How An Email Marketing Funnel Works From Prospect To Loyal Customer

By Sean Tinney March 16, 2023

You may spend hours designing and writing a compelling email collection that explains the wonderful advantages of your product.

But in case you don’t have a start-to-finish plan for connecting along with your prospects at each stage of their buyer journey, you’re losing your time.

Thankfully, there’s a advertising and marketing device that may assist you determine learn how to talk along with your prospects and prospects whether or not they’ve simply joined your listing, or they’ve been long-time prospects.

It’s known as the advertising and marketing funnel.

The new advertising and marketing funnel

You may be aware of the cone-shaped advertising and marketing funnel. This old-school model of the advertising and marketing funnel required you to repeatedly fill the highest of the funnel with as many individuals as potential since just a few individuals traveled throughout to advocacy.

But it’s time to throw that old-school advertising and marketing funnel out the window.

The drawback with this model of the advertising and marketing funnel is that it tells you advertising and marketing efforts finish on the level of buy. After an individual turns into a paying buyer, your job is completed.

But that’s not an efficient technique to develop your small business.

Instead, we suggest you observe the brand new advertising and marketing funnel that appears extra like a bow tie that’s extensive on the left, slim within the center, and extensive on the best.

Your relationship along with your buyer shouldn’t finish on the backside of the cone-shaped advertising and marketing funnel. Instead, deal with buyer retention simply as a lot as you deal with lead era.

Why? Because completely satisfied prospects usually tend to share nice model experiences with their household and buddies. These loyal prospects turn out to be advocates to your model and so they have the facility to drive extra leads for you.

Marketing to prospects after they purchase from you is simply as essential as advertising and marketing to prospects earlier than they purchase from you.

Need proof? The numbers communicate for themselves: 84% of consumers will take action based mostly on suggestions from individuals they know.

And there’s a unprecedented upside to emphasizing buyer retention in your advertising and marketing funnel: extra money in your pocket. You could have heard of the Pareto Principle in advertising and marketing, which says that 80% of your income come from simply 20% of your prospects. 

So in case you’re not advertising and marketing to your prospects, you’re shedding out on big income.  

Let this be your wakeup name. This is your alternative to create a deeper relationship between you and your buyer. Get suggestions from them, and apply it to content material throughout all of the advertising and marketing funnel levels. 

In this put up, we’ll present you learn how to construct a robust email advertising and marketing funnel.

5 advertising and marketing funnel levels

Now that you simply perceive what the advertising and marketing funnel is, I’ll describe the levels of the advertising and marketing funnel and provide you with email advertising and marketing methods for every stage.

1. Awareness

Awareness is the primary of the advertising and marketing funnel levels.  During this stage, prospects which are strangers to your model and firm. This is your alternative to begin constructing a trusted relationship with them.

It is your job throughout this stage of the advertising and marketing funnel to show your worth to prospects by means of free, academic content material. They’re not prepared to purchase from you but — as a result of they don’t but perceive what you deliver to the desk. 

How to make use of email within the consciousness stage

Not certain what free content material to ship in your emails? Let’s say you’re a private coach who’s attempting to show your prospect into paying prospects and also you’re utilizing email as your primary supply of communication. Here are some concepts for content material you can embody in an automatic email collection to your prospects:

• Blog posts about vitamin or health
• A meals monitoring calendar worksheet
• An e-book that explains the well being advantages of being match
• A dwell 30-minute exercise webinar

(Here are 25 sensible lead magnet concepts to develop your email listing proper now.)

Here’s an instance:

Fitness influencer Kayla Itsines builds a relationship together with her prospects by exhibiting her experience and demonstrating the worth of her providers by giving her prospects a free week of her Bikini Body Guide exercise program.

When prospects join, they obtain an e-book with a full week of exercises to allow them to take a look at this system and see the worth of it for themselves.

2. Consideration

Once a prospect strikes previous the notice stage of the advertising and marketing funnel, they enter the consideration stage. In the consideration stage, a prospect is prepared to contemplate buying your providers or merchandise. They are desirous about studying extra about you and what you possibly can provide them.

Since you recognize extra about your prospect on this advertising and marketing funnel stage than you probably did through the consciousness stage, you possibly can ship them extra focused content material that addresses their particular ache factors. This helps construct belief between your prospect and your model, since you’re exhibiting them that you simply perceive them. 

How to make use of email within the consideration stage

So what sort of content material must you ship your prospects through the consideration stage? 

Let’s say that you’re a web based vitamin coach attempting to get extra results in think about buying your 8-week vitamin course. Here are a couple of examples of content material you can embody in your emails:

• A testimonial or case research exhibiting how different prospects obtained success along with your course
• A dwell vitamin webinar
• Your free podcast episodes, the place you discuss most of the ideas you educate in your course

Here’s an instance:

In this email, OptimizeMe features a testimonial from a buyer who noticed nice success after buying the masterclass. The testimonial is acceptable through the consideration stage, as a result of it pertains to prospects’ pursuits (vitamin) and introduces them to the product (8-Week Nutrition Essentials Masterclass) whereas exhibiting the worth of what they’ve to supply.

3. Conversion

It has lastly arrived: resolution time. Once your prospect is aware of the worth of your product and you’ve got educated them on the product itself by means of using social proof, webinars, weblog posts, and different academic content material, they’re able to determine whether or not or to not buy.

Once you’ve reached this advertising and marketing funnel stage, you can begin speaking about why your product and repair is healthier than your opponents’ and why it’s excellent to your prospect. Focus on the advantages of your product/service relatively than simply explaining options.

How to make use of email within the conversion stage

Here are a couple of techniques you should utilize to persuade your prospects to buy:

• Invite prospects to a gross sales webinar the place you present them your product/service and inform them the advantages
• Create an automatic email collection that describe a distinct advantage of your product/service
• Offer a free trial or give away samples in order that prospects can see the advantages for themselves
• Send prospects an email that provides a sale or low cost for buying inside a sure timeframe

Here’s an instance:

By providing reductions and offers by way of email, Freshly creates a way of urgency for his or her prospects. If prospects are desirous about buying however haven’t but, this email convinces them that now could be the proper time to take motion.

4. Loyalty

Once a prospect turns into a buyer, you could be tempted to pat your self on the again and transfer on to the subsequent prospect. However, forgetting about your prospects is a foul thought.

Unless you’ve a plan for creating buyer loyalty, you’ll most likely lose a lot of your prospects, losing plenty of your prior advertising and marketing efforts through the earlier advertising and marketing funnel levels.

Remember the Pareto Principle? Repeat prospects are too priceless to disregard. So what sort of email content material will increase loyalty and retention?

How to make use of email within the loyalty stage

Let’s say you’ve a web based espresso retailer. You promote subscriptions to your coffee-of-the-month membership, and also you don’t need your coffee-of-the-month members to lose curiosity and cancel their subscription. Here are a couple of concepts for priceless content material you can embody in your emails to extend retention:

• A month-to-month dwell stream to YouTube that describes the coffee-of-the-month and offers espresso brewing greatest practices.
• A survey that asks prospects how completely satisfied they’re with the coffees they’re receiving and what different kinds of espresso they’d prefer to get.
• Educational content material concerning the historical past of espresso.
• A 20 % low cost to prospects that buy a yearly subscription of your coffee-of-the-month membership.

Here’s an instance:

To retain their prospects and encourage loyalty, Canva sends academic emails to show their prospects learn how to use Canva.

 5. Advocacy

Advocacy occurs when your prospects turn out to be one thing greater than prospects: they turn out to be followers. 

Bringing prospects to this stage of the advertising and marketing funnel is extraordinarily priceless. The simplest advertising and marketing is referral advertising and marketing. That’s when your buddy tells you a sure product is superior, you might be more likely to buy that product since you belief your buddy.

How to make use of email within the advocacy stage

What are some methods to make use of email to show your prospects into raving followers?

• Identify prospects that love you and ship them an email asking them to refer you to their buddies
• Include a survey in an email to learn the way you can enhance your services or products
• Start an affiliate or loyalty program the place prospects get incentives for referring you
• Engage along with your advocates by replying to their emails, posting on social media, providing incentives for writing evaluations and taking part in testimonials

You additionally wish to acquire suggestions throughout this stage. The extra you hearken to your prospects, the extra you possibly can study and enhance your content material so it’s consistent with their challenges, wants, and desires. Tools like SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo make accumulating suggestions straightforward. 

Pro tip: Inside AWeber’s platform, you’ll find survey templates, too. All you need to do is add your individual content material into the templates and ship it to your prospects.

Here’s an instance:

To make their prospects really feel particular, Godiva gives reductions to their unique rewards members.

Create your individual email advertising and marketing funnel

Develop your email technique with the advertising and marketing funnel in thoughts. Doing so, you’ll convert extra prospects into prospects and extra prospects into followers, which implies extra money for your small business. Yay!

And with a device like email automation, it’s simpler than ever earlier than to maneuver individuals by means of your funnel towards advocacy.

Automation options will let you give every prospect the content material, data, or merchandise they want after they want it most. It personalizes their expertise in any respect areas of the funnel.

And as soon as it’s arrange, you by no means should raise a finger! You’ve successfully arrange an engine that generates passive revenue to gas your ardour.

Start implementing your email advertising and marketing funnel in your AWeber account. Don’t have an account but. No drawback, signing up is fast and simple.