Email Marketing Funnels to Boost your eCommerce Sales!

The ultimate goal of every business that sells products or services to attract loads of customers, influence them to shop from their store, and then turn them into repeat customers.

How simple it is! Actually, it’s not! Your customers are unpredictable, so to know their next move, you need proper strategy, automation, and of course Email Marketing Funnels! 

An email marketing funnel works as a bridge between brands and customers. It helps you move your potential customers smoothly from one-time customers to loyal customers, without worrying about them getting lost.

There are few steps that you can follow to influence your potential consumers and drive them toward your conversion goal. However, before discussing anything, let’s understand the Email Marketing Funnel in detail. 

An email funnel is a process of turning prospects shoppers into customers using email marketing. For efficient email funnels, Shopify store owners have to predict the subscriber’s needs to send a hyper-personalized email at the right time to evoke action. Mainly marketing email funnels demonstrate the four-stage of the customer lifecycle:

• Engagement
• Discovery
• Purchase
• Retention

There’s a rumor that email marketing is dead now, however many studies have proved this assumption wrong. Nearly 73% of marketers attributed email marketing to increase their conversion efforts, and by 2021, it’s projected that over 319.6 billion emails will be sent daily worldwide

Email may be overlooked, but it by no means is ineffective. The only thing that is ineffective these days is “Junk Email”. To protect your email to become “Junk Email” email marketing funnels come in. If you use email marketing with the past one’s prime strategy, you’re not going to get too far. If you want email marketing to be successful, you need to be persistent and have a strategy so that the right candidate is receiving the right content at the right time. That is what an email marketing funnel can do for you.

A perfectly crafted funnel needs a subscriber list as without the list it will no longer be of use. Building your list is a part of the email marketing funnel that doesn’t really involve email marketing. In fact, building your list comes before the funnel, however, either way, it needs to be addressed.

There are loads of ways to build your email list. You can use opt-in forms on your website, social media, landing pages, and some other tactics. Here we will discuss two ways through which you can capture the leads for your funnel. Each way can be easily realized into your own email marketing strategy.

1. Use opt-in forms to capture leads

If you have read our previous blogs, you probably heard about opt-in forms. These forms are also known as lead capture forms. The opt-in form consists of a “first name” and “email address” field with a submit button. This is the best way to drive traffic to your marketing funnels because you can place them anywhere on your website. They can be spotted throughout your blog posts, placed on your Home page, or even at the footer of the home page.

You can also create various opt-in form copies to capture leads. This helps you examine what copy and position perform the best. AiTrillion automatically measures these conversion rates so you can promptly determine what factors will help you to capture more leads.

You may also have current email subscribers who filled the form to know more about your brand through informative emails. Send them tailored messages through the funnel.

This increases your odds of retaining audience members who have already bought from your brand and trust you and helps you increase the customer’s lifetime value. You can achieve this easily by adding a link on the CTA button for interested subscribers to take them into your marketing funnel. isn’t it Simple, right?

2. Create dedicated landing pages

Instead of showing a small opt-in form onto your website, you can also create a dedicated landing page that leads to your email marketing funnel. Here you can also embed an additional copy and a preview of your offer.

It’s important to add one call-to-action on each landing page to increase your conversion rate. Since here your email funnel is your priority, your call-to-action is already decided for you. Landing pages also facilitate you to highlight the benefits of your product and services without mentioning them as your main focus is to evoke visitors to click on the call-to-action of signing up for your email funnel strategy, not selling them a product at that point. In this way, you will collect sufficient information from the visitors to tailor your landing page to attract more of your ideal buyers or clients. Once the visitor is on your email list, you’ll be able to nurture and engage them throughout your email campaign funnel.

Now, let’s discuss how email marketing funnels can help you boost your business sales.

As most of the people you’ll be emailing during this stage are likely new to your email list. So when you try to sell somebody something at this moment they will walk through the door. This is an opportunity where you can introduce your brand, greet the customer and gain their trust. 

You may be thinking about how to build trust over email. Here are the tactics that you can follow to achieve this.

First, send a welcome email. This is an automated email that you can send after somebody subscribes to your list. Use this email to welcome your subscriber and introduce your brand through the email. In this mail don’t ask anything from the recipient. All you need to do is tell all the benefits that they will get as your customer/client. 

Most subscribers instantly trash the mail from companies because all they seem to ask for is up-gradation, buying things, or leaving a review. So don’t ask at this point only share. 

Here you come to the nurture stage. 

The nurture stage is not just about welcoming you people. One welcome email does not help you turn subscribers into a warm lead. There is more to do before you should ask a subscriber to make a purchase.

Somebody will not certainly be likely to make a purchase after a simple welcome email. Here you can use your loyalty program and segmentation strategy. 

If you put personalized content with exclusive offers, they will grow to trust you, and when they plan to buy things, they will most likely buy from you.

We all have been getting these emails for over a year now, however, we only open those that include information that we are looking for, help in solving our queries, and offers that can help us to buy things at a discounted price. 

Do you know why? It’s not because we liked their welcome email. It’s because they are talking about adding value to our life through their product and services. We started believing that what they have to offer is truly valuable. 

Now you are entered into a more crucial stage. It’s time to sell. 

Sell to your nurtured warm leads. These leads will most likely convert as your loyal customers. If you implemented all the processes carefully, then till now they know you, they trust you, and they would be happy to buy from your store.

However, still there is a chance they may deviate to another store if they find a better deal somewhere else. Just because you’ve nurtured them, doesn’t mean you have closed the deal. When someone buys something, they need a nudge to dive. Here email marketing funnel acts as a nudge.

Unlike the usual newsletter, now send an email with product images and CTA buttons and ask your customers to take action. This is a write time when you can ask your prospects to buy from you as till now they have read dozens of your blog posts and learned a ton about you. 

When you put something in front of the customer that they viewed previously with some amazing offers, they probably would buy the item. Maybe they wouldn’t have sought out the team, but when put in front of them like in the above-mentioned example from a brand they trust, you would take out their wallet.

This is why the nurture stage is so critical. When your contacts trust you, they’re much more likely to purchase from you when the time arrives.

Your work has not ended here! You might be thinking that now the customer has made their purchase, you achieved your goal. Now, what next? A lot more needs to be done. 

For a successful business, it is imperative to retain your customers as a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review revealed that “increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.”

 Customer retention also costs less than spending on acquisition strategies. Retained customers are most likely to share their shopping experience with friends and family, and indirectly promote your brand through mouth publicity. Also referred customers normally have a higher lifetime value than customers that were acquired through conventional channels.

Conversion funnel marketing helps you in retaining customers. In the retaining stage, you need to start with the nurturing stage. Sure, you’ll have opportunities to upsell to your existing customers, but at this stage, you need to send hyper-targeted content so that you can hit the emotions of the customers and they can get the most out of your product.

A happy customer always sticks around the brand they trust. These are the customers that help you grow your business farther beyond just a simple purchase. Even more valuable than an upsell — a really satisfied customer will turn into your brand advocate and help you bring in new customers by word of mouth. 

Managing all these emails and making sure they’re reaching the right people is a time taking task if done manually, especially when you are sending emails across all of the mentioned email marketing funnel stages. The best thing is that the majority of the work can be automated. This is the “integrated automated funnel.”

Using an eCommerce marketing automation platform like AiTrillion you can create conditions so that contacts receive specific emails based on their behavior. All you have to do is create the emails, the rest of the work will be handled by funnel marketing automation.

For example, when a contact makes a purchase, you can segment into a predefined category and assign them a tag, so they start receiving the retain emails.

In this way, you can handle the number of communications in a single setup once you’ve set up your funnel in automation. So what are you waiting for? Automate your email marketing funnel now.