If you’re wondering how you can increase your conversion rates and close more deals, you’re not alone. This is a question every salesperson asks themselves at some point in their career.
The answer is simple: the sales funnel email sequence.
This type of sequence is meant to nurture your leads through the different stages of your marketing funnel. Considering that 50% of leads are qualified but not immediately ready to buy something from you, lead nurturing plays a pivotal role in your conversion strategy.
What is an Email Marketing Funnel?
An email marketing funnel is a visual representation of how a subscriber goes from a lead to a customer through value-driven and educational content.
The first step of any effective email marketing funnel is content mapping. This is a process that helps you decide the most appropriate content to show someone at the right time. It’s important that you have a full understanding of your sales cycle so you can cater to the messaging of your sales funnel sequence based on the specific stage someone is in. This will help you reduce your sales cycle because you’re showing your subscribers relevant content every step of the way.
Essentially, the end goal is to keep prospects moving and converting down your sales funnel to eventually become loyal customers. While the buying cycle can be broken down into many substages to align with a company’s specific business model, we can categorize the cycle into three main stages:
- Awareness: Leads are experiencing a specific problem and acknowledge that your product or service can help them solve it.
- Evaluation: Leads are aware that your product or service can help them solve their problem, and they’re trying to determine if your company is the best fit.
- Purchase: Leads are ready to make a purchase.
Content mapping comes into play during these stages because a prospect’s intent will differ depending on which stage they’re actively in. By mapping the most relevant content to each stage in the buying cycle, you’ll speak more directly to the individual needs of each lead, so you’re having the right conversation with the right people at the right time.
Email marketing is only a fraction of the sales funneling process. Read our blog here to learn everything you need to know about the sales funnel.
Why Do You Need a Sales Funnel Email Sequence?
Now more than ever, people are starting to see through traditional sales-y marketing tactics. Sequencing your sales funnel emails is the difference between having a value-driven conversation and just blasting off hundreds of impersonal emails to faceless names.
According to a recent study, 68% of companies have not identified or attempted to measure a sales funnel. That same survey also found that 79% of marketing leads are never converted into sales.
Do you see a connection?
Developing a sales funnel email sequence enables you to build a nurturing relationship with your subscribers while also educating them on the value of your product or service. By pinpointing where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey, you can communicate more effectively and personalize each subscriber’s experience, which leads them through the decision-making process.
Your email funnel sequence acts as a highly-skilled salesman working around the clock in the sense that with the right technology in place, a portion of your sales efforts can be put on autopilot. This frees up more time that you can then spend on more pressing matters of your business, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.
Not only can these sales funnel email sequences bring in new leads, but they can also help you sell additional services to your existing customers. After all, it’s 10 times harder to close a new customer than sell to a current one. With a strategic email funnel in place, you can consistently generate new leads while sustaining your existing email list. By providing such a positive brand experience, you’re increasing the odds that customers continue to buy from you, advocate for your company, and recommend you to others.
How To Create a Sales Funnel Email Sequence
Each company will take a different approach to building out its sales funnel email sequence, but there are a few basic principles to consider if you’re looking to engage (and retain) your leads. We’re here to walk you through each stage of your sales funnel and tell you how to get the most out of your efforts.
Generating New Prospects (Top of the Funnel)
The first mission of your sales email funnel sequence is to generate new leads. Leads are the fuel that keeps a company’s revenue engine running. However, it’s what you do with your lists of cold leads and how you warm them up that matters the most.
The two most effective ways to collect email addresses are through opt-in forms and dedicated landing pages.
- Opt-in Forms: Embedded throughout your website, often requesting just a visitor’s name and email address. Effective for newsletters because they keep your subscribers engaged.
- Dedicated Landing Pages: Focused specifically on one piece of content, like an eBook or a cheat sheet, that incentivizes website visitors to give you their contact information in exchange for the resource you’re offering. You’re providing valuable and relevant content to the user that they actually want to see.
Once their information is captured, your leads can then be nurtured through your sales funnel email sequence until they eventually convert.
Lead Nurturing Your Subscribers (Middle of the Funnel)
Once you’ve attracted new prospects, the next step is to continuously engage with them via your sales email funnel sequence. This is where segmenting your audience comes into play. Categorizing your leads into segmented lists will help you deliver the most effective message to each subscriber. This might sound overwhelming, but with the right automation platform in place, you can automatically segment your audience based on many factors, such as the landing page they converted on, their website/email behavior, or their demographic information.
After your audience is segmented accordingly, you can then tailor your sales funnel email sequence based on their preferences and send content that will resonate with them, such as blogs, webinars, and customer success stories. With this targeted approach to your messaging, you can boost your overall credibility as a brand and make it easier to build relationships with subscribers.
Converting Leads Into Customers (Bottom of the Funnel)
Bottom-funnel emails convert prospects into customers by giving them an offer they can’t refuse. This is the point in your sales email funnel sequence where you need to take a more aggressive approach. Bottom-funnel emails work because they’re designed to be irresistible. They’re short, sweet, and aimed at one thing: getting your subscribers to convert. These types of emails should include client testimonials, case studies, and other resources that point to you as the best solution to a subscriber’s problem.
Retaining Customers (Repeat Funnel)
Once a subscriber converts into a customer, you might think your job is done. But that’s not the case.
Customer retention and loyalty are pivotal in increasing your marketing ROI. The tone of these email sequences should discuss your brand more directly compared to other parts of the funnel.
In order for these types of sales email funnel sequences to work, you need to constantly keep up with the customer. Look for any opportunities to upsell or cross-sell based on their purchasing history, offer referral programs to encourage word-of-mouth advertising, or simply provide them with weekly progress reports and technology updates.
It’s important to focus on keeping your current customers happy and coming back for more. The average cost of acquiring a new customer is six times the cost of retaining an existing customer. A company can’t grow if they’re constantly losing their customers. Simply put, the more customers you have, the more revenue you have.
Key Takeaways
A sales funnel email sequence is vital when it comes to growing your business. You need to be willing to take a step back, analyze your audience, and get a pulse on what content makes the most sense and where. This conveys to your audience that you’re doing more than just firing off mass emails to an unsegmented audience.
In the current marketing landscape, it’s not enough to just have a great product or service. You need a strategic system that nurtures your prospects and makes them want to buy from you—and that system is the sales funnel email sequence.
Abstrakt has a proven process for creating and implementing a sales funnel email sequence to help small to medium-sized businesses catch the right leads at the right time. When you’re ready to maximize the impact of your B2B email sequences, contact the experts at Abstrakt!
