While email marketing can often be overlooked in today’s marketing world, it should definitely not be ignored.
According to HubSpot, 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content, 83% of B2B companies use e-newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention.
However, when it comes to email marketing, it’s important to get it right. A great way to ensure you’re targeting the right people with the right email marketing content is to focus on creating an effective email marketing funnel.
What is an Email Marketing Funnel?
It’s important to understand what a marketing funnel is before focusing on an effective email marketing funnel for your business. A marketing funnel can otherwise be known as the buyer’s journey or sales funnel – these are all essentially different terms for the same thing – the journey taken from prospect to customer. At the core of these funnels are the ‘awareness’, ‘consideration’ and ‘decision’ stages of a purchase. An email marketing funnel refers to the process of turning prospects into customers using email marketing as the key tool.
It’s important to think about your target customers and what their journey through the funnel might look like. For example, prospects may come across a blog you posted and enter the ‘awareness’ stage. From here, they may have been prompted to address one of their pain points by looking at solutions in the market, including those offered by you. This is where more in-depth pieces of content such as whitepapers and eBooks can come in, to tell this prospect that you’re an expert in your field and can offer them the solution they need. The final ‘decision’ stage is where they’ve made the decision to choose your business, and this is a great time for offerings such as free trials and demos.
HubSpot provides the tools to create email sequences that apply to prospects at different stages of the buyer’s journey, otherwise known as ‘workflows.’
Creating Workflows on HubSpot
Workflows are HubSpot’s automation tool for the email marketing funnel. They offer you the chance to create a sequence of different emails targeting different stages of the funnel. These are automatically triggered when a contact becomes eligible for the set term of the sequence.
For example, a contact may sign up to your newsletter and become eligible for the first ‘thank you’ email. You can then set up a second email to be sent, for example, 7 days after the initial ‘thank you’, which includes some helpful blog posts relevant to your prospects. Emails later on down the line might include promotion of an eBook you’ve created, which can help prospects in the ‘consideration’ stage.
With the workflows tool, it’s easy to automate your marketing, sales, and service processes to make your team more efficient. You can find a more in-depth guide to creating workflows here.
For our B2B clients in the tech and telecoms industries, HubSpot workflows have been a great way to nurture prospects and widen their customer base. By targeting the right prospects with the right materials at the right time, converting prospects to customers through email marketing is simple. Get in touch today to find out how we can help automate your email marketing for sales success.