Marketing email nurtures aren't dead.
People just don't want to hike through a 35-email journey to Mordor before they're allowed to see the product.
I'll admit it—I used to build those nurtures too. I’m sorry!
It required months of thought leadership, pain-point validation, industry stats, and a dramatic reveal of the product around email #17.
We marketers all convinced ourselves we were "building trust." Meanwhile, the buyer was screaming, "Can I just see the damn thing?"
Now buyers are doing their homework before they hit our HubSpot forms. They've searched Google, asked ChatGPT, compared competitors, watched videos, and read your pricing page. They don't need another email telling them they have a problem. They're living it.
What they want is a chance to understand your product before having to talk to someone. That's where your email nurtures can really help instead of hindering.
Instead of making the product the reward for finishing the nurture, it should be the centerpiece. Here’s how we rebuilt our awareness nurture program around enabling the buyer.
Our awareness nurture has one primary objective:
Get the person to engage with an interactive demo.
That's it. Hard stop.
I don’t ask them to book a meeting, or download three more assets, or consume every piece of thought leadership we've ever written. Just experience the product.
Once someone has engaged with a demo, they're no longer an awareness-stage prospect. They've crossed an important line—they've shown genuine curiosity about how the product works.
From there, the conversation changes.
Our workflow starts with a simple question:
Has this person already watched a demo?
If the answer is yes, they don't need this awareness nurture. They've already experienced the product, so we move them into a consideration-stage nurture that's focused on helping them evaluate Consensus and decide whether they're ready for a conversation with sales.
If they haven't watched a demo yet, this is for them! They join our awareness nurture.
We segment these by our primary ICP with the use cases according to their roles:
Each audience receives messaging that's relevant to their role, and cites real-world use cases and outcomes from either our own teams or our customers. Here’s a quick view of the workflow:
The “goal” in HubSpot for this workflow is to watch a demo. When a prospect does that, they’re removed from this workflow and added to our Consideration workflow, where we ask them to book a meeting.
Every email in the nurture includes multiple opportunities to explore a demo.
I usually include:
Yes, it's intentionally repetitive.
People click in different places. Some click the first button they see. Others read every word before deciding. And yes, some really do scroll all the way to the footer.
The goal is to get the product in front of your buyer as quickly as possible. It should be ridiculously easy for someone to try your product from any of these emails.
One of my favorite parts of this workflow is that the demo feels personal without requiring anyone on our team to manually customize it.
Inside Consensus, we can create a mail merge link for any demo.
That link uses HubSpot personalization tokens to automatically insert information like the recipient's name and company into the demo experience.
So when someone clicks a link in an email, they land on a demo that feels like it was created specifically for them. Something like this:
From there, they choose the path that's most relevant to their interests:
So, instead of forcing every prospect through the same product story, they get to build their own demo with the items that matter most to them.
Once someone engages with a demo, our automation takes over.
If they match our ideal customer profile and meet our qualification criteria, they become a Demo Qualified Lead (DQL). At that point, sales is notified.
But here's the important part: Our sales team doesn't just know that someone watched a demo.
They know:
They’ll get something like this:
That means the first conversation begins with real context. Our account executives aren't walking into discovery hoping to uncover what matters most. They already have a strong starting point.
I don't judge this nurture by open or click rates. Those metrics are useful diagnostics, but they're not the outcome I’m trying to create.
Instead, I measure one thing:
How many people actually experience the product?
Today, this workflow converts 2.58% of nurtured contacts into demo viewers.
For a workflow that runs almost entirely on autopilot, I’m happy with that result. My benchmark for email engagement with this audience is about 2% as they’re generally our coldest leads.
If you're thinking about adding interactive demos to your own nurture programs, here's what I'd recommend:
For years, marketers treated the product like the grand finale. We're finding the opposite works better.
Show people the product early. Let them explore at their own pace. Then build the rest of the journey around what they actually cared about.
The fastest way to build trust isn't another email. It's simply letting someone click "Try a Demo."