How To Boost Your Sales With A Killer Email Marketing Funnel
Think of the stages of your sales funnel like a roller coaster. Each step is a hill that you need to go through before reaching the next level. The longer it takes to get to the next level, the more likely it is people will get tired of trying — and walk away.
One of the most overlooked tools of any entrepreneur is the sales funnel. The concept of a sales funnel is quite simple – it allows you to track how many people go through each stage of your sales process. The longer it takes to go through a sales funnel, the less likely it is that people will reach the end and buy. Therefore, you have to invest in increasing the amount of time that people spend on each level — or risk losing potential customers.
What is a marketing funnel?
So, what is the marketing funnel? The marketing funnel is a strategic framework that helps you organize your entire sales and marketing process (from acquiring customers to building relationships with prospects and customers), from top-of-funnel actions like creating content and sending emails, to acquisition of new subscribers and referral traffic from existing customers.
According to Elias St. Elmo Lewis, a pioneer in the field of consumer psychology and advertising, every purchase begins with four steps, also known as “AIDA”: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. These stages will help you create optimal marketing funnel for your business.
Awareness: The prospect is aware of their problems and possible solutions for them.
Interest: The prospect shows interest in a group of services or products.
Desire: The prospect begins to evaluate a certain brand.
Action: The prospect decides whether to purchase.
Benefits of a marketing funnel
Marketing funnels are important for your marketing efforts as it allows you to target your audience and optimize the experience for every touchpoint in order to gain more customers and maximize conversions. The goal of a structured marketing plan and metric analysis aligned to the various stages of the funnel is to improve the sales process and fine-tune your marketing strategy. The buyer's journey can be better understood and followed using marketing funnels.
In addition to establishing themselves as innovators in their industry, companies using these techniques can also improve customer service. Having the pipeline in place provides a standard guideline for the sales reps.
A potential customer leaving the funnel can be traced to the stage at which they left, revealing the reason for leaving. Through conversational marketing solutions, businesses can improve the online shopping experience of their customers. Customer journeys should be tied together as an experience from the awareness stage to the brand loyalty stage.
Identifying your funnel stages also helps you understand your potential clients' motivations for research and purchase. By sharing information about the product and selling its features and benefits, marketing warms up and nurtures new leads.
With an understanding of your target customers, their behavior/intent, and your brand's growth and diversification, it becomes critical to be able to adapt your marketing funnel accordingly.
Consumer behavior can be controlled at a multitude of levels using strategic marketing funnels. By doing so, you can deliver content to your audience at the right time. You can keep leads moving towards the next stage of your funnel by mapping out your customers' journey and delivering tailored content to meet their needs.
Building a marketing funnel: 4 Steps
In order to engage and retain your leads, you should begin with the four basic steps to push your subscribers through your email marketing funnel.
Top of the Funnel: Generate Leads
At the beginning of the funnel, potential customers don't know much about your company. This approach is appropriate for targeting prospects who need to be educated about your product or service.
Rather than focusing on selling, your content here should aim to educate your audience about topics related to your brand. Create content based on your audience's interests after researching and analyzing what they want.
2. Middle of the Funnel: Lead Nurture Subscribers
The Mid-funnel is the next phase in which you start building trust with your prospects by convincing them to buy. It's a stage in the buyer’s journey that helps you build trust and convince your leads about your product or service.
Following the implementation of a successful lead generation strategy, you need to stay in touch with the leads. You can set up segmented lists to send different value propositions, products, reviews, etc., to various subscribers. With the right automation software, your subscribers can be automatically categorized based on the lead magnets and forms they signed up for, their website and e-mail activity, and their demographics.
3. Bottom of the funnel: convert leads into customers
You've primed your subscribers for the big conversion if they've made it past the first two steps. Providing value has helped you build a relationship with your subscribers, which has sparked an emotional reaction from them. Step three involves sending more aggressive conversion strategy-driven personalized nurturing campaigns at the bottom of the funnel.
Include these emails:
Retargeting - Your warmest leads, such as abandoned ecommerce carts, can be retargeted by delivering ads driven by their preferences.
Time-sensitive offers - Your warm leads will convert more quickly if you provide them with deadlines in urgent emails. Subscribers who spend a lot of time on your website may receive special offers and coupons in these emails.
Onboarding - Lead magnets can be used to convert trial customers into full-paying customers once the free trial expires.
4. Repeat funnel: retain customers.
The goal of customer retention is to increase the number of repeat customers and extract as much value as possible from them. Keeping customers happy, making repeat purchases, and not defecting to competitors is the goal of customer retention.
How can you achieve this? Consider the following:
Reward for brand loyalty
Be personable
Offer one-time upsells
Use relevant email campaigns
Expand customer service to social media channels
Ask for feedback
Wrap Up
You can turn prospect leads into repeat customers with an email funnel marketing campaign developed for conversions. By using automation software, you can not only build an email list but provide value to your leads as well. Boosting your ROI through an email funnel can also reduce time-consuming tasks.
You can start by following the above steps to help you convert a customer:
Grow your email list by using opt-in forms with a promise of a valueable content
Nurture your subscribers with what you promised (solution to their problems, free content, etc)
Converting them into paying customers with time sensitive and exclusive offers
Retaining your customers by rewarding them