Out of the different marketing channels, email takes the lead with over 40% in marketing ROI.
This shows you just how important to incorporate email marketing into your strategy. But most importantly, implementing the related marketing funnels effectively.
And not just implementing, but automating them to ensure optimal results for your campaign!
In this article, we will analyze different effective email marketing funnels you need to automate, but first…
Why Is It Important To Automate?

Let’s break down the benefits further:
Allows You To Customize Your Customers’ Experiences
All-inclusive emails will get you nowhere. You need to target and customize your email newsletters to get the results you are looking for. Automation helps to segment your audiences and personalize the newsletters sent to them.
Addressing your customers by their names and curating content to fit their needs forges trust and helps you boost your conversion rates.
Saves Marketing Time and Effort
Automation will up your email marketing game because no manual labor will be required. The automatic triggers are planned hence saving the family time and effort. This time can alternatively be for other critical marketing tasks.
Boosts Customer Retention
There are multiple ways of improving customer loyalty, one of them being through email. The sales funnel has different stages which is why it’s important to personalize the message for each phase and deliver on time.
This ensures that your audience thinks about your brand whenever they need to make a purchasing decision.
Take advantage of email automation to offer exclusive deals, product recommendations, and even deliver precious content that will leave your readers feeling special.
Enhances The Scalability of Your Marketing Plan
It would almost be impossible to manually reach every single individual interested in your brand. Your numbers may always be rising making it difficult to keep up with them.
Automating the process such as having a predetermined message sent to every new signup eases the work. This way, you can steadily but significantly scale your marketing plan.
Important: With every stage of the email marketing funnel, the customer goes through different phases;
✔Awareness: When they first interact with your product/service.
✔Interest: They like what you are offering.
✔Consideration: They think it could solve their problem(s), so they’re considering it.
✔Conversion: They buy it!
Make sure to consider these when building your email marketing funnel.
Effective Email Marketing Funnel Automations To Consider
You now know why it is important to automate your email marketing funnel, great! Let’s look into some of the types of email sequences you could send to your email subscribers.
The Welcome Series
Your welcome series is your first impression. This goes to show how crucial it is to have an impeccable email marketing funnel. It is designed to introduce new subscribers while encouraging them to buy your product.
The best part about the welcome sequence is that it allows you to not only salute your subscribers but also; expound on your brand story, send them the initial lead magnet you used, encourage your readers to look into your product, give them valuable information, as well as ask them for recommendations for their favorite content or any support you might offer them.
The Lead Nurturing Series
Your new subscribers won’t just buy your product or service. It’s essential to build up the trust and drive them towards that final step of making a purchase decision.
It allows you to draw your readers closer to your products rather than wishing they would just buy them. It is especially effective since 99% of people check their email inboxes daily.
If you do this right, you will not only improve your conversions but also get closer to your target audience.
The Cart Abandonment Series
Sometimes buyers add items to their cart but don’t end up purchasing them. This is called ‘cart abandonment’.
The cart abandonment series is meant to remind and persuade the customer to check out. And when compared to the normal marketing email, it performs better with an open rate of 41.18%.
Note that a lot of potential buyers abandon their cart because of various reasons like, expensive shipping, better deals from competitors, complicated checkout, technical problems, and also because they weren’t ready.
A few characteristics of a great abandonment cart series include prompt delivery, simplicity, customization, captivating product images, clear CTA, and incentives such as exclusive offers, free shipping, and giveaways.
The Upsell Series
Upselling is one of the best email marketing tactics. After a customer makes a purchase, encouraging an upgrade of the initial product or a complementary purchase is what’s known as upselling.
Instead of marketing to new customers, the current customers are encouraged to buy more products, pumping more revenue into the business. Your customers are not aware of the other products your brand offers but upselling creates this awareness.
However, you need to avoid sounding pushy- NEVER hard sell to your customers.
The Cross-sell Series
The relationship with your customer doesn’t have to end when they make a purchase. Just like with the upsell series, you want to strike a long-term relationship. It encourages future purchases while improving customer loyalty.
And cross-selling means marketing a product that aligns with the initial product purchased. For instance, selling a pair of shorts to a customer who bought a t-shirt that would complete the look.
For your customers to make a purchase, they were first interested in it which means they were likely highly satisfied with it.
Don’t you think it’s easier to sell to such a customer than to try to convince a stranger to buy your product?
The Customer Feedback Series
The customer feedback series gives you a glimpse of what your customers think about your products. Are they happy or disappointed? Is there anything you need to improve on? How do you make their experience better? What are they interested in the most?
The feedback series gets the information needed to effectively address your customers’ needs through the products you offer them.
Stages in this email marketing funnel are;
- The survey email: It’s an email meant to find out about a customer’s experience after a purchase.
- The follow-up survey: If the initial survey email isn’t responded to, the customer is sent a follow-up email as a reminder for them to give their feedback.
- Feedback confirmation: Once a customer completes their survey, this email is sent to thank them for providing feedback on their experience.
- Action stage: Since not all customers will provide positive feedback, the negative ones are responded to with a solution to their concerns.
- The reward: To encourage customers who provide positive feedback, emails with a special kind of offer or discount are sent to reward them and equally encourage them to buy again.
The Re-engagement Series
A part of your audience might be less active, or completely inactive. The re-engagement email series is meant to win them back. They could be your next buyers so don’t ignore them!
However, they don’t always have to stay, re-engaging them can help you establish if you need to keep them or let them go.
Re-engaging subscribers by telling them about new products, or even improved features in the existing products is an exciting way to keep inactive subscribers interested. You can also ask them to share what they wish to hear from you.
The Birthday Series
This is one of the best ways to show your subscribers that it’s not always about you. You care about them and remember important details about them such as their birthdays. This makes them feel special!
Birthday email series get more attention compared to normal emails. And with such a high open rate, marketers take advantage of this to boost their sales.
The Referral Series
Referrals are an effective way of reaching potential buyers. Once a buyer uses your product or service and they are satisfied, they will likely refer it to people they know.
However, the referral email needs to offer an incentive that motivates a referral from your existing customers.
For instance, your customers could get a gift or discount if people they refer to your products or services make a purchase.
➢A survey has proven that 54% of marketers have agreed that recommendations have the highest average order value for most of the purchases.
➢According to a Monetate study, retailers experience a 70% conversion rate higher than other seasons.
➢49% of buyers confessed that they made a purchase out of recommendation but they didn’t intend to do it at first.
➢35% of Amazon purchases are as a result of recommendations.
The Loyalty Program Series
After all is said and done, loyalty-building emails are crucial in your automated email marketing funnel.
The best part is that there are countless types of loyalty emails you could send your readers. Whether you are offering coupons or discounts, offering benefits like special access or sneak peeks into a new product, and even giving interesting personal stories about yourself or that of your teammates.
Further share tips, educate your readers, offer unique tokens, and complementary CTA. Just ensure that it is simple.
On the downside, it might not work how you want.
Why? Different types of loyalty programs apply to different industries -you just need to find the most suitable one(s).
The Bottom Line…
An additional 320% of revenue is generated from email automation. This indicates how vital email automation funnels are for your business. They not only make work easier for you but also multiply your ROI.
While building up your email series, remember that a call to action(CTA) is as important as what you are promoting. It should be simple, clear, and blunt.
Direct the reader to do exactly what you need them to do for great results.