Email Marketing Funnel : How to Create One

Of all the words in the English language, none get marketers more excited than this four letter combination: L-E-A-D.

Collecting and qualifying leads is every marketer’s prime responsibility. It doesn’t matter whether you focus on local, social, or organic channels, the number of leads you capture each month (and their quality) will be among your top KPIs.

One way to capture and qualify leads is through an email marketing funnel. A well-formed email funnel can bring in a steady supply of leads to your sales team on autopilot.

How exactly do you go about setting up an email marketing funnel? What steps can you take to maximize this funnel’s impact? which email marketing tool will you need? I’ll share some answers in this detailed guide.

The Email Marketing Funnel Explained

An email marketing funnel can be broadly divided into three distinct stages:

• Attracting visitors to a page (such as a landing page or blog post with an opt-in form)
• Engaging visitors with relevant content and capturing their emails with targeted offers
• Nurturing captured leads and turning them into sales-ready buyers

Graphically, you can represent this as follows:

At the start of the funnel, you have just raw traffic. As the traffic moves through the funnel, it turns into a lead and eventually, into a marketing qualified lead (MQL).

I’ll share an example to help you understand this funnel better.

Reference this page on growth hacking tactics for an example of a project. Since it ranks on the first spot for its primary keyword (“growth hacking traffic”), it attracts a number of targeted visitors.

This is the first stage in the email marketing funnel—Attraction.

The next step is to turn this raw traffic into leads. To do this,  an opt-in form with a highly targeted offer - a printable checklist of the page’s content.

Since the offer matches the visitors’ requirements, we get a strong conversion rate for the opt-in. This is the second stage: Engagement.

Once we’ve captured an email address, we plug it into a marketing automation funnel. This funnel sends the lead a series of emails based on their actions. This is the third stage—Nurture.

 

The purpose of this funnel is to educate the reader about “growth hacking” with a subtle plug for our services. By the end of the email series, the lead is “qualified” for a sales call.

This is just one example of an email marketing funnel. Large agencies might have multiple offers and complex automation rules. If you’re starting out, however, this simple three-step funnel is a good place to start.

The Key Ingredients of a Successful Email Marketing Funnel

Every successful email marketing funnel requires a few key ingredients:

• Traffic: A successful funnel requires a consistent stream of quality, targeted traffic. The traffic must show some intent to learn more about a topic. Organic or paid traffic through long-tail keywords works particularly well.

• Content offer: Any targeted visitor landing on your site must have a reason to give away his email address. Your goal should be to demonstrate value, either through content (such as a blog post), or through other trust signals (such as testimonials, content previews) on a landing page.

• Tools: You’ll need a way to capture emails through opt-in forms and landing pages. You’ll also need a marketing automation tool for the nurture stage of the email marketing funnel.

This covers the basics of any competent email marketing funnel. You can go further with A/B testing to improve conversion rates, though I recommend reserving that for later.

In the next section, I’ll show you how to create your own funnel using these key ingredients.

Phase 1: Attracting Traffic with Content

As they say in marketing: it all starts with traffic.

To build a successful email marketing funnel, you need to supply it with a steady stream of targeted traffic. The more consistent and scalable the traffic supply, the more predictable your results and revenue.

To attract this traffic, you’ll need to create quality content. Even if you’re using paid channels, you’ll need to create a compelling content offer to reel in visitors.

How to Create Compelling Content

When it comes to capturing emails, there are broadly two models you can adopt:

1. Place high-value content (such as an eBook) behind a download form. Drive traffic to a landing page that promotes this content.
2. Offer content upfront (such as a blog post) and place additional high-value content behind an opt-in form.

You can illustrate these two models as follows:

The first model is effective but depends mostly on paid traffic. A landing page isn’t going to attract much organic traffic by itself.

I prefer the second model for two reasons:

• You can attract traffic through search and social media referrals
• You can give visitors a “preview” of your content and highlight its value

The second model is also much more in line with the inbound marketing philosophy of giving value for free and letting visitors opt into receiving additional information.

When you’re creating this content, there are a few things you need to keep in mind:

1. Pick relevant topics

When picking topics for your content, always keep your final goal in mind - to capture emails.

This means that the topic should be:

• Expansive enough to support a high-value content piece
• Narrow enough to interest your targeted demographic
• Focused on a relevant keyword(s) with substantial search volume
• Related to the high-value content you’re going to offer to capture emails

For example, if you’re targeting small businesses that want to get local customers through search, pick a topic like “Local SEO checklist” instead of just SEO checklist. The former is more relevant to your target audience’s interests.

It’s always a good idea to pick a topic that can be turned into a listicle. This way, you can expand the content when necessary by adding more items to the list.

Another good practice is to take stock of your existing eBooks, whitepapers, and other content offers. Try to align your topic with this existing content library. This allows you to plug in your existing content to capture emails.

2. See what your target clients are sharing

One of my favorite ways to pick a content topic is to see what my target clients are publicly sharing. This gives me great insight into the client’s biggest concerns and content consumption habits.

Here’s how you can use this tactic:

• Create an ideal buyer persona: If you don’t already have one, create your ideal buyer persona. Describe this customer’s demographics, role/position in the company, and interests. Read Zachary’s guide to learn more about it.

• Find 10 people who fit your target persona: Make a list of at least 10 prospects who a) fit your target persona, and b) are active on social media.

• Make a list of their shared content: For each prospect, find out what content they’re sharing on Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Analyze shared content: Note the topic, content complexity, content type (how-to, thought piece, guide, etc.), and length for each piece of shared content.

Here’s what your sample spreadsheet might look like:

Your goal is to figure out what kind of content your target customers like to consume. This will help you create content that appeals to their interests.

3. Align content with traffic acquisition strategy

What kind of content you create will depend a lot on how you plan to attract traffic to it.

If your plan is to get traffic through Pinterest, you’ll want to create highly visual content.

Likewise, if you plan to attract traffic through search, make sure that your content is SEO-optimized.

Broadly speaking, there are a few guidelines you should follow for different channels:

Social media:

• Emphasize visual content, especially on Pinterest
• Focus on B2B topics and in-depth guides on LinkedIn
• Tech and current events-related content does well on Twitter
• For Facebook, focus on useful content with strong visual components
• Ensure that you have relevant share buttons placed strategically throughout the content

SEO:

• Create longer content (over 2,000 words) to improve your chances of ranking
• Ensure that you’re using strong on-page SEO tactics (headline tags, keyword usage, etc.)
• Keep content updated since fresher content will often outrank older pieces

I can’t emphasize the last point enough. You can often beat more established competitors simply by keeping your content regularly updated.

For example, after updating one of our pages, organic traffic shot up substantially even though we added barely 100 words of additional content: