Building your email marketing strategy and content around the marketing funnel
The marketing funnel is a tool for understanding the journey most customers take to a purchase. If your email marketing follows and works with that journey, you build an effective and lasting relationship with customers, and that relationship keeps producing revenue. Below is the funnel stage by stage — note what to do and what not to do at each, and use it as the basis for your email marketing strategy and content.
1. Awareness
At the top of the funnel is awareness. At this stage prospects are still unfamiliar with your brand and your company, and do not know who you are. Focus on establishing yourself as a thought leader in the industry. This is your chance to start building a trusting relationship.
Goal:
Demonstrate the value of your product or service by providing educational content and building a relationship with subscribers.
Do:
Educate, and show that you are willing to help.
Don’t:
Hard sell, give too much specific detail about your product or service, or try to get subscribers to buy.
2. Consideration
Once customers graduate from awareness, they enter consideration. Here they are willing to consider your company and your product, and are interested in learning more about you.
Goal:
Build a deeper relationship with subscribers, introduce them to your product or service, and nurture them with relevant or targeted content.
Do:
Provide educational content tailored to your subscribers, offer product-specific content, and show how the product helps.
Don’t:
Over-promote, or send content that does not apply to your subscribers.
3. Conversion
Decision time at last. Once subscribers understand the value of your product, and case studies, webinars, blog posts and other educational content have created need and interest, they are ready to decide whether to buy.
Goal:
Persuade subscribers to buy.
Do:
Discuss the benefits of your product or service, demonstrate it, offer a discount or promotion to persuade, and create urgency that pushes subscribers to buy now.
Don’t:
Call subscribers relentlessly, or drown them in sales material.
4. Loyalty
Once a prospect becomes a customer, the temptation is to move straight on to the next prospect. Do not forget the customer you have. Advocacy is what happens when a customer becomes a loyal supporter. They buy again or keep paying for your service, and now that they love you, they tell their friends about you on social media and talk you up.
Goal:
Keep your customers and turn them into loyal ones by giving them useful content and genuinely attentive, high-quality service.
Do:
Provide useful information, and send educational content relevant to your customers.
Don’t:
Stop engaging with customers or stop adding value.
Getting subscribers to this stage of the funnel is extremely valuable. Why? Because the most effective marketing is referral marketing. When a friend tells you a product is great, you are far more likely to buy it, because you trust your friend.
Goal:
Get customers talking about your company and happily referring you to their friends.
Do:
Stay in touch with your loyal customers, and keep them satisfied with content and service worth talking about.
Don’t:
Forget your customers.