The Customer Acquisition Funnel For Email Marketers

To succeed, you need to take people who don’t know anything about your brand, and transform them into informed and engaged customers. It’s about getting them to take action, and share their passion for your brand with others. 

The customer acquisition funnel is, essentially, the theoretical model that visualises this journey. 

It maps out the key touchpoints and behavioural changes that happen throughout the customer buying journey. The funnel itself demonstrates the value of casting a wide net and filtering down into those customers who are the most likely to convert and even advocate for your brand. 

To put it simply: understanding the customer acquisition funnel, and the necessary actions you need to take at each stage, is critical to your marketing success. Marketers need to build and deliver campaigns that take customers from awareness through to purchase, and even loyalty.

When it comes to email marketing, in particular, this might be a wake-up call. The customer acquisition funnel serves as a reminder that we can’t simply focus on conversion-led campaigns and must also target users at other stages. 

Wondering how your email marketing can deliver more at every stage of the customer journey? Keep reading this guide to get acquainted with the funnel, and how to put these learnings into action. 

The customer acquisition funnel is a visualisation of the theoretical stages a customer journeys through before they commit to a purchase. 

B2C and B2B acquisition funnels are similar, though some B2B models include more steps due to the perceived complexity and longer-term nature of B2B buying cycles. 

While there is some conflicting information about how many stages are actually involved, the general idea is that each step represents customers moving from a research-led approach towards buying intent. To keep things as straightforward and effective as possible, we’d suggest focusing on these six core steps:

1. Awareness: Users at this stage have been unaware of your brand/business and are now just beginning to discover it. 
2. Interest: Users begin exploring your brand and showing interest in what you offer. 
3. Consideration: Users now consider and compare your products and services.
4. Intent: Potential customers now show a defined interest in making a conversion. 
5. Conversion: The user becomes a customer by taking a final converting action. 
6. Retention: Converted users can become loyal repeat customers. 

These steps don’t just explain customer behaviour – they also represent certain needs and opportunities that marketers can use to build campaigns around. Let’s dig deeper into what each step represents and how to tailor email marketing around buyer intent to progress users down the funnel towards a conversion. 

When a prospect moves down to this stage, they begin showing an interest in your brand/products. Prospects are still early in the cycle and may not even be aware of what the solution they need is. This means they’re not yet ready to buy and want to perform research before they commit. 

Goal: identify your prospect’s problems and demonstrate how your brand/product solves them. 

Tactics:

• Build how-to guides on your site to serve your prospect’s research needs. 
• Share case studies to clearly demonstrate user problems and how you solved them.  
• Plan informative email campaigns aimed at solving problems or demonstrating solutions. 
• Create a sense of trust alongside interest by sharing customer reviews and social proof. 

At this stage, a customer is aware of the potential solution and sees your business as one of them – but there’s no guarantee they’ll choose you over a competitor. Their research becomes more focused and comparative. 

Goal: give customers the information they need to evaluate your brand against competitors. 

Tactics:

• Track any incoming customer queries and use common questions to design FAQ articles. 
• Create material to promote favourable comparisons between you and your competitors. 
• Design product/service demonstration assets that show the solution in-situ.
• Use email campaigns to solve any remaining problems and offer customers a way to interact with your brand via the email – perhaps even asking them to se

Having progressed down the funnel, a customer is now ready to make a purchase. There are still some factors that may inform their decision, so this stage often sees a customer either complete a purchase or abandon the journey altogether. 

Goal: make completing a conversion as straightforward and appealing as possible. 

Tactics:

• Ensure every campaign sent to buyers further down the funnel contains clear CTA banners and product purchase links. 
• Check that any payment processes are working smoothly on your website to ensure no barriers to customer conversion. 
• Engage retargeting campaigns to bring lapsing customers back to your funnel. 
• Follow up on any personalised offer/trial email campaigns you’ve sent that haven’t converted. 

Acquisition isn’t solely about converting your target audience – it’s also about creating long-term customers. Users who have converted successfully may be turned into loyal, repeat purchasers – but only if you can offer great customer experiences and ongoing support for customer problems. 

Goal: turn a one-time purchaser into a long-term retained customer. 

Tactics:

• Create post-purchase email series that gather feedback on your products/services. Try to act on customer feedback and demonstrate it to them. 
• Process returns/refunds as quickly as you can to keep customers happy. If there have been problems, offer concessions for future purchases to limit damage to your brand. 
• Make sure your website and digital channels all promote positive customer experiences. Cut down on waiting/load times, improve omnichannel browsing options and make support easy to access. 
• Try to implement further personalisation around customer needs and interests, sending tailored offers based on past purchase history. 

Though the customer acquisition funnel is mainly theoretical, marketers can still tie distinct metrics to each stage. Early research stages can be gauged by impressions, visits and time on page – whereas more conversion-focused stages can be tracked with clicks, conversion rates and even manual goals like brochure downloads. 

To maximise the effectiveness of this model, you need an email marketing team that understands how a customer’s behaviours and needs change at each stage. By segmenting email lists and building campaigns that address these needs, you can push more and more customers towards conversion and ultimately, long-term retention. 

Talk to the team here at Jarrang if you’re interested. We work with enterprise-level clients across the UK and globally, delivering email marketing campaigns that drive conversions for both B2B and B2C audiences. Book a call, and let’s get started.