here. Okay? So I want you to be making money even from your nurture emails. Is every email gonna make you money? Maybe, probably not. However you want people to know what you do so that you are there and positioned for when people buy from you. I will tell you this, I bought a pair of glasses probably four or five years ago from I buy direct.com. I don't even know if they're reputable. I have received probably three to seven emails a week from them ever since. I have not bought another pair of glasses since however. My glasses, my sunglasses specifically are super scratched, and I need to buy another pair of glasses soon. I'm probably going to go right back to, I buy direct and buy the same exact pair of sunglasses here soon. If I didn't have those emails, those 700 emails from them, I probably wouldn't remember if I had bought them from IBU Direct or LensCrafters or Zenni Optical. I really wouldn't know. But I know that I've worked with them before, which means when I log in, my prescription is probably gonna be right there and I just click and buy the same pair of sunglasses again. No, not all of your nurture emails are gonna make money, but they will keep you top of mind. They are a vital part of your funnel because they keep people in your ecosystem. They give you the opportunity to make people problem aware again and solution aware all of the freaking time because they stay in your ecosystem. So next week we're gonna talk about another top of funnel thing. We're going to talk about the copy that goes in ads. I'm bringing in Melissa Litchfield of Litchfield Media to talk about what copy specifically goes in your ads. And that will conclude our series on Funnels 1 0 1. So I have been your professor. My name is Sam. You can find me online@nomadcopyagency.com. Of course, on Instagram at nomad dot copy. If you want bots that write your opt-in page and your welcome emails for you, I'll make sure that those are linked below. If you need help with this, you can find me@nomadcopyagency.com slash contact. There's a form on there where you tell me what you need help with, and then it will automatically send you a link to get on my calendar so that we can talk about your project and get you selling in 2026. If you have questions, reach out to me on Instagram or via email, and I will see you next week when we talk with Melissa about what copy goes in your ads.