Email Marketing Has a Giant Sales Funnel
Email marketing has always been an underrated strategy by many users, either because of strategists' perception of scope or their basic way of seeing scope. On many occasions people associate email marketing as a simple mass mailing of emails, but it is not as easy as they see it, since an email marketing focuses largely on planned and related mass mailing, this means that, if there is no process between them or a relationship, it is very difficult to achieve a complete email strategy. In fact, an email marketing sales funnel is much more complex and offers a longer lasting good opportunity than a simple two-step process. It takes time, more than just relying on the speed of a couple of clicks.
Sales generation is the holy grail for any strategist, therefore, it is necessary to define the steps clearly and basic that can be applied for any project.
What is a sales funnel?
The funnel or conversion funnel is about the different steps that a user has to take to achieve an objective within our website, whether to acquire a product, registration or a subscription (or conversion of leads).The funnel looks simple and short. It seems to start with the message. The email contains nice text and an invitation to action. The landing page provides the next and final stage by directly enhancing the service by offering a call to purchase.
The funnel really starts long before the first email is sent, when the visitor reads the text attached to the subscription box. This text not only invites the user to send their email address; It also establishes the beginning of the relationship and the reasonable expectation that the reader may have during their stay on your email list.
This text promises subscribers that they will receive information of a particular kind: marketing news, for example, or announcements about special offers. For as long as you submit this information, the subscriber will remain in the funnel. You may or may not make a purchase, but it will not have disappeared. If the purchase is not generated by one email, it can be generated by the next. Contacts only come out of the funnel completely by using the unsubscribe link - an easy move to measure.
Contacts Must Not Leave the Funnel
Every email that doesn't produce a sale, extends the funnel a little further. But it should also bring the contact a little closer to the sale by building a relationship with them. If the email is interesting, if it provides valuable information and offers what the contact may one day need, and has personal content, it will not only keep the contact within the funnel. You will ensure that the contact receives the following email with pleasure and will probably interact with it.
Steps to drive sales through email marketing
These steps allow you to establish the necessary phases to achieve the desired goals, of course, as with all planning, adjustments are extremely normal and more so if it is the development of a sales funnel within the email channel.
Step 1: Definition of forms and data collection areas
In this first step it is necessary to know Where will the data be obtained? In short, where will I place my forms to get the leads.
This phase is also known as lead capture, where forms are located in specific areas through a landing page or blog, attracting them with valuable content, tools or digital gifts and thus they are encouraged to leave us their data in exchange for this knowledge.Of course, they are not the only spaces from which data can be obtained, since you can also get it on other digital channels. Keep in mind that in this first step not all those users want to buy, but you can convince them.
Some tips to design attractive forms is that you should take into account that depending on the value of your exchange more or less information will be requested. This means that, if it is only a subscription, focus on making a form that does not obstruct the consumption of content and that does not ask for so much data, only the fundamental thing that is the EMAIL.
If you are going to deliver a guide or an important gift card, you can request more details such as name, surname, address, date of birth, among others.
Step 2: List Segmentation
Once the forms have been defined, it is necessary to classify the information collected. It can be according to your country, age, interests or taste, product or service that you downloaded, by your objective, by your branch or area, among others.The lists allow us to have in a well-defined way the data that we can count on and in what way we can manipulate it to obtain points of coincidences.However, the lists can be edited and updated according to the behavior of our email marketing process flow, because they can be classified as active users, interacting users, inactive users, among others.
Step 3: Shipping Flow Development
The flow allows us to know the possible steps that each user must perform, within the Benchmark tool it has an automation option, where when developing the flow, he himself will perform each scheduled action, but for this, always consider it important to plan it before, and then start the full run.
Step 4: Design, develop and schedule emails
It is time to design the format and style of the content, here is an important point and it is that depending on which way you want to send information.You can go for the classic and reliable option that is ONLY TEXT without design, where the message will not be compromised to the Time to load all the email or the complete design option, where it can be a landing page style, newsletter, greeting card or gift card, you can create your own style that matches the content and the brand.
Of course, when using the Benchmark tool, it offers you hundreds of templates that you can select and you only have to edit with the drag and drop format, simple and without so many complications.
Once designed it is time to schedule the start dates of your small shipping flow
Step 5: Monitoring
Once the start of the mail has been sent, it is time to monitor the reactions of our lists with the content sent, in order to evaluate and make the corresponding adjustments for new subscribers or CUSTOMIZE the next messages of the new shipments or CREATE new options or different routes within our shipping flow
Step 6: Restart Shipping
When making the corresponding adjustments, it is necessary to restart the shipments again, but with THE NEW SUBSCRIBERS, to obtain better results, and go polishing until obtaining a flow that is optimal and feasible for the brand.
The sales funnel for email marketers is not short and narrow like the funnel for websites. It is wide enough to capture movement in both directions, it can grow with each email and as long as the content remains interesting and promising, it will always provide an opportunity to generate sales.