The sales funnel looks exactly the same for all brands, but how that sales funnel plays out, and how you move prospects farther down the conversion funnel can vary a lot.
Ultimately, the goal of all brands is to get as many people to the top of the funnel, and then work actively to get as many people to the final step, which is a conversion, while, at the same time, losing a few prospects as possible throughout the process.
The email sales funnel looks no different from a regular sales funnel, but how you operate on each step of it in order to get people to move to the next step is a lot different from other marketing methods.
Now, unfortunately, many brands completely neglect the sales funnel and have no real strategy for how they’re going to get people to convert. They work super hard to get people to the top of the funnel, and then, just leave them there. In other words, they have no real strategy for how they’re going to get people to ultimately convert – even though that is the most important part. And as a result, these businesses see an incredibly low conversion rate.
In a perfect world, there would be just as many conversations as leads, but today, this isn’t the case. This is why you need to have a clearly defined sales funnel, and a clear strategy for how you’re going to get people to convert.
The good news is that an email is a tremendous tool for doing just that.
In this post, we’re looking at how you can create your email marketing funnel and get more conversions.
What Is An Email Funnel?
Let’s start with the foundation.
You probably already know about the sales funnel, and an email funnel is actually no difference. The only difference is that you leverage the powerful marketing tool known as email.
The sales funnel is essentially a map of customer’s journey through different stages that a customer goes through before purchasing a product.
The stages that make up a sales funnel are:
- Initial contact
- Qualification
- Develop solution
- Presentation
- Evaluation
- Negotiation
- Closing
What happens in this process can be translated into only four stages which are:
- Awareness
- Leads
- Prospects
- Sales
Once you’ve gotten your prospects through these stages, you have a sale. But in order to get a sale, you need to have a strategy for how you can move them through those stages. And an email funnel is essentially the use of email marketing for getting your prospects through them.
1. Get prospects and leads
First thing first, in order to get people to buy from you, you need to have people at the top of your funnel that you can actually work with to move farther down it.
This is essentially all types of marketing. Now that you’re going to be using an email marketing funnel, you need to collect email addresses of your prospects so you can start warming your leads up, and for doing this, the best method is by using a subscription form.
With SendPulse, you can create powerful subscription forms and have full control over each element within them as well as the visual appearance of it. Design a subscription form that aligns with the rest of your website, and only ask for the most important information, as it has been found that the more fields you include, the more you’ll decrease your conversion rate.
2. Choose an email marketing service
Now, if you’re going to be working with email marketing, you need an email service.
Sending out emails manually one by one just won’t cut it, and frankly, you don’t have that much time. Instead, you need to be automating the process in order to streamline so you can focus on the more important things.
With SendPulse, you can automate the complete email process, or, create specific email campaigns and then have the emails sent out automatically. Getting started with SendPulse is completely free, and then if you want to take your email marketing funnel to the next level to drive even more sales, you can upgrade your plan.
Choosing an email marketing service will take a lot of stress and hard work from your shoulders, and if you take your funnel seriously, manually just won’t cut it.
3.Warm up your leads
In order to move people further down your email sales funnel, you need to consistently be in touch with them. People won’t move down it all by themselves.
This is why you need to make sure that you send out email regularly to them so they get more familiar with your brand, but most importantly, so that they always have your brand on top of mind and never forget about you.
But be careful so you’re not spamming them. When emailing them, make sure you have an actual reason to email them. Focus on providing them value as much as you can, and don’t have as a main focus to try to sell to them just yet, because if they’re new to your funnel, remember that they have to go through all stages before they’re ready to buy, and if they just signed up, they aren’t ready just yet. This is why the focus at the beginning is to warm them up.
4.Personalize
Personalization is a powerful thing in marketing, and for moving people down your email sales funnel, it is tremendously powerful.
By personalizing your emails, you’re not only increasing open-rates and click-through rates, but you’ll also make the email feel much more like a conversation between them and you, rather than just an email blast that has gone out to several thousand other people. In that sense, it will make people value your emails much more. It will also contribute to making them much more loyal and engaged in your brand.
This is great news when working to get them to convert.
Normally, personalizing email is a hard thing to do, but with SendPulse, it is as easy as 123. Since you’ve already created a lead-generation form (subscription form), you’ve probably set it up so that you get some basic information about your leads. If you’ve only asked for their email address, SendPulse allows you to effortlessly change your form as you go and add more fields. Now, you might be questioning why you want to add more fields when it leads to a lower conversion rate, but the good news is that with the valuable information that you get from the added fields, you’ll be able to have a greater impact with your marketing emails, so in that sense, it well weights up the short-term downside.
With the information you’ve gotten from your lead generation form, you want to add it to your SendPulse email subscriber list to the respective subscriber. After that, you want to set up how you want to personalize your emails, for example by country or name, that are then implemented in the emails that are then automatically sent out by the SendPulse email software.
5.Build a sequence
Your email sales funnel is all about taking your leads’ hands and guiding them through your funnel, and the best way to do this using email is to send them email sequences. In case you’re new to the term, an email sequence is a series of emails that are sent out after each other which warm up your prospects more and more, and help you build upon your messaging.
Now, this might sound complicated, but using SendPulse, building your email sequence is actually extremely easy. And best of all, the complete process can be automated.
With the feature Automation 360, you can set up trigger emails that are sent out when your customers perform certain actions, or at specific times. This can be, for example when they’ve been a part of your email list for a week, or for a month, or on a specific date.
Doing this allows you to send the right emails at the right time, and therefore warm up your prospects to ultimately get them to move closer to the conversion stage.
6. Convert!
By now, you should have warmed up your prospects enough so they are ready to buy.
Therefore, it is time to come at them with email messages that are focused on getting them to convert.
In doing this through email, you want to include a clearly visible and powerful call to action, and you want to leverage a CTA button to give it an even better effect.
To convert your prospects, you need to come at them with an offer they can refuse. Since new customers are much harder to convert than old customers, you need to give them an incredible offer, and then, you can work to upsell them and sell to them time and time ver.
SendPulse allows you to effortlessly implement appealing and powerful CTA buttons not only in your subscription forms on your website, but also in your emails, so when it is time to convince people to buy from you, you can ensure the highest possible conversion rate.
