How to Create a Successful Email Sales Funnel: A Complete Guide

Do you want to reach out to prospects and convert them into paying customers?

The global email marketing sector was valued at $7.5 billion in 2017 and is anticipated to grow to more than $17.9 billion in 2027, indicating that email marketing is and will continue to be an effective tool for all organizations.

In this post, we will define an email marketing funnel, go over the five stages of your prospects' customer journey, and show you how to create your own successful email marketing funnel.

Let's get this party started!

What is an email marketing sales funnel?

An email marketing sales funnel is the process of converting prospective leads into paying customers using email interactions, often known as the "customer journey."

This sales funnel has three primary objectives:

Maintaining your relationship with your subscribers
Informing potential clients about your product's benefits or highlighting their problem issues
Persuading prospective customers to act and make a purchase

Email marketing funnels enable you to treat each of your existing customers as an individual, rather than just another faceless name on a list!

To collect leads, your prospects will go through five marketing funnel stages before becoming committed clients.

5 stages of the email sales funnel that your consumers go through

While every business's email marketing funnel will be different depending on its goals and audience, here's an example of how an email sales funnel may look:

Let's dig further into these five email marketing funnel stages.

Awareness

The first stage of the email marketing funnel is intended to raise awareness of your company.

Prospective leads are just getting to know your brand at this point, so now is the greatest time to start creating a trustworthy relationship.

You want to educate your audience while also demonstrating the value your company delivers.

Here's how our email marketing team tackles the first stage of the email sales funnel:

systeme.io email sequence selling an opportunity

There are 3 main goals that this email achieves:

Provide instructional content to demonstrate value – Aurelian tells the potential customer how he turned 1 hour of work per week into a $2,000 monthly income.
Establish authority – Aurelian demonstrates his coaching expertise and results, as well as how much money he has made utilizing his method.
Build a relationship with potential consumers – Aurelian discusses the benefits of his course and offers the first video for free.

After you've alerted your potential clients, you'll need to give them a reason to stay engaged, which brings us to the second stage of the funnel.

Interest

A successful email sequence attracts attention through awareness and closes the offer with interest.

At this point, you want your potential consumer to be interested enough to learn more about your company.

You can accomplish this by:

Making use of blog postings
Increasing the visibility of webinars
Storytelling/case study

This will help potential clients comprehend what your company is all about and why they require it.

Here, Aurelian shares his own story of how he managed to land a $20k consulting gig:

systeme.io email sequence telling a story

When writing your email for this stage of the email funnel, you should make sure to:

Add the advantages of your products – Aurelian claims that the online course on offer will teach consumers how to sell extremely expensive deals.
Aurelian focuses on business entrepreneurs who are just getting started and want to learn how to successfully launch their firms.
Create a need for your product – Aurelian provides just enough information on how he achieved success to create a want for more knowledge. What was the title of the book he read? How did he manage to close a $20k deal?

Put yourself in the shoes of your potential consumers and think about what you would want to hear if you were them.

Evaluation

As potential leads progress from the interest stage to the assessment stage, it's important to start building your relationship.

Your potential consumers have expressed a strong interest in your product and how it will benefit them – this will help you learn more about them and send targeted emails and great content.

At this step, you want to prepare your prospects for the decision-making stage by providing things like:

Additional benefits
Product manuals
Showcases
Solutions to frequent issues

Aurelian decided to add a bonus to an already helpful online course - here's how he accomplished it:

systeme.io email sequence announcing a bonus

Aurelian not only provided a supplementary cheat sheet that covers the four action stages to double your clients' businesses, but he also told you that you can still obtain free access to the first video of his course for a limited time.

Brownie credits Aurelian with adding social proof to the company's legitimacy.

The main purpose of this stage is to persuade your potential consumer to make a decision - whether or not to buy!

This leads us to the next level, which is engagement.

Engagement

Your first closer is your engagement email!

After persuading a potential consumer that your product is essential, you must compose a closing email that strikes the proper blend of persuade and urgency.

You can sweeten the sale by providing:

Discounts
Webinar invitations and free material
Another reason to buy

Aurelian takes his first step towards closing the prospective customer with the following sales email:

systeme.io email sequence calling to action

Aurelian explains that the potential client obtains free access to the first video of the new email marketing masterclass – this immediately increases the appeal of a purchase.

He also hits the perfect balance between persuasion and urgency by making the free content available for only 24 hours and using the word 'WARNING'.

You're ready for the final phase of the sales funnel, commitment, after delivering your "call to action" email.

Commitment

The commitment stage can have one of two objectives:

Generate leads
Increase sales

At this point of the email marketing funnel, you must be clear and precise about why they should buy your product or service and why they must buy it right now.

You can add a sense of urgency by including:

Purchases have time constraints.
Words that convey a sense of urgency, such as "warning" or "act now"
Links directly to the order form

Let's see how Aurelian approaches this stage:

systeme.io email sequence closing email

What makes this sales email the ideal closing statement is:

Including a link to the online course
stating the advantages of the material
Instilling a sense of urgency

Once a lead becomes a customer, you must maintain touch and build loyal customers.

However, don't be too eager and end up filling your new customer's inbox with emails -- a simple "Thank-you"-email will serve for this stage of the email marketing funnel.

Sometimes a client just needs a little push to travel through the complete email marketing sales funnel - that's why we've listed three of the most critical steps to consider when writing an email.

3 important email marketing strategies to converting a prospect into a customer

There are three important strategies to carry out when converting a prospect into a customer.

Value

To ensure that your prospects read your emails, you must understand that your marketing message should be about them and addressing their requirements, not about you or your product!

Adding value is an art, and it begins with the ability to see your company through the eyes of your customers.

In general, communications' value is expressed by including promotions or incentives that are directly related to the sale, product, or service – but value can take various forms.

Here are six methods for providing value to your customers:

Show case studies
Share success stories from customers
Include customer testimonials.
Address your customers' concerns
Make educational content available
Provide exclusive discounts or free material

Remember that when you offer value to your emails, avoid selling right away; instead, captivate your customers by providing without asking for anything in return.

Authority

As a company, your goal should be to become a go-to resource for people looking for solutions to specific challenges.

You may position yourself as an authority through email marketing by:

Writing your content with certainty
Sending follow-ups on time
showcasing to your customers what your product can achieve and how they can profit from it
Customers can be grouped by segmenting your list and delivering targeted emails.
demonstrating that your company understands the needs of its customers
Building trust by delivering on your promises with your product or service

All of these factors help your clients connect with your brand and move them closer to completing a purchase.

Action

The most essential stage in converting your prospective lead into a customer is how you sell your sales offer in your email.

Here's what you should include in your email sales pitch:

Introduce the essential problems you'll be solving.
Emphasize the suffering caused by the condition.
Distribute your goods as a solution to their difficulties.
Tell your buyers how your product will benefit them.
Evidence should be used to back up your claims.
Include a prominent call-to-action button.

A sales pitch does not have to be long and complex - keep it brief and to the point!

You must, however, offer all of the vital information to entice your prospective clients to act and make that buy.

Understanding the steps of the email marketing funnel and what to focus on when implementing it is the first step towards creating your own — so, what's next?

Building your first email marketing funnel

Creating an email marketing funnel and building an email marketing strategy is critical for converting leads and increasing sales – and here's why:

boosts conversion rate
Considered to be cost-effective
Increases customer relationships and allows for a high level of personalization
Aids in the optimization of content

Now that we understand the need for an email marketing funnel, let's look at how to create one.

Map out the customer journey

Modern depiction of a customer journey map

As a marketer, you must always understand your customers and what they want.

A customer journey map is a tool for tracking and analyzing your customers' interactions with your company or product.

Customer journey maps not only allow you to better understand your customer's demands, but they also make it easier to define clear goals for your organization.

When building a customer journey map, the following questions should be addressed:

Where do customers begin their relationship with your company? — Promotions on your website, commercials, online review sites, and so on.
What are their thoughts on your company as a whole? — Feelings or emotions
Which consumer activities have the greatest direct impact on your company? — Opinions, reviews, habits, and so forth.

Using email marketing solutions to track your customers' interactions will not provide you with a complete picture of their experience with your company or product.

This is why adopting buyer personas to profile your customers is critical!

After you've produced your customer journey map, it's critical to analyze the results and make the necessary improvements.

You can move on to the next step - lead generation — now that you know who you're marketing to, what their wants are, and how to cater to their pain spots.

Create your pages

What is email marketing if there are no leads to whom you may send emails?

After you've determined your buyer's path, you'll need to construct your pages.

In this step, it's vital to prioritize list quality above list size – ideally, you want your new leads to be both relevant and engaged and to fall into the marketing-qualified lead category.

That being said, here are two common methods of lead generation:

1. Opt-in forms

An opt-in form is a form that you put on your website where visitors can sign up to receive further information about the product in question.

Here's an example of a popup opt-in form used by systeme.io for its blog posts:

Systeme.io popup opt-in form

Systeme.io can assist you in creating targeted and personalized opt-in forms for your email marketing funnel.

These forms can be placed anywhere on your website in the form of pop-ups, floating bars, splash pages, and exit-intent popups that are difficult to miss.

2. Landing pages

A landing page is a dedicated page including a lead magnet.

Here’s a screenshot of a systeme.io landing page containing an opt-in block to join the platform for free:

systeme.io landing page

You can create professional-looking landing pages from scratch or use one of our many pre-designed landing page templates using systeme.io's funnel builder.

Email marketing solutions assist you in automating your email marketing by creating a series of emails for each consumer category in your email marketing funnel.

Lead magnets can help you generate leads more easily. So, exactly what are lead magnets?

Create lead magnet

A lead magnet is a product or service you offer to your website’s visitors in exchange for their email addresses.

Here systeme.io uses an ebook as a lead magnet to collect email addresses:

systeme.io ebook opt-in form

Your lead magnet's purpose is to attract your visitors to offer their email addresses or other contact information in exchange for excellent content.

In general lead magnets could include:

Ebooks
Online courses
Free trials

And more.

Giving out free stuff is the best method to get more customers – who doesn't like free stuff?

It's critical to understand who you're attempting to persuade to opt in – this will assist you avoid selling products that your customers aren't interested in.

After you've gathered email addresses, you'll need to start nurturing your leads – let's look at how!

Nurture your leads

You should have started generating leads and building your mailing list by now.

The last stage is to develop a series of emails to connect with your subscribers and ensure their engagement — also known as email marketing campaigns.

The emails you send to your mailing list can have an impact on their customer journey; here are two email marketing tactics to use when nurturing your leads:

1. Drip campaigns

A drip campaign is an automated email series that distributes specific emails to segmented audiences at pre-determined periods.

A drip campaign, as opposed to a lead nurturing campaign, has a much more precise goal: to welcome new leads, enroll new clients, re-engage an inactive lead, or nurture your existing consumers.

2. Lead nurturing campaigns

A lead nurturing campaign is more personalized since it uses specific behavioral data and focuses entirely on lead conversion.

Systeme.io streamlines your lead nurturing strategy, saving you time and money.

Maintain a positive customer relationship

After your leads become existing customers, you must do all possible to keep them interested and engaged.

Why? Because maintaining clients is 6-7 times less expensive than obtaining new ones!

If you are successful in retaining your present consumers, you will have created a situation that most digital marketers desire: loyal followers.

Here are some emails you can send to keep your customers:

Follow-ups, upsells, and cross-sells
News and updates about your platform
Usage reports, progress reports, and newsletters
Case studies
Free educational content

Having a loyal client base entails not just having customers who buy your products, but also having customers who will praise and suggest you to others.

Consider building a membership program or community where your clients can stay up to date on your business.

Systeme.io enables you to construct membership sites that provide gated content that is only accessible to paying members.

If you're just getting started, working with a marketing platform may be a smart fit because it will offer you the resources you need to construct your marketing funnel while keeping your costs to a minimum.

However, you must ensure that the platform you select satisfies all of your requirements; we recommend systeme.io, an all-in-one marketing tool that is not only feature-rich but also cost-effective!

The ideal email marketing tool to grow your online business

systeme.io logo

Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing tool that makes launching, growing, and scaling your online business easy.

With systeme.io you can:

Build an email marketing funnel with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor
Automate your funnel steps
Send unlimited emails to your email subscribers, such as sales emails and/or promotional emails
Set up drip campaigns to trigger a sequence of automated emails

FAQs about email marketing sales funnels

How do I maintain an effective email marketing funnel?

Change is constant, and you must stay current on all trends.

Stay current, deliver desirable, personalized content, use analytics to optimize your email campaign, and lastly, automate everything!

How do I know if an email marketing sales funnel is successful?

Understand your objectives!

The goals you set for yourself at the start of the process will teach you what to measure, and you may measure your own performance based on the results.

Conclusion

With your newfound knowledge of email marketing sales funnels, you can go ahead and construct your own, converting all of your prospects into devoted customers!

Remember that email marketing solutions are available to assist you with the building, launching, and sustaining of your campaign – so don't be afraid to look into them if you need assistance!

With systeme.io you can easily create your email marketing funnel and more with no extra cost at all — and it’s only one click away!

Try systeme.io for free today.

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