How To link Your Small Business Email Marketing to a Marketing Funnel

What is a Marketing Funnel?

The idea of a funnel is used to illustrate the process a potential client goes through as they become familiar with your products or services.

Visually, clients enter the funnel at the widest part, the top, then proceed to descend, stage by stage, leaving at the level they lose interest.  What you end up with at the bottom are the final few who have purchased and love your product or service.  These are the clients that will keep coming back

Your goal is to raise the number of potential clients that enter the top and lower the number that loses interest at each stage.

To accomplish this, you will need to have a conversion tactic for each stage.

There are a few different Funnel maps out there that vary in their vocabulary but each basically means the same thing, for the sake of this article, we’ll go with the following terms:

• Awareness
• Engagement / Interest
• Discovery
• Purchase / Conversion
• Loyalty / Retention
• Advocacy

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Using Email Marketing to Get a Client All the Way to the Bottom

Now that you understand how a marketing funnel works, let’s discuss email marketing plans for each.

Awareness

The top of your marketing funnel is awareness.  This is when the potential client finds out you exist but doesn’t know anything about your product yet. At this level, you should start showing them the value of your product or service.  This can be done with free informative content, such as a free eBook on product related subjects.

Engagement

At this level, potential clients are starting to show an interest in your company and products and want to know more.

Discovery

You also know more about the client, which allows you to send them more targeted content that can relate how your product or services can help them.  This email could include specific items that you believe will be beneficial to them and even include an invitation to a free consultation or demonstration.

Purchase / Conversion

Now you potential client is aware of the value of your product or service and it’s time for them to decide if they are ready to purchase.

Here, you start communicating to the client why your product and service is better than your competitors’ and perfect for them.

Loyalty / Retention

OK, you’ve made the sale, your potential client has graduated to the title of actual client.  Your work is not over, however, not even close.

Now you need to implement your plans to keep them.

Repeat and long term clients are a wonderful asset for any business. Help keep these valuable assets by continually engaging them with fun and useful content such as educational emails related to upcoming products or surveys asking them their opinions on potential changes coming. Make them feel like their opinion really matters to you.

Advocacy

Advocacy happens when your clients turn into your biggest fans.

They’ve probably purchased or used your services several times because they adore you. The best part?  They start telling everyone about your and how great your products or services are!

Word of mouth, still the best way to gain more potential clients that will stick.

Now, as you start to recognise these special clients, you can start sending them special requests like emails asking them to refer you to their friends. You could even create a version of your initial email sent to the Awareness level that they can forward to friends and family they think would most benefit from your products or services.

Now you have the information you need to plan your own email campaign and begin to channel your potential clients all the way to being actual clients.

By developing your email strategy with the marketing funnel in mind, you’ll convert more prospects into customers and more customers into fans, which means more money for your business. Yay!

Grab our free Social Media checklist and free email marketing training here

By Martin Goldthorpe 2018 www.businessmarketingmastery.com