How to create an engaging email funnel
An engaging email funnel is an essential marketing tool for business growth. From a subscriber to a brand advocate, engaging email funnels work to build relationships and establish trust with potential customers.
An email funnel shows the journey of how a subscriber goes from a potential lead to a customer through a variety of emails such as educational and promotional communications. Throughout the email funnel, the four stages of the customer lifecycle - engagement, discovery, purchase and retention - are considered to help bring leads through to buying customers. Understanding the email funnel is super important for businesses as it’s a useful model for visualizing the customer journey from initial awareness all the way through to the conversion, helping us to produce the perfect email series for our subscribers.
You might be thinking it can be a slow process, but creating an email funnel is an incredibly effective marketing strategy. An email funnel is sent to a subscriber to create and nurture a relationship between the brand and the subscriber through a series of emails. The aim of an email funnel is to turn the subscribers into a customer so the emails sent to them should be effective and educating, establishing trust.
Of course, other forms of marketing are great. Social media is great for the audience to find your service and for you to connect with audiences, however for your business to truly strive, it cannot depend only on social media. If one day, your account is randomly deleted and that was your only source to gain customers, you would be put in a very difficult situation and lose out on many potential leads. Having an integrated marketing strategy helps to improve results, brand image, drive awareness and so much more.
Why should an email funnel be engaging
It takes a lot of time and effort to build a relationship with subscribers to your email funnel, but it’s SO WORTH IT. It’s essential that every email you send builds trust and makes an impact that in turn, brings them closer to making a purchase and becoming brand advocates for your amazing brand.
An engaging email funnel that grabs the attention of the reader is more memorable and impactful. Regardless of how regularly someone uses social media, they will always check their inboxes and emails so it’s the perfect strategy to grab their attention and take them through the customer journey.
How to structure your email funnel
To structure your email funnel, you should follow five key steps from the customer lifecycle:
Awareness
Contemplation
Engagement
Commitment
Endorse.
This will give your funnel the ability to be fully productive and successful, however be mindful of not spamming your subscribers! Instead, send a smaller number of impactful emails to reach full potential and keep your customers happy.
Awareness
The first email should have the aim of creating awareness of your brand and begin to build a relationship with subscribers. The first email should be sent immediately after someone subscribes to your email list, keeping that connection and, therefore, it needs to be informative and of value.
Contemplation
A great email creates awareness and leads them to strongly contemplate purchasing your service. Therefore through this next email, you want to persuade the viewers to seek additional information. To make this happen, it may be a good idea to include more information on the benefits of the service. Share testimonials to provide reassurance to the subscriber. All of this will help to persuade readers to purchase from you and your epic business.
Engagement
This will take your subscriber to the next stage of the journey. In this stage, you should be mindful of creating an emotional element to create a sense of urgency such as excitement and panic. But don’t worry, we will go into more detail down below! Another thing to consider is a call to action. Call to actions help to push the subscriber to make a purchase and take them through the transformational step to becoming a customer.
Commitment
You have now successfully developed the subscriber into a customer - woo go you! However, there’s still some work to do! Maintaining a strong relationship with the client takes a lot of effort; so at this stage of the email funnel, you need to keep promoting the development of the relationship. You can do this by offering incentives for purchasing products such as a free webinar providing them with tips and tricks. Build that relationship further, provide trust and make sure your brand is stuck whizzing through their minds.
Endorse
At this stage, it would be great to turn that customer into a brand advocate. Ask them to voice their opinions and thoughts on your service. Kindly ask them to write you a testimonial or a review. There are many benefits from getting your customers to do things like this as it brings more credibility and customer retention. Also, who doesn’t love to have people advocating for their brand? You deserve it!
The benefits of adding an emotional element
Emotions can have a massive impact on our decisions. In fact, pulling on those heartstrings can have an impact on buying decisions in emails too. Including an emotional element such as happiness or curiosity will make your email more relatable and the overall purchase more engaging. This goes for your call to action too. Your email CTAs are a vital part of connecting with customers and are the branches that guide traffic to your website, leads and other goals. An engaging call to action that taps into the emotional appeal of your readers will inspire readers to take action.
Fear/Panic
We all get the dreaded FOMO (fear of missing out) time and again and it can come around when purchasing products! The service or products you may be offering could be created to be seen as limited due to being ‘Limited Edition’ or on ‘Sale’. This will use the emotional element within emails to produce a slight ‘panic’ to help drive readers to make an investment into your service or product.
However, we do not want to be dishonest. If we have a surplus or loads of products, we don’t want to deceive them into panic buying. We should remember to be truthful because we want our business to be ethical. It’s all about building that trust. For more help on how to build your brand image to be trustworthy and ethical, check out my previous blog about ‘How to Write Ethical Sales Page Copy’ for some ideas around increasing sales, and of course, being ethical!
Anticipation and Excitement
Let’s get your customers excited for your brand just like you are! According to Gretchen Rubin, Anticipation is the first stage of the four stages of happiness. Creating anticipation will make customers look forward to your product/service and make them feel good about it, encouraging them to share with others! Some ways of building excitement include pre-order opportunities and behind the scenes. Giving your customers that sneak peak will make them feel special, provoking that excitement factor.
Still, struggling with creating an impactful email funnel?
An engaging email funnel is a great marketing strategy to get people from subscribing to your email to actually purchasing a product or service from yourself. It also gives you the confidence to decrease your dependency on social for sales as having multiple marketing strategies to rely on is important for growth.
It may be daunting to start or to begin to structure your email funnel, however the effort will certainly be worth it! However, if you are struggling, I have made an ‘Email Sequence Package’, perfect for business owners struggling to create the perfect email funnel for them and their business needs.
