With impressive open rates of over 40% and ROI of a whopping 3600% , maximizing at $45, email marketing boasts one of the most effective customer acquisition channels.
Combine it with the potential of email funnels, strategically designing a series of email campaigns, leading potential customers toward conversions, and you get an unbeatable marketing strategy to grow your business exponentially.
For a business looking forward to leveraging email funnels, here’s a detailed guide explained with the help of examples that will get you started with your first email funnel in 2024.
A marketing funnel is a set of steps a prospect goes through in order to become a customer for a business.
It is a top-to-bottom designed system to:
Here’s an example of a marketing funnel:
An email marketing funnel is a framework used to strategically structure and streamline email campaigns to guide potential customers through various stages in their customer journey.
Awareness Stage: Potential customers’ first contact with your brand, making them aware of your existence, making a connection, and stating who you are and what you stand for.
Engagement Stage: Share what you offer, your product or service. How can you help them, and what problems are you solving for them?
Consideration Stage: This is where you go all in with your offer. Keep it direct. Add a simple and clear CTA. The goal here is to make them excited for the next stage- conversion.
Conversion Stage: This stage is about making the final conversion towards purchase.
Retention Stage: Focus on retaining customers and building long-term relationships with them, keeping them engaged, and achieving brand loyalty with customers.
Here are some top benefits of email marketing funnels:
Read More: Ways To Drive Customer Engagement In Email Marketing Campaigns
Here's how you create email marketing funnels across various stages, including the best practices involved and examples.
First, set an objective or goal as to what you specifically want to achieve with the email marketing funnels. Then, ensure you have a strategy goal aligning with your overall marketing and business goals.
Learn about your audience's :
This will help you craft much more relevant and effective messaging that will keep the prospects in the funnel.
Conduct market research to grasp a basic understanding of the territory you’re getting into. Utilize social media platforms, forums, review platforms, and comparison websites to see what customers want.
Categorize your data into various segments to create a buyer’s persona, where the categories include who your ideal prospect is, their pain points, what they prefer about your competitors, their expectations, and more.
Map the entire customer journey, displaying various touchpoints of your business through which the prospect will interact. It allows you to answer the four essential marketing questions- who, when, where, and how.
Opt-in forms allow businesses to get express written consent from the prospect to receive business communication from your brand. Build engaging opt-in popups and forms to capture leads and build your email list.
Here's an example of an Opt-in form by wpbeginner:
This is a pop-up form, a type of opt-in form that appears on the website after getting triggered by an event such as exit intent or some amount of time spent on the website.
The planning phase also will require getting ready with a robust email marketing application to send emails. You can always start with free email marketing automation software; however, it has its limitations.
Consider communication cloud platforms like Route Mobile and their smart email delivery platform, SendClean, offering numerous tools and features ideal for a variety of email marketing campaigns.
Using opt-in forms, landing pages, and pop-up forms to get the contact information, turning the visitor into a subscriber. You can also use lead magnets, providing them value in exchange for their email addresses.
Welcome emails are one of the effective ways to engage with your new subscribers and create awareness. They have a 4 x open rate and a 5 x click rate compared to other emails.
It not only creates first impressions and engagement but also helps build trust, set expectations, and enforce the brand. It further aids in generating more revenue, as much as an average of up to 320% more than other marketing emails.
Here’s how AirBnB sends a welcome email guiding the users through the simple steps required to start using the platform. They keep the design and content both simple and minimalist with an easy-to-understand CTA.
To capture leads, the best method is to offer something valuable in exchange for the prospect’s contact information, i.e., using freebies, free tools, and webinars as lead magnets.
Here’s how HubSpot use offering its free tool to capture leads:
Once captured, nurture your leads, offering them engaging content to retain and further move down the funnel.
Use high-quality, personalized, relevant, and helpful email content, social media, and retargeting ads to do so.
Leverage segmentation to categorize your email list based on various behaviors, interests, etc, for more personalized content.
According to a BrightLocal survey, 88% of consumers trust online reviews and testimonials. And 92% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision.
At this stage, nurture your email list by building trust and establishing your brand's authority with your subscribers.
You can send emails featuring:
Must Read: How To Integrate Omnichannel Communication With SMS, Email, And Voice?
This is the stage where you focus heavily on sending promotional emails, sales announcements, discounts, exclusive offers, and other marketing emails aiming to convert your leads or subscribers into customers.
However, keep the content more of a nudge to genuinely move customers down the funnel to make the buying decision. Avoid being pushy sales-sy, and use clear and compelling CTAs, making it easy for the subscribers to follow.
The funnel doesn’t end with conversion or making the purchase. Keeping your customers engaged through personalized content, exclusive offers, and exceptional customer assistance is crucial.
In this stage, you must build a long-term relationship with the customers, increase repeat purchases and customer retention rates, and build brand loyalty.
Sending abandoned cart emails when your customers leave products in the cart can boost the purchase rate dramatically. In fact cart abandonment emails have an open rate of 39.7% and a click-through rate of 23.33%.
Not to mention, utilizing abandoned cart users is such an untapped opportunity. According to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is approximately 70%.
Here’s how Dollar Shave Club reaches out to their abandoned cart customers using their witty and personable marketing approach with the subject line “Where did you go?”
Email funnels are the cornerstone of a robust email marketing strategy, helping businesses attract new leads and convert them to customers with high retention rates.
With such outstanding email open, engagement, and conversion rates integrated to a series of systematic and strategically crafted email campaigns focused on the customer journey, email funnel marketing is yet to be fully leveraged by the business.
Email funnels are inherently complex, so seeking an email marketing automation platform/service is always better. SendClean, a Route Mobile company, is a sophisticated email platform ideal for automation, personalization, and building budget-friendly campaigns, helping to design a seamless email funnel. To get you started, contact our experts today!
What Are The Steps In Email Marketing Funnel?
The different steps or stages of an email marketing funnel are awareness, engagement, consideration, conversion, and retention.
What Is The Difference Between Email Marketing And Sales Funnel?
Email marketing funnels are focused on utilizing email communications specifically to guide potential customers through different stages of conversion. However, the sales funnel leverages a broader range of communication channels, including multiple marketing and sales activities, to convert prospects into customers.
What is an Email Funnel Strategy?
Email funnel strategy refers to all the planning, implementation, and optimization practices focused on driving customers from their first interaction to the final conversion.
