How to Create an Email Marketing Funnel?

Every business wants to acquire new customers and keep them around for as long as possible. Additionally, every business wants to keep in touch with their clients and stay at the top of their minds. An email marketing funnel is an excellent way to help you keep in touch with existing clients and help you stay in front of prospective clients.

Nurturing a relationship with your target audience is a great tactic for capturing new customers and retaining current customers. It’s a good idea to create a series of emails that will ultimately help you accomplish your business and marketing goals. This blog post serves as a detailed guide on how to set up an email marketing funnel.

1. Decide on the Content for Your Email Funnel

You will want to create various stages of your email marketing funnel. The first stage might focus on building awareness for you or your brand. Or, it might be something else; which we will talk about in a moment. But, the objective is to target each part of the funnel with stage-specific content that converts your audience into paying clients or customers. This will make more sense as you read about the various stages below.

So, how do you create converting content? You need to make sure your content is relevant and valuable. The content doesn’t even need to be original. What works especially well is if you use curated content. You can pull this content from your blog, YouTube channel, social media accounts, or use other marketing materials you have already published elsewhere.

The other obvious question is, what are the stages and types of content that should go in the funnel, and where in the funnel should this content be placed? The answer depends on your industry and the target audience. Let’s take a look at stages that can be used in an email marketing funnel.

Awareness Stage

Assuming the recipient either doesn’t know you at all, or they only barely know you, the first email they receive will address the awareness stage. For most email marketing plans, this may be the top of the funnel. In this stage, the content should be straight to the point. This could mean the recipient scrolls down a little further in the email or they could even be given a link to leave the email and go straight to a designated landing page. If you’re targeting unqualified prospects, the type of content should ideally include a short introduction and/or videos.

A video is usually more persuasive than text, and helps your audience get a better understanding of your service or product. Since these email recipients don’t necessarily know or care about your company yet, you should strive to really catch their attention with this email. Make them notice you!

Consideration Stage

If you are sending emails to people who already know you, then you may skip the previous stage and start your email funnel with the “consideration” stage. At this point, the subscribers know you exist. Now, they are thinking about how you can specifically add value to them. You want to share content in this stage that’s designed to help them imagine the value you provide. This can be done by sharing infographics, videos, blog posts, case studies, etc. Educate your audience on why they need you and the value you bring to them.

By the way, visual content is usually very effective at telling your story and keeping the email recipient engaged. Try to include helpful images or videos when possible.

Conversion Stage

In the conversion stage, you want to convey you are trustworthy and inspire your audience to pay for your products or services. A great way to do this is to provide an email that spotlights exactly what it is you’re selling, along with testimonials or something else to help convert them. They already now you exist, so the awareness stage is passed. The consideration stage has also been completed and they have already read emails that clearly convey the value you bring. You’ve educated them on that point. Now, tell them exactly what you are selling and give them a reason to buy it.

Closing/Loyalty Stage

 It might be that you already have a great sales process and you don’t need to implement the stages above into an email marketing funnel. If that’s the case, perhaps your email strategy should tap in on this last stage. Once someone has become a customer or client, you can put them into a loyalty stage. This stage is focused on retention. If you sold them an on-going service, you should use this stage to keep them using your service for years to come. If you sold a product, this stage could be used to encourage them to purchase related products in the future.

Another way to use the loyalty stage is to convince the email recipient to send you referral business. Depending on your business, there are multiple ways you could create a loyalty email. Just make sure the email is relevant and provides value to your customer or client. Also, make sure it provides value to you.

2. Select a Layout For Your Email Marketing Funnel

How do you decide on the best layout for your email marketing funnel? First, you analyze your business goals. Make sure you focus on core activities instead of planning too many tasks. If you plan well, it will be much easier for you to stay on top of your email marketing. Here are some key points to consider when planning the layout:

• People want quality content. Make sure whatever you share has value to the reader.
• They aren’t so interested in repetitive content. Unless there is a really good reason to do so, don’t send the same thing over and over again. Otherwise, your recipient is likely to unsubscribe.
• The funnel should be crafted to meet the specific needs of your audience. To achieve this, you must understand what your readers need.
• The most frequently used email layout is quite possibly the inverted pyramid. Consider using this same approach.

Be sure to include the essential points of the offer and a call to action. The idea is to use an attention-grabbing headline and supporting information. Some brands use plain text and hyperlinks while others use fancy, stylish designs. Decide what works best for you. And possibly experiment with both options to see what gets the best results.

Apart from that, you should ensure that white space is your best friend. Also, avoid writing big blocks of text. Instead, make the email more streamlined and easy to digest. And as far as the font is concerned, don’t use too many font sizes. Aim for about 2-3 colors that match your brand and make sure the emails are easy to read.

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3. Decide on Landing Pages

A landing page will be used in every stage of the funnel to further enhance your marketing effectiveness. Is your landing page creating a pathway to sales? If it’s not generating leads, you should make some changes. When you send an email, you want the subscribers to take action.

Make sure your landing page is optimized for high conversions. And since the success will depend on the headline, it should be captivating. If fact, you will most likely want to use an inverted pyramid approach for your landing page, just as with your email. Also, you can use this landing page for more than just email marketing. If you run ads on Google AdWords, social media, or somewhere else, you will likely want to send the people who click those ads to this same landing page.

Creating quality landing pages is also helpful for building trust with your customers. This is even more true when you include contact details at the bottom of the landing page. Your target audience wants to know they can contact you if needed. When people know they can easily reach you, it helps inspire confidence in your authenticity.