It’s every business owner’s dream to develop a productive way of gaining more customers each day and retaining them for as long as possible.
However, it’s often the case that customer acquisition and retention can be extremely difficult things, even for the most successful of marketers out there.
Email marketing funnels are excellent tools for helping to guide your prospective customers from A to B whilst minimising the risk of them getting lost along the way. Guiding your audience down this path can help you to gain a greater level of influence over your customers while achieving your conversion goals.
But how can you work to ensure that you’re developing a highly convertible email marketing campaign? And how can you adapt your funnel for the greatest level of success? Let’s explore the intricacies of email marketing whilst looking at four essential tips for building the best possible campaign:
Managing Your Funnel
Before we get started, let’s explore what an email marketing funnel actually looks like. In a nutshell, an email marketing funnel consists of a sequence of emails sent on a predetermined schedule to various leads with the intention of turning them into fully-fledged customers.
(Image: MAKE)
Why are email marketing funnels important? According to Oberlo data, around half of the world’s population - some 3.9 billion people - have access to email, while the average ROI for every $1 spent on email marketing amounts to $42.
As much as 81% of small businesses rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, while 80% use it as their main source of customer retention.
When it comes to tracking performance, it’s possible to make the right optimisations at the right time, and it’s easy to adapt your campaigns to further boost your levels of performance.
Although newer and emerging channels revolving around social media and video marketing are proving popular for marketing, it remains true that if you ignore your chance to optimise your email marketing funnel, you’re missing out on the chance to boost your revenue in a sustainable manner.
Get Your Lead Magnets in Order
When visitors arrive on the pages of your website or blog for the first time, it’s unlikely that they’re immediately prepared to make a purchase. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t make a strong and lasting impression that could pave the way for future purchases.
To ensure that you give the best possible experience to users, you’ll need to utilise an array of different lead magnets to encourage them into subscribing to your mailing list in order to begin their journey through your funnel..
(Image: OptinMonster)
Above, we can see a strong example of a lead magnet. The magnet contains an offer for a free ebook that showcases premium quality content. This offer also displays the fact that 26,000 subscribers have already signed up, which acts as a form of social proof.
However, some visitors can feel compelled to sign up to a mailing list just for a free offer before disengaging with the company. To avoid this, be sure to send a welcome email from the get go and generate an email sequence where a follow up is sent two or three days after the initial email to every subscriber who hasn’t opened your first message.
Optimise Your Funnel by Staying True to Your Goals
Email marketing funnel optimisation can often resemble traditional advertising campaigns. Just like with advertising campaigns, sometimes marketers can miss the whole point of why they’re setting up their funnel in the first place: to facilitate sales.
This calls for a more holistic approach. You could spend days working on the perfect email copy and whittle down a pool of winning CTAs, but it’s pretty useless if the website you’re linking to isn’t up to scratch.
There are some key rules to follow when it comes to staying true to your goals. Firstly, resist the temptation of adding distractions to your copy. Images and content can be very engaging, but they can also distract recipients from the message you’re trying to convey. Also, avoid adding multiple calls to action that link to different areas of your website. You need your funnels to be a well oiled machine for conversions, and this means that you should focus on guiding your customers through your funnel in an efficient manner.
(Image: Econsultancy)
The image above shows a Macy’s email marketing call to action. In this example, Macy’s struggles with a series of distractions that could ultimately repel customers from entering their sales funnel.
Firstly we see that there’s no clear CTA - purely because the offer has been split into two, with the customer challenged to work out which suits them best. This illusion of choice can result in a more off-putting effect. We can also see that there are links to all sorts of pages in different areas of the company - making your campaign performance harder to follow and wholly unconcentrated.
Create a clear funnel entry point for your leads to follow so you can better optimise your landing pages to welcome email subscribers and better cater to them.
Always Measure Your Performance
It’s vital to dedicate the necessary time towards testing your emails to ensure that you have a wholly optimised marketing funnel at your disposal. Test your emails at every stage of the campaigns you create to guarantee the best performance at every state of the campaign.
Be sure to A/B test various parts of your emails - particularly your subject lines, content, CTA, email trigger and the time your emails are sent to confirm that you’re optimising your process throughout.
It’s also worth creating urchin tracking module (UTM) campaign codes, or working to measure your progress with a specific analytics system like Google Analytics or Finteza.
Using Finteza’s UTM parameters as an example, we can see how websites can create comprehensive datasets regarding unique visitors, pageviews and subsequent conversions. This can help users to see tangible data that confirms what campaigns are working better than others, while offering insights into where improvements can be leveraged.
Never Neglect Retention
One of the most significant and simple rules of marketing is this: never think your job is complete when a sale is made. Customer retention is essential for generating more brand loyalty and boosting your ROI, too.
By all means enjoy winning a sale, but don’t wait too long before you’re back in a new customer’s inbox looking to steer them towards a fresh conversion.
Email is naturally one of the best ways to facilitate customer retention. This is because they’ve already provided you with their address and you’ll by now know that there’s a level of familiarity with the company.
By now, you can talk more directly about your products and services based on the assumption that your customer will be familiar. You can use their purchase to point them in the direction of new ranges or other similar products that they may be enticed by, or offer them top ups of the item they bought prior.
This essential part of the process isn’t massively different from the task of nurturing prospective customers, apart from the fact that you have the freedom to be much more clear on the products you’re offering and their respective value.
Although email marketing is often neglected for more social media or multimedia-based approaches in this day and age, email remains one of the most effective ways to put your best and freshest products right under the noses of leads that have displayed a level of interest. If utilised correctly, email marketing can pave the way for loyal and regularly returning customers - all without breaking the bank, or your budget.