How Email Marketing Keeps Sales in Your Funnel

Email can be one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolbox. Email is the oldest form of digital communication. A full 94% of the online community uses email daily. Often neglected by marketers because it has a bad reputation due to abuses of unethical marketers, email remains a superstar in the marketing toolbox. The return on investment (ROI) for email marketing campaigns is among the highest of any digital marketing. This fact has created renewed interest in using email marketing to keep the sales funnel filled.

One of the problems with creating sales funnels is that our customers don't always travel the sales journey as we anticipate. Sometimes they stray off the sales path, and we lose the chance to convert them. Using email in our marketing campaigns is a great way to guide our prospects farther down our funnel. Email is unique. There is no other digital tool that allows us the flexibility and directness that we can get when running an email marketing campaign. For the campaign to be effective, there are a few things we need to keep in mind. 

MARKETING FUNNEL

A marketing funnel is our plan to get the attention of a prospect and lead them through a series of steps that have the goal of converting them into a customer. In any marketing funnel, there are a series of steps we hope our soon-to-be customer will take. We design our funnels so that the next step is obvious and logical. Here is an example of a straightforward marketing funnel.

Step 1. A prospect Googles our product or service.

Step 2. Our Google Ad listing puts our company as the top search result.

Step 3. The prospect clicks our ad and goes to a landing page, completes a form with their email.

Step 4. We send the customer a special coupon for our product.

Step 5. The customer uses the coupon to purchase our product.

As we can see, if all goes well and according to our plan, in just a few steps, an unknown prospect becomes a customer. But the process is rarely this simple. One of the biggest problems with marketing funnels is that the customer doesn't always take the steps that we had planned for him. Sometimes, the cause of this "straying away" is a poorly designed funnel. Poorly designed funnels happen when the marketer has incorrectly anticipated the decisions of the prospect. And with many funnels, once the prospect leaves the funnel, the marketer loses control of the process. This situation is precisely where email can be remarkably helpful.

AN EMAIL FUNNEL

The powerful thing about email funnels is that marketers can't lose track of the customer. We can't because we have his email address and can contact him when we want. While we can't force someone to buy our product, if the prospect is a good match and we can demonstrate value, they likely will become a customer. Email is an excellent tool to help lead the prospect through each step of the marketing funnel. 

And email statistics are very impressive. Statistics tell us that -

Email Users Worldwide: 3.7 Billion

Users Who Check Email as Their First Daily Activity 58%

Users Who Check Their Email Daily 91%

Percentage of Email Opened from A Recognized Company 44%

Users Who Have Purchased Through Email 66%

Roi: 3200% Making It the Highest in Digital Marketing.

3.7 Billion Email Users In 2019 And Expected to Grow To 4.3 Billion Users In 2022

As we can see by these statistics, email is a powerhouse when it comes to customer engagement and opportunity, and it is not going away anytime soon. Email is the primary marketing vehicle of small businesses for customer acquisition and retention. Don't let the skeptics mislead you, email is still very much alive and has every indication of growing. If you design an effective marketing funnel for an email campaign, the email campaign will help you grow your business. 

The internet is constantly producing new ways to reach out and market to our prospects.  Email has been with us from the beginning and has consistently grown in the number of users and the number of emails sent every year. Email is an extremely efficient and effective way to keep prospects in your sales funnel.

EMAIL CAMPAIGNS AND SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, are providing us with new and exciting marketing opportunities. We have more options for targeting and engagement than we have ever had before. Using productive and well-planned email campaigns hand and hand with our social media marketing campaigns is a very powerful approach. Making a landing page to attract and engage customers so we can collect their email addresses, opens up very inexpensive but effective options for us as marketers.

EMAIL OPEN RATES

It's a very simple matter to measure the effectiveness of an email campaign. This simplicity is because we can immediately see who has opened our email. As it turns out, the average open rate for “welcome emails” is an enormous 82%. This open rate is an incredibly high percentage for customer engagement. This rate is tough to match in all of digital marketing. The majority of marketers can't get customers to do anything at a rate of 82%. It's no wonder why email campaigns boast about the highest ROI in digital marketing.

When you consider all emails as a total, the open rate is a low 20%. However, when you personalize those emails, the open rate more than doubles to 50%. So, what we take away from this is when designing our email marketing programs, including the name of the recipient in the greeting and the subject line, we will massively increase the open rate. If that contact information is not available, include the name of the recipients' company, the name of the product, or some topic that is familiar to your prospect and common to you both. Studies have shown that the more "individual” an email looks, the higher the open rate. We have seen instances of open rates reaching 100% when is each email is adequately customized.

ABANDONED SHOPPING CARTS

Abandoned shopping carts are a huge problem for online sellers. In some industries, the rate exceeds 75%. Sending these customers an email reminding them of their unfinished shopping trip results in almost 70% more orders. And this is an easy activity because the seller already has the name and identity of the shopper. Abandoned shopping cart emails are the single highest ROI marketing activity in all e-commerce.

EMAIL IS INTERACTIVE

When email was new, there was no such thing as hyperlinks, or any other multimedia or interactive options. Studies have shown that if email advertisers include videos, gifts, menus that collapse, and other interesting graphics, the open rates skyrocket. Various studies have shown up to a 300% increase in the open rate. This changed open rate is a huge rate increase for such a small investment.

CUSTOMERS LIKE YOUR EMAILS

Another interesting study from Statista tells us that customers like to receive emails every week from companies they like.  Use this statistic to plan out email marketing campaigns.  Especially use it when the question of frequency arises. One email a week is a great frequency that your customers will like. They want to hear from you , and they want value from you. 

EMAIL IS MOBILE

One of the significant developments in digital marketing is the Mega Trend toward mobile devices. More people are surfing the web, conducting Google searches, and spending time on their mobile devices than they are on desktop computers. This trend also applies to customers using email. Your customers are reading emails on their phones. As Statista stated, they want to hear from you every week. It only makes sense to send a weekly email that they can read on their phone.

DESIGNING THOSE EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

The digital landscape is constantly shifting, and so is the list of "best practices" when it comes to email marketing funnels. The Click Depot has been designing and implementing effective email marketing campaigns for many years. Call us and talk to one of our digital marketing consultants about how you can incorporate email marketing into your overall marketing strategy.