Every business owner’s goal should be to create an efficient strategy for attracting more customers on a regular basis whilst retaining them effectively. 

Despite this being a simple concept, customer acquisition can often be the most difficult aspect of running a business – even if you happen to already be a proven and proficient marketer. 

Email marketing funnels are ideal for enabling you to direct visitors towards the point where they’re ready to make a purchase without them getting lost in the process. Having a clear path set up all the way from your mailing list enables you to maintain a strong degree of influence over your customers while pursuing your conversion goals. 

Although, how can you guarantee that you’re creating a convertible email marketing strategy? Let’s take a deeper look into the finer details of email marketing with these four key tips for creating the best campaign for your business: 

Keeping Your Funnel Well Managed

Let’s quickly look at what an email marketing funnel looks like before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to optimize them. Fundamentally, an email marketing funnel takes the form of a sequence of emails scheduled to be sent to leads with the strategic purpose of converting them into customers. 

(Image: SlideTeam)

What makes email marketing funnels more important than others? Notably, it’s the most effective way of getting in touch with leads. Data suggests that approximately half of the world’s population have access to email – a pool of around 3.9 billion people. Furthermore, the average ROI for every $1 spent on email marketing amounts to $42. 

81% of small businesses are dependent on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and likewise 80% choose to use it as their customer retention strategy of choice. 

When tracking campaign performance, it’s possible to optimize your campaigns as and when you’re ready and at the right time in order to maximize your performance. 

Today there are more channels than ever for appealing to new customers. Social media and video content have evolved to become a strong form of marketing, but it’s still email marketing funnels that can leverage the best chance of sustainably boosting your revenue. 

Managing Your Lead Magnets

When visitors come to your website for the first time, the chances are that they’re not immediately certain that they’re going to buy your product or service. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t make a great first impression that could lead to future sales. 

To make sure that you give the best possible impression to your visitors, it’s important that you use various lead magnets as a means of getting them to subscribe to your mailing list in order to take their first steps into your funnel. 

(Image: AWeber)

Here, we can see a great example of a lead magnet. We can clearly see that the company is offering a free premium quality ebook that consists of 49 pages. We can also see that the visitor will receive 20 recipes that have been social proofed by the business as ‘fan favorites’.

However, there’s the risk that some visitors may give their email address out to access a free offer before disengaging with the business once they get their freebie. As a way of safeguarding from this happening, remember to create and send a welcome email from the off whilst generating an email sequence where a follow up is sent a few days after the initial email to each subscriber who hasn’t opened the initial message yet. 

Keep Your Goals in Mind

Email marketing funnel optimization campaigns can resemble their more traditional advertising counterparts. Similar to the case of advertising, sometimes marketers can miss the point of why they’re creating a funnel in the first place: to maximize conversion opportunities. 

In leveraging these conversion opportunities, you’ll need to develop a more holistic approach. You could spend days working on the perfect email copy and create a shortlist of the more appealing CTAs, but it’s all ineffective if your landing page and website is a mess. 

There are some important rules to adhere to when it comes to keeping your goals in mind. Avoid the temptation of cluttering your copy with distractions. Images and content can be engaging but they can also take attention away from the matter at hand. Also, try to steer clear of cramming multiple calls to action that link to various different company pages. You need your funnels to be aligned to leverage conversions, which means guiding customers through your funnel efficiently. 

(Image: Econsultancy)

Here we can see a Macy’s email marketing call-to-action. In this instance, Macy’s runs a series of distracting hyperlinks that may be too confusing for potential customers to trust into entering a sales funnel. 

While the ‘extra 20% off’ appears to be the CTA, it’s not the only offer on the ad – with ‘extra 15% off’ listed directly below without much context offered into what qualifies as 20% off if other lines haven’t got a full discount. There’s also a series of hyperlinks leading to all different areas of the company website, making it much more difficult to follow visitor journeys. 

Be sure to create a clear funnel entry point that can direct leads accordingly so you can better optimize your landing pages to greet email subscribers and cater to their needs. 

Monitor Your Performance

It’s important to spend time testing your emails to make sure you have a well-oiled marketing machine at your fingertips. Test your emails at each stage of your campaigns to ensure you get the best performance throughout. 

It’s also worth A/B testing parts of your emails, particularly when it comes to subject lines, content, CTA, email triggers, and the times your emails are sent to ensure that your process is well optimized. 

Urchin tracking module (UTM) campaign codes can be generated to help to measure your progress with certain analytics systems like Google Analytics and Finteza. 

By looking at Finteza’s UTM parameters as an example, it’s possible to see how websites can create huge datasets surrounding each visitor, their pageviews, and conversions that follow. This helps users to identify data that can pinpoint what’s working well in campaigns and what needs attention. 

Always Remember Retention

One simple rule when it comes to marketing is to never assume your job is done when you’ve made a sale. Retention is vital for generating more brand loyalty and optimizing your ROI. 

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t enjoy winning a sale, but you shouldn’t delay in getting back to winning new customers and keeping your existing ones happy enough to make fresh conversions. 

Email is one of the best ways to retain customers. This is down to the fact that they’ve already given you their email address and will have acquainted themselves with the company. 

Thanks to this, you’ll be able to talk directly to individuals about your products and services based on this assumed familiarity. You can use their purchase to create tailor-suited offers and content surrounding similar products or offer top ups of the items they’ve already bought. 

Though marketers are increasingly drawn to social media or multimedia strategies today, email marketing remains one of the best ways of putting your most ideal products forward and generating the right kind of interest. When used effectively, email marketing can win you customers in a cost-effective manner that’s unmatched by other strategies.