Email marketing is one of many important digital marketing tools, given how it is a cost-effective way to increase brand awareness and customize your outreach, alongside many other benefits. It can also be successfully aligned with your sales funnel to maximize conversion and ROI.
How exactly do sales funnels and email marketing campaigns go together? Here are the benefits of combining your sales funnel with email marketing, along with tips to get you started.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is sometimes also referred to as the buyer’s journey. It outlines the path a customer will take when buying your product or service — from the time they become aware of your business to the time the sale is closed.
From a marketing strategy standpoint, a sales funnel can help you identify ways to improve the buyer’s journey, and also identify why customers may step away from the sale at any given point. Lead nurturing, enhanced customer engagement, and higher conversion are some of the many other benefits of having a sales funnel.
Every sales funnel has six stages:
- Awareness. This is when prospects first become aware of your brand or business.
- Interest. Prospects take action to learn more about your business by visiting your website or browsing customer reviews.
- Evaluation. Prospects are almost ready to buy your products or services and put in extra effort to learn more, such as by filling out a form to gain more information or subscribing to your email newsletter.
- Negotiation and decision-making. Prospects are planning to buy your product or service and are ready to negotiate pricing, terms, etc.
- Sale. Prospects have decided to buy and become customers.
- Repurchase or renewal. Prospects are deciding whether they want to buy your products and services again or renew their subscription, contract, etc.
After becoming more familiar with the sales funnel, your business can develop several email marketing campaigns that seamlessly align with every stage.
How to Organize Your Email Database for Your Sales Funnel
Organizing your email database is the first step to take when aligning it with your sales funnel. This usually involves sorting email addresses and placing them into their corresponding stages of the buyer’s journey. Here’s how you can do it:
- Clean out your email lists. This may require you to remove bounced emails, spam emails, and emails with syntax errors. Cleaning out your email database can help you develop highly personalized campaigns and also save time and money you may otherwise have spent on trying to target illegitimate and dead leads.
- Separate emails by user behavior. Consider sending “triggered” emails if you’re not already doing so. These are emails customers may receive when performing certain actions, such as abandoning a shopping cart after adding products or leaving your site after browsing certain product categories. Tracking these triggers can often provide your business with invaluable insight when getting to know your audience.
- Act on those triggers. After separating emails by user behavior, you can devise a series of emails for each of those triggers that guide customers through the rest of the buyer’s journey. For example, you could offer 20% off to customers who return to their abandoned carts and complete the checkout process within the next 24 hours.
Benefits of Organizing Your Email Database
Organizing your company’s email database may seem a bit daunting at first, but the payoff may be well worth your time and effort. Here are notable benefits of organizing your email database to support your sales funnel.
Improved Targeting
Separating email addresses into the six stages of the sales funnel can help you double down on personalization and targeting. It gives you the opportunity to learn more about your prospects and target audience, which brings your business one step closer to delivering exactly what they want and need. This could also help you identify new buyer personas so you can target those prospects more efficiently.
More Personalization
With improved targeting comes more personalization. Personalized content is often more interesting and appealing and more likely to be opened, read, and acted upon. If you segment emails into several trigger categories, focus on personalizing the content in those emails to reflect the current stage of the buyer’s journey.
Better Engagement
Engaged leads are less likely to fall out of the sales funnel. Email marketing can help you better engage with your prospects and customers, especially when you know exactly where they are in the buyer’s journey. For example, send coupons and special offers to prospects in the evaluation or negotiation stages or informative content to those in the interest stage. Surveys, quizzes, and contests are other fun and effective ways to boost engagement through email marketing.
Increased Retention
Customers at the retention stage (which is the repurchase/renewal stage of the sales funnel) have already purchased from your business at least one time and are already familiar with your brand. Consider sending exclusive offers to these customers to reward them for their loyalty, as well as email surveys that allow them to share their testimonials and personal experiences with others.
Does your business need help with developing a successful email marketing campaign or help with aligning your sales funnel with your email strategy? At Katava Marketing, your vision is our mission!
Our full-service marketing agency can work with you to address any gaps in your sales funnel and merge it with your email marketing efforts. SEO, website design, and email marketing are some of the many services we offer. Contact us today at 973-998-8008 to get started!
