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Develop an Email Marketing Strategy

What is an email marketing funnel and why is it so important for your business?

Before you can create an email marketing funnel – you first need to know what an email marketing funnel is!

An email marketing funnel is a depiction of how your audience goes from a prospect into a customer. Exactly the same as a traditional sales funnel… but for emails! You can read more about Sales Funnels in one of our previous blog posts here.

There is an assumption that email marketing is dead and no one likes to receive spammy emails. Whilst the latter is true… email marketing is most certainly not dead! Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to sell your product or service! You just have to know how to use email marketing so that it works for you and you can avoid looking “spammy” to your email list.

If you want your email marketing to be successful (who wouldn’t?!) you need to be purposeful and have a strategy in place so that your prospects are receiving the right content at the right time. This is exactly what an email marketing funnel does for you.

Building your email list

Building an email list is the most crucial part of your marketing strategy because if you don’t have anyone on your email list, then who is going to read your well-crafted emails?

There are so many ways to build an email list. Opt-in forms on your website, landing pages, social media pages and lead magnets are just some of the ways to successfully obtain email addresses. It’s an exchange – what is your prospect going to receive in return for their email address…? They need to see the value. And value can be in the form of a free e-Book, discount offer or a subscription to a regular blog or newsletter delivered right to their inbox.

Nurturing your leads

The top of your email marketing funnel is where you do all the hard work. The top is where you need to nurture your leads. This means you don’t want to hard sell to your cold audience at this stage. This is the perfect opportunity to gain their trust first. The first email you should be sending out to your subscribers is a welcome email which should serve as an introduction and shouldn’t ask your audience to do anything. The purpose of a welcome email is to welcome your new subscriber and to chat about the benefits they will receive for joining your mailing list! 

Converting your leads

Now that you have built your list and have welcomed them by letting them know what they will receive from you – it’s time to convert your prospects. They know you, they like you and now they trust you so they would be more than happy to purchase from you.

Just because you have welcomed them and prepped them, doesn’t necessarily mean that they will buy from you straight away. Your work is still not complete yet! They might need a little nudge in the right direction to part ways with their hard-earned cash. The big-ticket email to convert is to have a call to action (CTA) Ask your prospect to click that button. Put it right in front of them so they can’t resist to take action and make it super easy and clear so that they put their hand in their wallet and spend money with you! When your email list trusts you, they are more likely to make a purchase from you when the time comes.

Retain your leads

So once you have made a sale, your job is complete right? Wrong. The funnel still gets narrower. A great and successful business keeps those customers coming back for more. You have to have something so enticing and irresistible that they simply cannot unsubscribe. This is the stage of the email marketing funnel where it’s about sending targeted content to your customer so that they can make the most out of your product or services. Add more value, add more offers – what is your customer going to get if they engage with your product or services again? What can they pass on to their friends and receive a reward for doing so? A happy customer is one that is going to stick around and tell all of their friends about how amazing your business and customer service is. Afterall social proof and word of mouth are the best way to bring new customers in. 

Automating your funnel

This is the part where your emails will work for you whilst you sleep! By using an email marketing tool (At Searchbox we like to use Active Campaign) most of the hard work will be automated for you. You can create special conditions so that your email contacts will receive specific emails based on their behaviour. For example, if a contact makes a purchase, you can assign them a tag so that they receive the retaining section of your emails and they then become a recurring customer. 

Triggers is an easy way to start your email automation without you needing to do anything. This is where all of your hard work pays off. Triggers is a great way to help you reach your leads immediately when they are the most engaged and interested in your business. You can add triggers at any stage including when a contact submits a form on your website or clicks a link on a previous email.  The benefits of adding triggered emails is that they can increase your open rates and can be highly targeted and personalised to your customer, therefore a higher conversion rate and more money in your pockets! 

This is an example of a trigger we use for our blog post email marketing;

Key takeaway

Creating an automated email marketing funnel will improve your efficiency and enable you to focus on what you do best in your business. Email marketing funnels can work for you whilst you sleep, but only if you set them up correctly from the get-go. 

Email marketing funnels, if set up the right way, will help you to establish an engaged customer list. Nurture your prospects with the right sequence of emails and automated triggers. Convert your prospects to paying customers using creative CTAs, the right pricing strategy and avoid ‘hard selling’ type emails. Continue to use email marketing to communicate special offers and updates to your existing customers so that you retain their loyalty.

If you haven’t grasped the wizardry that email marketing funnels are for your business, Book in a strategy call with us today, we’d love to help.

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