Whether they’re browsing a website or reading an email, today’s consumer expects personalized content from brands. Consumers now look to brands to help them make informed decisions. It’s the marketer’s job to deliver that information — and become genuinely useful to the customer.

This is the biggest challenge that brands face today — as well as their biggest opportunity. Lead generation alone is not enough anymore; companies have to nurture the leads. When they do, the payoff can be great. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. On average, nurtured leads produce 20% more sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads.

This presents an opportunity for email to be effective for more than generating leads; it can also be effective for nurturing them toward purchase and retention. The vast majority, 78%, of B2B marketers say email is the most effective channel for lead nurturing.

Here are two brands that skillfully use email to nurture leads through the evaluation stage of the customer journey. (To see Joel Book’s full presentation about evaluation, watch this video.)

Volvo Construction Equipment

To many people, Volvo is a well-known car brand, but the company also manufactures heavy construction equipment. When a potential buyer inquires about a product listing and provides his or her email, Volvo tracks that incoming lead with a sophisticated lead-management workflow. It automatically qualifies the lead, records it in Volvo’s CRM system (integrated with Salesforce Marketing Cloud), sends a report to the sales rep, and generates a thank you email for the subscriber.

This isn’t unusual. Many brands send a thank you email to new subscribers. But Volvo takes it a step further. In addition to the “Thank you for your interest. You will be contacted shortly,” language, the company includes an invitation to explore additional content relevant to the subscriber’s original inquiry and directly links to that content.

For example, when Volvo gets a lead for an articulated hauler — machines that go for more than $400,000 used and more than $600,000 new — they use the thank you email to bring the buyer right back to product videos, specs, user reviews and other content to help inform the buyer’s decision.

This additional content serves a couple of very important purposes — for both the buyer and the buyer journey.

For buyers, it aids them in their evaluation of the brand and products, and in their decision-making. For the buyer journey, it keeps customers engaged with the brand and helps move them through the evaluation stage toward making an informed purchase.

Volvo Construction Equipment’s digital marketing solutions help dealers to sell $100 million worth of new and used equipment each year.

Blue Nile

Blue Nile is an example of a B2C brand that also skillfully aids the buyer’s decision-making process through email, specifically through a well-executed cart-abandonment series designed to re-engage buyers.

Some 68% of buyers who place products in an online shopping cart will not complete that purchase. We’ve all done this. We put something in our cart, go to enter our credit card info, then get distracted on our way to grab our wallet in the other room. This represents a major opportunity for marketers to take advantage of re-engaging these buyers.

Blue Nile deploys a cart-abandonment “sandwich” series that consists of three emails:

1. The first email reminds buyers of the items they’ve left sitting in their cart. It also cautions them that product availability changes constantly, politely prompting them to complete their purchase.

2. Sometimes we abandon items because we think we like them, but aren’t 100% sold. It’s the digital version of ditching something next to the candy bars in the checkout lane. Blue Nile’s second email addresses this by showing buyers items similar to the ones they initially showed interest in. Maybe the perfect item is in there. If nothing else, this email re-engages the buyer and brings them back into interacting with the brand.

3. The third email reminds the buyer of the item once more, includes links to similar items, and adds an enticing offer such as free shipping.

How well do cart-abandonment campaigns work? The numbers look pretty good — 40% of cart abandonment emails are opened, 30% drive a purchase, and 27% drive click-through.

There are some important things to learn about cart-abandonment campaigns from the Blue Nile series. First, don’t rely on one email. Blue Nile’s three-part series gives the company three times at bat to re-engage that buyer. Second, timing is key. Blue Nile sends its email series out over the course of a week. According to eMarketer, 20% of emails sent within one hour of cart abandonment convert to sales.

This is a fully automated campaign. Once designed and tested, marketers at Blue Nile don’t have to plan these series individually for every potential buyer. They are able to automate the series through Salesforce Marketing Cloud. For more on how you can build and manage your own 1-to-1 customer journeys, check out Salesforce Email Studio.

Check out the rest of the video series from Joel Book, Senior Director of Digital Marketing Insight at Salesforce.