Cold Email: Email Funnels: How to Set Your Email Marketing Strategy

Email funnels are powerful tools for businesses. They can help you increase brand awareness, boost revenue and grow your overall brand. And once you’re familiar with the basic stages of a marketing funnel, all you need to create email marketing funnels is a little creativity.

Today, we’re talking about all things email funnels — what they are, why you need them and what should go into an email funnel strategy. Let’s get started exploring this helpful marketing tool!

Email funnels are powerful tools for businesses. They can help you increase brand awareness, boost revenue and grow your overall brand.
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What is an email funnel?

Email funnels are a type of marketing funnel. They help convince people to become customers of your business. The question of whether you should create email funnels is a no-brainer. A good sales funnel will lead to increased growth for your business, so if more revenue and brand awareness is your goal, email funnels are a must.

Depending on who you ask, marketing funnels can look a little different — but most take customers through the following basic stages:

Awareness. A lead starts getting to know your brand.
Consideration. Subscribers begin to think seriously about making a purchase.
Conversion. This is the stage where a lead converts and becomes a customer.
Loyalty. Now, you need to go above and beyond to make sure your customer sticks around.
Advocacy. Your customer likes your brand so much that they recommend you to their friends.

At the awareness stage, you’re throwing a wide net. You want to reach as many people as possible through marketing campaigns and other outreach tactics so they’ll begin to recognize and trust your brand. As those leads begin to move down through your funnel, you want to turn as many of them into customers as you can.

Leads in the consideration stage will receive more targeted content and product information. As they get into the buyer intent phase, your emails should become more overtly salesy, trying to prove why they need your product instead of your competitor’s. And after a lead converts and makes a purchase, you’ll still need to nurture that relationship, ensuring that the customer returns to you again and again — ideally with a friend in tow.

Wondering what the best email funnels look like? Let’s walk through each stage of the email funnel and look at some examples that do a great job.

Design your email funnel

Search BEE’s template catalog to find email templates for your marketing funnels.

See templates

Awareness

Your email funnel starts when a lead discovers your business and opts in to receive communications from you. Try capturing leads via a lead magnet, like a form on your website. Then you can send your leads something that’s relevant and valuable to them and allows them to get to know your brand. Send these awareness emails as soon as your lead opts in. Here, 1Canoe2 sent email subscribers a free digital calendar to download.

Subject line: {free download} Happy August!

best email funnels example

Consideration

During the consideration stage, customers are familiar with your brand but are still deciding whether to make a purchase. Help them along with personalized emails showcasing products they might like. Of course, this will take a little behind-the-scenes work on your part. Track what products they’ve viewed or even left in their cart on your website — then remind them about those same products in an email.

Subject line: Bee, your new leggings in size M are here!

email marketing funnel

Conversion

As your customer continues to move through the funnel and become more interested in your brand, it’s time to turn up the heat. Send emails with strong CTAs that urge people to buy now. In this email funnel example, Thrive Causemetics uses several phrases designed to spur subscribers into a purchase:

Final few

Don’t wait

Shop now

Must-haves

Subject line: FYI: These are selling quickly

sales email example

Run some A/B tests to find which CTA phrases work best for your brand. Then encourage your customers that it’s time to buy.

Loyalty

Your customer has officially made a purchase. What happens next? Now it’s your job to continue providing high-quality content so the customer doesn’t go anywhere: Continue nurturing your customers so they’ll become even more loyal to your brand. Byrdie sent this roundup of beauty blog posts to its subscribers, sharing relevant content and adding in a few product recommendations at the bottom of the message. The best email marketing funnels don’t stop when a customer converts. Instead, they keep going, increasing customer satisfaction.

Subject line: 49 life-changing beauty products you need to try ASAP

email funnels to increase customer satisfaction

Advocacy

At this stage of the email funnel, your focus should be on expansion. Since you know your customers are satisfied, try asking them to recommend your business to their friends. For example, Naja offers a loyalty program with a monetary incentive. The points-based system outlined in this email rewards customers who share about Naja on social media or directly refer a friend. It’s a smart way for Naja to get a little extra marketing (nearly) free of charge. Get your customers hooked and then get them to spread the word.

Subject line: Earn points, get free stuff!

email funnels example

Wrap-up: Create email marketing funnels

Have you planned out your email marketing funnels? If not, start now! For best results, lay out your sales funnel email sequence long before you make contact with your first lead. This ensures you’ll be well-prepared to attract, convert and delight those customers when the time comes.

BEE’s email templates can help with your funnels. Our template catalog has hundreds of professionally designed HTML email templates that you can easily customize and use for your business. Search through the catalog to find emails that are right for every stage of your email marketing funnels!