What is an Email Marketing Funnel – How to Create One for Conversions in 2024

Wondering what is an email marketing funnel and how it helps in lead generation? You have landed on the right page.

Email marketing is the most influential digital marketing technique for both B2B and B2C companies. That being said, you know the importance of building an email list and creating brand value. But, do you know how to convert an email subscriber into a customer?

That’s where the email marketing funnel comes into the picture. Simply put, an email marketing funnel guides you in sending the right emails to your subscribers depending on where they stand currently in their buyer journey.

In this blog post, we will explain the importance of an email marketing funnel and how to create one to improve conversions and ROI.

What is an Email Marketing Funnel?

An email marketing sales funnel describes the sales journey of the subscriber from a prospective lead to a customer. This is often supported by educational content and persuasive email communications.

For example, if you’ve designed an email finder software that finds and verifies business email addresses from LinkedIn, your potential customer follows these steps over a course of the time:

1. Visit your landing page
2. Sign up for a free trial/Install a free chrome extension.
3. Get a welcome email, explaining yourself and what you do.
4. Receiving emails promoting your new software upgrade.
5. Click the link in the email and purchase the monthly/annual subscription.
6. Continue to receive emails and updates on your software-related announcements.

Once they sign-up for your email list, each email in the funnel walks you through a series of updates that motivates taking the desired action. Remember, it’s not over once the customer does any purchase. It’s important to continue sending follow-up emails even after purchase to nurture the relationships and build a loyal network.

Stages of an Email Marketing Funnel

Now you have a fair understanding of your customer’s email journey, let’s visualize it.

See the graphical illustration of a standard email marketing funnel:

Source

Your prospect becomes a part of this funnel in five different ways:

1. Awareness

Every customer’s buying journey starts with the Awareness stage. Prospects get to know about your brand and start exploring what you offer. They subscribe to your newsletters. At this stage, you should help them discover and evaluate your product. This is the best time to send welcome emails and start a healthy conversation.

2. Consideration

Once the subscriber shows interest in your product, they’ll automatically start learning about your business and what you have for them.

And, it’s vice-versa. At the consideration stage, you too should be learning about your customers. Start by sharing your brand story, your value propositions, and what you’re selling. Sharing product newsletters is the best way to kick-start at the consideration stage.

3. Conversion

Now you have built a good rapport with your subscribers, they can be considered sales-qualified leads. At the conversion stage, they want to discover how your product will solve their problems.

At this stage, you must focus on persuasive selling, i.e. explain the benefits of your product, how your product is the best solution to their problems, and back your claims with testimonials.

4. Loyalty

Once your leads try your product and liked it, they become your customers.

At the loyalty stage, your customers come back to purchase and use the product. It’s easy to retain an existing customer, rather than struggling to find new ones.

You must nurture the current customers by sending them valuable and relevant emails and enhancing their user experience. This improves customer loyalty toward your brand.

5. Advocacy

Now your customers know your brand well and are happy. They’re ready to share their reviews and many times do word-of-mouth marketing for you on social media. Here, your focus must be on getting more genuine reviews or feedback to improve your product.

Further, to encourage advocacy, set up a reward system for customers if they refer your brand to others.

Why do you need an email marketing funnel?

Many email marketers are confused about what email marketing tactics will work. Hence, they randomly put effort into copying others’ strategies, and no wonder they fail.

Defining a well-constructed email marketing funnel lets you study the customer journey. You can guide potential buyers from one stage to the next.

An email funnel is the best option for those who can’t afford to spend huge on social media advertising (also here, sometimes you can’t identify which stage the buyer is in).

Benefits of building an email funnel:

• An organized and targeted email funnel simplifies the customer journey. You no longer should worry about your next email to subscribers.
• Since the email funnel has given a clear picture of your customer journey, you’re aware of their probable decision process at each stage of the journey. You, therefore, have enough information to craft the upcoming emails and eliminate the guesswork. Moreover, since you have correctly highlighted their decision process, your emails will persuade them to move from their current position in the journey to the next level.
• As an email funnel enables personalization, you can easily send direct messages to each person according to their standing in the funnel. Personalized emails tend to have more email open rates and click-through rates. Move beyond addressing your user’s only first name in the email. Establish direct conversations that address their problems and needs.

For example, at the awareness stage, your emails must help customers get familiar with your brand. When they move to the conversion stage, your emails must offer discounts, free trials, or a money-back guarantee that encourages them to purchase your product.

• The right email funnel strategy enhances customer engagement. Emails are the best way to directly interact with customers and make them stick to your brand. A healthy customer engagement allows you to nurture customers and encourage them to take the desired action for your business.
• With email funnels, you’ll also know at what stage your customers are turning away. This will help you pause your marketing efforts and reconsider your strategies. You’ll thus be able to examine the impact of your emails on the customer journey.

What is the difference between Email Marketing and Sales Funnel?

Many people confuse the email marketing funnel with the sales funnel. That’s because both funnels aim to maximize ROI via brand recognition. Both funnels also help businesses to visualize their customers’ journey. However, there’s a slight difference between an email funnel and a sales funnel.

An email marketing funnel is a procedural and high-level strategy that guides a customer from being completely ignorant of your brand to a well-aware, happy, and loyal customer. An email marketing funnel starts by creating awareness and ends with customers becoming brand advocates where they actively promote your brand.

A sales funnel is all about generating sales where you plan to drive people to take the desired step. Here, you persuade customers to make a purchase. The sales funnel is a part of the marketing funnel.

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How to create an Email Marketing Funnel for Conversions?

It’s the time to create an actionable email marketing funnel to pull your subscribers, engage them and create a network of loyal customers.

1. Build an Email List

An active email marketing strategy starts with building an authentic email list. It’s no use building a well-defined email funnel without including the emails of your target prospects.

So, how to build the email lists?

Well, there are many options available. You can manually search for emails or use some software that automates email searching. With manual search, you can manage to get a few emails but software helps you generate a list of 100s of emails within a minute. Moreover, they’re verified which isn’t possible with a manual search.

So which is the best email finder software?

AeroLeads helps you to find business emails and phone numbers from LinkedIn. AeroLeads automates the process of email searching from LinkedIn and boosts your lead generation efforts by creating a list of unique emails in less time.

Just head towards AeroLeads search bar or install its free chrome email finder extension and enter the name of your prospect or company and hit search. You will receive all the required information starting from name, profession, email address, company, and up to 15 data points.

Key Features

• Find business emails from LinkedIn or find emails by uploading names and companies.
• Find as many as 15 data points like full name, job title, location, generic company emails, etc.
• Export the data to CSV or transfer data to Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, FreshSales, Zapier, etc with 1 click.
• Rock-solid support via chat, email, and phone.

Pricing

AeroLeads offers four types of pricing plans.

• Take Off $49/month – 2000 credits, find emails, names, company names, etc., only 1 user.
• Climb $149/month – 8000 credits, find all contact details, integrations, and 5 users.
• Cruise $499/month – 30,000 credits, all contact details, unlimited users, and integrations.
• Enterprise – As per your requirements

2. Awareness – New Leads/Subscribers

As seen before, awareness is all about generating new leads. Here, people should discover your brand or product either through your digital marketing tactics or during their online search. At the awareness stage, your leads are looking for a trusted source to help them diagnose their problems. Also, they’re searching for what possible solutions are available in the market. To capture their attention, start with sharing solution-oriented advice to create awareness among them.

This can be achieved by:

• Hosting Webinars

Hosting webinars is the best way to collect your prospects’ email addresses in exchange for actionable tips or advice. Webinar speakers are experts in their field and people like to hear the solutions straight from the expert’s mouth along with enhancing their knowledge base.

• Regular blogging

Blogging covers various topics related to the prospect’s problems. If your prospects can relate their problems with the blog content, they will subscribe to receive more relevant updates.

• Social Media Advertising

If you’re able to successfully run Google ads, Facebook ads, or LinkedIn ads, your subscriber count will increase significantly.

• Optimized landing pages

A well-optimized landing page rank higher in SERPs. If your landing page content is compelling and persuasive, they will become your subscribers. To enhance their experience, you can create pop-ups or use lead magnets (offer free downloadable templates, discount codes, etc.).

Once you receive their email addresses, send a welcome email and create a good first impression.

Example of a welcome email-

3. Consideration – Lead engagement

Here, the leads or subscribers start taking interest in your brand or product. They want to test you as a reliable solution for their problems.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to start ‘selling’ right away.

At the consideration stage, prospects are interested in free demos, trials, customer reviews, case studies, whitepapers, FAQs, etc. Some may schedule a consultation call with you.

To encourage them you can send emails related to:

1. Case studies -Email with a short description of how one of your customers solved the problems with your product and link to that case study.
2. Whitepapers/e-books – Free downloads.
3. FAQs
4. Quiz

Example of SEJ sending email that offers free e-book download.

4. Conversion – Taking Desirable Action

Conversion is the heart of the email marketing funnel. Your subscribers are convinced and ready and you can encourage them to take the desired action. Conversion can be any one of these actions: a free trial, a free demo, pricing comparisons, customer reviews, or a direct purchase. Your emails should persuade them to try your product and create a sense of urgency.

Your conversion-led emails should encourage subscribers to invest in your product. You can use the following tactics:

• Persuasive email subject lines that boost open rates.
• Actionable and compelling CTA buttons such as “Buy Now”, “Get Demo Now”, and “Free 7-days trial”.
• Incentives such as ‘free delivery’, or ‘discounts’ easily persuade them to try your product.
• Personalized emails
• Create a sense of urgency by using countdown timers. This pushes people to make quick decisions.

Example of Udemy sending an email including a time-sensitive sale offer.

5. Loyalty – Nurture Relationships

The hard part is over and your subscribers are now customers. But that isn’t the end of your job.

Nurturing customers is necessary because it’s expensive and time-taking to search for new customers. Keep your customers engaged with meaningful and supportive emails. That’s what happens in the loyalty stage. Here, your job is to keep your customers happy so that they come back again.

Remember to remain engaged with your customers by delivering what they need. Offer special discounts and keep sending follow-up emails that offer tips on how they can get more value from your product. If you’re not getting expected results, run email surveys to know their expectations better.

6. Advocacy – Brand Promotion

Advocacy is the stage where your satisfied customers will promote your brand to others. They leave reviews for your brand on social media and other relevant platforms. That boosts your conversion rate automatically.

To turn them into brand advocates through your emails, use these ideas-

• Send emails asking customers to leave a review on popular sites.
• Ask customers to write or record a testimonial explaining in short their experience with your brand or product. That could be featured on your website.
• Set up rewards or purchasing incentives for customers who are referring new customers.

Build Your Email Marketing Funnel Today!

As you can see, an email marketing funnel is a wonderful technique to monitor your customers’ buying journey and implement the right tactics to achieve the desired action. Every company should create an email marketing funnel to improve its conversion rate and maximize ROI.  With the right strategy, you’ll easily build relations and loyal customers in no time.