A Complete Guide: How to Create a Successful Email Sales Funnel

An email marketing sales funnel is the process of how people go from prospective leads to paying customers through email communications — better known as the ‘customer journey’.

This sales funnel has 3 main goals:

Email marketing funnels allow you to treat every single one of your existing customers as an individual — and not just another faceless name on a list!

To capture leads, your prospects will journey through 5 marketing funnel stages to eventually become loyal customers.

While all business’s email marketing funnels may differ depending on their goals and audience, here’s a general depiction of how an email sales funnel might appear:

The first stage in the email marketing funnel is specifically designed to develop an awareness of your business.

At this point, prospective leads are just starting to get to know your brand, therefore, this is the best stage for you to start building a trusting relationship.

You want to educate your audience and demonstrate the value your business provides.

Here’s an example of how our email marketing team approaches the first stage of the email sales funnel:

Once you’ve made your potential customers aware, you’ll need to give them a reason to stay interested — which takes us to the second stage of the funnel.

A successful email sequence grabs attention with awareness and seals the deal with interest.

At this stage, you want your potential customer to be intrigued enough to seek additional information about your business.

You can do this by:

This will help your potential customers understand what your business is about and why they need it.

Here, Aurelian shares his own story of how he managed to land a $20k consulting gig:

You need to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer — focus on what you would want to hear if you were them!

As potential leads move out of the interest stage and into the evaluation stage, it’s time you begin strengthening your relationship.

Your potential customers have shown immense interest in your product and how it will benefit them — this will help you gain information about your prospects, allowing you to provide targeted emails and quality content.

At this point, you want to prepare your prospects for the decision-making stage — make their purchase decision easier by including things like:

Aurelian decided to throw in a bonus to what is already a beneficial online course — Let’s see how he did it:

Your engagement email is your first closer!

After convincing a potential customer that your product is a must-have, you need to write a closing email that strikes a perfect balance between persuasion and urgency.

You can sweeten your deal by offering:

In the following sales email, Aurelian takes his first step towards closing the prospective customer:

The commitment stage can have one of 2 goals:

At this stage of the email marketing funnel, you need to be clear and precise as to why they should purchase your product or service and why they need to make the purchase right now.

You can create a sense of urgency by adding:

Let’s take a look at how Aurelian approaches this stage:

Once a lead becomes a customer, you need to stay in contact and in doing so accrue loyal customers.

Don’t, however, be too eager and end up spamming your new customer’s inbox with emails — A simple “Thank-you”-email will suffice for this step in the email marketing funnel.

Every now and then a customer just needs a little push to get through the entire email marketing sales funnel — that’s why we’ve compiled 3 of the most important steps you should consider when you write an email.

There are three important strategies to carry out when converting a prospect into a customer.

To ensure that your prospects are reading your emails you must understand that your marketing message shouldn’t be all about you or your product — it’s about them and meeting their needs!

Creating added value is an art, and it starts with the ability to see your business through the eyes of your customers.

In general, the value in messages is expressed by adding promotions or incentives that are directly linked to the sale or product, or service — Value, however, has many forms.

Here are 6 ways to deliver value to your customers:

Remember that when you add value to your emails, try not to do any selling just yet — instead, attract your customer by giving without expecting anything in return.

As a business, your goal should be to become an expert that people go to to find solutions for specific problems.

With email marketing, you can establish yourself as an authority by:

All these things contribute to your customers’ connection with your brand and take them closer to making a purchase.

How you pitch your sales offer in your email is the most important step to getting your prospective lead to convert into a customer.

Here’s what you should include to make the perfect email sales pitch:

A sales pitch doesn’t necessarily have to be drawn out and super detailed — short and sweet does it!

You do, however, need to ensure that you include all the necessary information to get your prospective clients to take action and make that purchase.

Understanding the stages of the email marketing funnel and what to focus on when carrying it out is your first step to building your own — so, what’s next?

Building an email marketing funnel and developing an email marketing strategy is absolutely vital to converting leads and making more sales — and here’s why:

Now that we know the value of an email marketing funnel, let’s take a look at how we can build one.

Using email marketing tools to track your customers’ interactions won’t be enough to realize their complete experience with your business or product.

This is why profiling your customers by using buyer personas is important!

Once you’ve created your customer journey map, it’s crucial to analyze the results of your map and make the appropriate changes.

Now that you know who you’re marketing for, what their needs are, and how to cater to their pain points; you can move on to the next step — lead generation.

What is email marketing without any leads to send emails to?

With your buyer’s journey clear, your next step is to create your pages.

In this step, it’s important to focus on the quality rather than the quantity of your list — Ideally, you want your new leads to be both relevant and interested, and fall under the marketing-qualified lead category.

With that said, here are 2 common ways of lead generation:

An opt-in form is a form you add to your website where page visitors opt-in to receive additional information about the product involved.

Here’s a popup opt-in form systeme.io uses on its blog posts:

A landing page is a dedicated page including a lead magnet.

Here’s a screenshot of a systeme.io landing page containing an opt-in block to join the platform for free:

A lead magnet is a product or service you offer to your website’s visitors in exchange for their email addresses.

Here systeme.io uses an ebook as a lead magnet to collect email addresses:

And more.

Providing free value is the best way to generate more customers — who doesn’t love freebies?

It’s important to understand who you’re trying to get to opt-in — It’ll help you avoid trying to sell things that your customers aren’t interested in.

After you’ve collected email addresses, you’ll need to start nurturing your leads — let’s take a look at how you can do this!

A drip campaign is an automated email sequence that sends out specific emails at pre-scheduled times to segmented lists.

When compared to a lead nurturing campaign, a drip campaign has a much more specific goal — to welcome new leads, onboard a new client, re-engage an inactive lead, or nurture your existing customers.

A lead nurturing campaign takes a more personalized approach by adopting specific behavioral data and focusing solely on lead conversion.

Systeme.io simplifies each step of your lead nurturing strategy, saving you time and money.

Having a loyal customer base doesn’t only mean you have customers who purchase your products, but also that they’ll praise and recommend you to others.

You can also consider creating a membership program or community that your customers can join to stay up-to-date with your business.

Systeme.io allows you to create membership sites to offer gated content that will only be available to paying members.

If you’re just getting started, partnering with a marketing platform might just be a good fit for you as it will provide you with the necessary tools to build your marketing funnel as well as keep your expenditures to a minimum.

You do, however, want to make sure that the platform you choose meets your every need — we recommend systeme.io — an all-in-one marketing tool that is not only feature-rich but also cost-effective!

Let’s see how systeme.io can help you build an email marketing funnel and give your prospects the ultimate customer journey!

First, you’ll need an active systeme.io account.

Thereafter, on your dashboard, you start by clicking on “Funnels”.

The next step is to click on “Create”.

A sales funnel is unique in that it comes preloaded with a customizable offer form and Thank You page.

This funnel is used to generate sales for your business.

The custom funnel is perfect for those who have experience building funnels, as it has a blank template, and you use it to create any kind of page that you want.

The Webinar funnel is a specially designed, 3-page funnel that is optimized to sell your webinars.

(Webinars are only available on the Webinar and Unlimited subscriptions.)

Select any of the 4 options and move on to our templates.

You can create landing pages from scratch or customize our templates as you wish with our user-friendly drag-and-drop editor.

Systeme.io offers 4 pricing plans to choose from:

With up to 2,000 contacts, the Free plan allows you to create and send unlimited emails, build 3 funnels with 10 funnel steps, and also run tests, such as A/B tests, on your campaigns and pages.

With up to 5,000 contacts, the Startup plan allows you to create and send unlimited emails, build 10 funnels with 50 funnel steps, and additionally run tests, such as A/B tests, on your campaigns and pages.

With up to 10,000 contacts, the Webinar plan allows you to create and send unlimited emails, build 50 funnels with 300 funnels steps, run tests, such as A/B tests, on your campaigns and pages, as well as host 10 evergreen webinars.

With systeme.io’s Unlimited plan, you have unlimited access to all our features!

Before this article comes to a close, let’s take a look at some frequently asked questions we’ve stumbled upon — just in case you were thinking of one of these as well.

Over to you!

With all the knowledge you now have on email marketing sales funnels, you can go and create your own, and turn all your prospects into loyal customers!

Remember: Email marketing tools are there to help you with the building, launching, and maintaining process — so don’t hesitate to take a look if you need a helping hand!

With systeme.io you can easily create your email marketing funnel and more with no extra cost at all — and it’s only one click away!

Try systeme.io for free today.