Why and How to Create Email Funnels: A Step-by-Step Guide
Email funnels are very useful tools for automating your customer/client outreach marketing. Essentially, an email funnel is when a warm lead or potential customer gives you their email address in exchange for something, and they then receive a series of emails from you over the course of many days telling them about your business and warming them up to the idea of purchasing from you. Depending on your type of business, you could offer a variety of things in exchange for the customer’s email address: discount codes, free downloads, free items, newsletters, or even a physical item like a sticker or t-shirt.
When someone shows even a small amount of interest in your business, it’s important that you capture some sort of contact information from them so that you can keep in contact with them and keep warming them up to your business offers. Most of the time, customers are not ready to purchase the first time they interact with a small business, so it’s important that you keep reminding them of your business value and offerings so that when they ARE ready to purchase, your business is top of mind.
This same theory applies even if you are a product-based business or a mom-and-pop shop. Customers will want to know about your product features, customer experiences with your products/services, why you started your business, and how it’s different. Complimentary freebies or discount codes will entice customers to interact with your brand and “get their feet wet” before committing to a purchase.
How to create an email funnel
Choose your email service
Mailerlite is a great, free option for setting up your email funnel. It allows you to easily organize and design your emails into one easy-to-view outline. The design elements inside their email builder tool make it really easy to layout the body of your email with all of the appropriate features, and if you don’t want to start from scratch, they offer a variety of templates. There are a variety of other email service options available as well, including Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, and others.
Build each email in your funnel
Freebie opt-in - This is the first email that a potential customer will receive from your business after they have “opted in” or given their contact information for your freebie, whatever that may be. This email is your chance to congratulate the customer on choosing to download/order/access the free item you’re offering them, to make them feel like they’re in the right place and that your business can help address their needs. You’ll include the free item in this email (if it’s virtual) and give some basic information about your business.
Check-in - You’ll want to follow up with your customer a few days later and check-in to see if they have any questions about the free resource or your business’ offerings in general.
Customer experience - Share a positive customer experience/review.
Shout out your social media accounts - Share sample content and links to your social media profiles. Give customers a taste/reason to follow you there.
Personal story - Tell a personal story related to your business. This could be why you started the business, what your biggest lesson learned has been, more information about your background/credentials, or something else. Storytelling is a huge aspect of marketing your small business, and customers want to know about the human behind the brand.
Another freebie - Send the customer another freebie. This is a chance to highlight a different aspect of your business or expand upon the trust built thus far in your email funnel by showcasing your expertise or your business offerings in other categories.
What can I answer for you - This is a more open-ended email that invites the customer to engage in a dialogue with you. Customers like to do a lot of research before they purchase, so opening the door to allow them to directly reply to the email with questions is an important part of getting them closer and closer to being purchase-ready.
The importance of subject lines
Subject lines are an extremely important piece of your email funnel. Without enticing, interesting subject lines in your customer’s email inbox, your emails will likely be archived or ignored, bringing your open and engagement rates down. Including personal information (such as the customer’s first name), emojis, questions, or eye-catching terms (X% off, free resource, free download, how to) in the subject line are all ways to increase the likelihood that the customer will actually open the email.
Timing of each email
It’s important that you’re not overwhelming your customers by sending them too many emails too quickly, but also not waiting too long in between that they become disinterested or forget why they opted in to hear about your business in the first place. We typically recommend waiting 1-2 days in between each email, but depending on your overall content calendar, waiting up to a week between emails could also be appropriate.
One CTA only per email, please
It’s essential that you only have one call-to-action (CTA) per email. This means that you’re only asking the customer to do one thing per email, whether it’s clicking on a link, following you on social, replying to the email, or something else. If customers are given too many options or asked to do too many things, they will get overwhelmed or disinterested with the email. Keep it simple and only ask for one thing per email (this is why we send multiple emails over multiple days).
Analytics and evaluating if your funnel is working
Tracking data points for each of the emails in your funnel will provide you with the valuable information needed to make improvements. We recommend creating a spreadsheet and tracking the open rate, click-through rate, and number of subscribers month over month. The open rate is the number of subscribers that actually opened your email, with a healthy open rate being at least 20%. The click-through rate is the number of subscribers that opened your email and clicked on a link that was included, with a health click-through rate being above 2%. You will be able to see trends and make tweaks to your funnel once you have a good grasp on these analytics.
Feel free to add other emails into your content calendar whenever it feels most timely or appropriate. This email funnel is meant to operate independently from any promotional marketing emails or emails about special events.