What are the best practices for creating and testing effective email campaigns for each funnel stage?

1 Know your funnel stages

The first step to creating effective email campaigns is to understand your funnel stages and how they relate to your buyer personas, goals, and metrics. A typical funnel has four stages: awareness, interest, decision, and action. Each stage requires a different type of email content, tone, and call to action. For example, at the awareness stage, you want to educate your prospects about their problem and your solution, while at the decision stage, you want to persuade them to choose you over your competitors. You also need to define how you measure the success of each stage, such as open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, or retention rate.

2 Segment your audience

The next step is to segment your audience based on their funnel stage, as well as other criteria such as demographics, behavior, preferences, or pain points. Segmentation allows you to personalize your email campaigns and deliver relevant and timely messages that resonate with your prospects. For example, you can segment your audience by their source, such as organic search, social media, or referral, and send them different welcome emails that acknowledge how they found you. You can also segment your audience by their engagement level, such as active, inactive, or at-risk, and send them different re-engagement emails that offer incentives, feedback, or support.

3 Craft your email copy

The third step is to craft your email copy that aligns with your funnel stage, segment, and goal. Your email copy should be clear, concise, and compelling, and follow the AIDA formula: attention, interest, desire, and action. You want to capture your prospects' attention with a catchy subject line and a personalized greeting, spark their interest with a captivating headline and a relevant benefit, create their desire with a compelling story and a social proof, and prompt their action with a clear and urgent call to action. You also want to use a friendly and conversational tone that reflects your brand voice and builds trust and rapport with your prospects.

4 Design your email layout

The fourth step is to design your email layout that enhances your email copy and supports your funnel stage, segment, and goal. Your email layout should be simple, clean, and responsive, and follow the F-pattern: eye-catching elements on the top left and bottom right. You want to use a consistent and attractive color scheme, font, and logo that match your brand identity and style guide, as well as images, icons, or videos that illustrate your message and value proposition. You also want to use whitespace, headings, subheadings, bullet points, or buttons to break up your text and make it easy to scan and read.

5 Test your email campaigns

The fifth step is to test your email campaigns before you send them to your audience and measure their performance after you send them. Testing allows you to identify and fix any errors, glitches, or issues that might affect your email deliverability, readability, or conversion. You can use tools such as Litmus or Email on Acid to test your email campaigns across different devices, browsers, and email clients, as well as check your spam score, subject line, and preview text. You can also use tools such as Mailchimp or HubSpot to test your email campaigns using A/B testing or multivariate testing, where you compare different versions of your email elements, such as subject line, headline, image, or call to action, and see which one performs better.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?