How to Create Your Own Powerful Email Marketing Funnel [Step-by-Step]

Email marketing is likely something you are familiar with, whether you use it yourself, or you open your inbox to a slew of marketing messages. The reason for this is simple: email marketing has long had and continues to have a great return on investment (ROI) rate. Although there are plenty of other types of marketing currently out there, email marketing’s ROI consistently puts it at the top of the list for businesses to get their name and offerings out there in an efficient and effective way. 

I have put together all of the steps necessary to create your own powerful email marketing funnel, including how to build an effective email marketing campaign, how to automate your marketing funnel, and how these basic steps can make or break your success. 

No time to read? Listen to an audio summary of this blog post here:

What is an email marketing funnel?

An email marketing funnel is a multi-step process that starts out broad (the top of the funnel), and narrows as potential customers move through the steps, until you finally arrive at customer loyalty. An email marketing funnel can begin with educational content, for instance, move to building email subscribers, and conclude with encouraging loyal customers by continually offering value to the people on your email list. 

Ultimately, the goal of your marketing funnel is to increase conversion rates and guide customer journeys to eventually land yourself or your products as an indispensable part of a customer’s life. 

The shape of your funnel is important, as it helps guide how you approach your email marketing strategy. While it might seem that you start with email content itself, an effective email marketing sales funnel actually starts with developing valuable content on social media, a landing page, or another means of reaching your target audience, and offering the option to sign up for emails. From there, you can truly focus on your email content and evaluate how effectively you are reaching your target audience, and eventually encourage higher conversion rates. Email marketing funnel strategies generally follow this basic model, though the particulars may shift slightly from company to company or even product to product. 

Further Reading: What is Email Marketing Automation and How Much Can You Actually Automate?

The 5 Stages of an Email Marketing Funnel

To take your email marketing sales funnel from its broad start to its narrow base, there are 5 basic stages to follow: awareness, interest, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. By adhering to these steps in your email sales funnel, you can carefully walk your new and existing customers through their customer journey confidently, and with a sense of being seen and heard. I will go into greater detail on each of these steps below–including how to get started. First, let’s take a look at awareness, and how to develop awareness of your brand or product. 

Awareness: How to Attract Potential Customers

Promotional emails are a dime a dozen, and people receive tons of these messages every day. How can you stand out amongst the rest, and make sure that your sales emails are being read? Brand awareness! Before you move on to email automation, you have to make sure people hear about you, what you’re about, and what you’re offering. 

Interest: Building Interest and Nurturing Leads

Building awareness is the first step, and building interest, also often referred to as the consideration stage of the email marketing funnel, is the next. People may look at your attempts at conversion emails, shrug a shoulder, and say “so what?” Your goal, especially in highly competitive industries, is to nurture leads through sending informative and engaging emails that help set you apart from your competitors and develop a positive customer relationship. 

Conversion: Encouraging Leads to Make a Purchase

Conversion takes lead nurturing one step further to sales. Building customer relationships is important, but you do need to make sure you generate sales, as well. In the conversion phase of an email marketing funnel, your goal is to see a return on your investment in email sends through increased sales. To achieve this, your customer has to recognize value in your products or services and feel confident in their purchasing decisions. 

Loyalty: Retaining Customers and Encouraging Repeat Business

It is cheaper to retain current customers than it is to get new ones, so some of your email campaigns should focus on building loyalty and encouraging repeat business. To accomplish this, you essentially mimic your original sales funnel, with the topmost portion of your funnel focusing on special discounts, targeted advertising and more, rather than focusing on the warmest leads. This helps customers feel a sense of loyalty to your brand and encapsulates the loyalty stage of your sales funnel emails. 

Advocacy: Turning Customers Into Brand Advocates

Your email marketing funnel should conclude with an encouragement to customers to become brand advocates. This can be done through influencers, with a more structured referral process, or through simply asking customers to leave a review or spread the word about your products. Referrals from family and friends is one of the oldest and most effective forms of influencer marketing, so a simple positive review can go a long way! 

Further Reading: The 16 Best Email Marketing Tools to Consider Investing in Today

5 Reasons Why Email Marketing Funnels Are Important in Digital Marketing 

Email marketing sales funnels are far more than simply gathering email addresses, sending out emails, and hoping for the best. Funnels provide a careful and effective structure on which to build your email sequences, and can help guide your development of relevant content while improving click-through rates and conversions–all with a high ROI. An email address is no simple point of contact; it is the medium through which you are most likely to stay present in your audience’s mind and deliver your sales pitch quickly and effectively. 

There are five primary reasons I believe email funnels are invaluable tools: lead nurturing, conversion improvement, customer retention, measurable results, and cost-effective marketing options. I will detail each of these below, to help walk you through the value of email funnels from the awareness stage through brand ambassadorship. 

• Lead Nurturing: Email marketing funnels help nurture leads by matching your content to the stage of the funnel your customers are in. Email sales funnels are, by design, able to carefully and intentionally guide a potential customer from the awareness stage to the decision-making stage. 
• Increased Conversions: Far from simply detailing special offers, an email sales funnel can help increase conversions by delivering targeted and personalized content directly to a customer’s inbox. This allows you to turn more of your leads into paying customers. Customer reviews, sales, and even suggested buys can all help guide customers toward conversion effectively. 
• Customer Retention: Effective email sales funnels will convert leads, but will also place an emphasis on customer retention. Funnels can be used to build strong relationships and encourage repeat purchases. Loyalty and advocacy campaigns–think recommended products, reminders to leave a review, offering discounts, and more–can dramatically increase customer retention, and is an important part of creating your funnel. 
• Measurable Results: Email marketing efforts will struggle without a way of identifying measurable results. Funnels allow you to track and analyze the different stages of a customer’s journey. Insights gleaned may include customer behavior–think unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, preferred email times, times most likely to purchase, and more–and overall campaign performance. These insights can then be used to optimize your marketing efforts moving forward. 
• Cost-Effective Marketing: Email funnel marketing is among the most cost-effective ways to both reach out to and engage a large audience. The ROI of email campaigns cannot be understated, provided that your campaigns are being used well, through appropriate targeting and successful automation. 

Now that you know the value of email marketing funnels, here is a step-by-step guide to help you build or optimize your own.

Further Reading: 15 Amazing Benefits of Email Marketing No One Ever Taught You

Step 1: Create lead magnets 

Lead magnets are an important step in creating email campaigns, because they provide the sense of urgency or the push to sign up for emails. Done well, this leads into customers making purchases and developing a sense of loyalty. A lead magnet is any type of lead-in that encourages the start of email marketing funnels by offering a sign-up form to which you send out emails, including discount codes and exclusive offers. Those same exclusive offers can function as lead magnets, themselves. 

Some of the most effective lead magnets are simple enough: eBooks, checklists, guides, and webinars. I will go into greater detail on each of these lead magnets, to give you some email marketing funnel examples from which to develop your own email marketing tools. First up, let’s take a look at eBooks. 

eBooks

eBooks can be large or small, but they all require something simple: expertise. You do not have to launch a novel–or even a novella–in your eBooks, provided that you offer something your target audience finds valuable. eBooks are an excellent email strategy for capturing the interest of people using search engines to look for resources on a given subject. 

Checklists

Checklists are small, bite-sized pieces of information that can make launching into the beginning of your email marketing funnel stages easy as can be. Simply put together a checklist that your audience may find useful, and you can move onto the next step. 

Webinars

The concept of a webinar is simple enough: someone who has been established as an authority gives a talk on a given subject, in exchange for a customer’s email. This is an effective email marketing funnel, because customers often expect follow-up emails in the form of recordings, and will likely not balk at this point in the customer journey stage. 

When a lead magnet has captured the attention of potential customers, those same customers can then move into the interest stage. I will go over that stage in email marketing funnel stages next. 

Further Reading: 11 Best Practices for Successful B2B Email Marketing in 2025

Step 2: Capture leads from your lead magnets

Now that you have your lead magnets, it’s time to entice potential customers to subscribe to your list through their interest in your lead magnets. Here are some popular places to promote your lead magnets to capture leads:

Pop-up Forms

Often go to a website and immediately see a pop-up with a 10% discount or maybe an enticing free download? This is an example of a pop-up form, and while many of us might find them annoying, they are proven to help acquire leads.

Opt-in Forms Often Found on a Website Page or Blog Post

You can also promote your lead magnet anywhere on your website, such as embedded on a page or inside a blog post. A look at the bottom of this blog post shows you how I promote my own lead magnet.

Landing Pages

A dedicated landing page is another option and is a popular way to promote lead magnets because of the focus on the content of the page itself. A popular way of using landing pages is through Google or social media ads and continually optimizing them for better conversions–something that is easy to calculate when using a singular page.

Webinars or Other Events

Finally, many people use webinars and other events to get email leads. When the event is virtual, it’s easy to require that people give their emails to attend a virtual event. While you might not require an opt-in for paid events, that permission could easily be the “payment” for otherwise free webinars. Many companies have found this lead generation technique to be highly effective.

Step 3: Set Up Email Marketing Automation Sequences

In email marketing, this is the step where the rubber meets the road. When using marketing automation tools, you can set up different sequences of emails to send for different stages of the funnel. These include:

• Interest – They have shown interest in your lead magnet. How do you deepen their interest in your products and services?
• Conversion – How do you convince them to move from showing an interest to generating a desire to purchase your products and services?
• Loyalty – How can you keep your customers coming back for repeat purchases or showing an interest in products and services of yours that they haven’t bought before?
• Advocacy – Can you set up a brand ambassador program to help incentivize your customers becoming brand advocates on social media?

Implementing these automated sequences are usually done using two primary methods: drip campaigns and triggered events.

Drip Campaigns

Drip campaigns have been a staple of email marketing from the beginning. They are made up of a series of emails beginning with a welcome message when a customer subscribes. The overall purpose is to build trust and encourage people to develop a deeper relationship with you. Drip campaigns can include sale announcements, product launches, and even newsletters. They are a predetermined set of emails which either your entire audience or a subset of them gets, regardless of their actions.

As you can imagine, these are most popular in the “interest” stage and are usually sent out immediately after the lead magnet is sent.

Triggered Emails Based on Customer Activity or Behavior

Besides drip emails, the typical email marketing funnel includes triggered emails. These are sent to customers based on their activity on a website or social media page. For instance, most e-commerce sites send abandoned cart emails when someone fails to complete a transaction. Another example of triggered emails is the product suggestion. Here, you’ll recommend products based on a customer’s browsing or buying history. You can deploy this technique regardless of what your company sells.

Triggered emails play a big role not just in the conversion stage but also the loyalty and advocacy stages. By integrating a CRM with your email marketing software, a feature that many email service providers either have as a feature or support the integration of, we can begin to see the amount of purchases that each customer on our email list has made. From there, you can engage them with specific triggers ad send personalized messages to encourage them to buy more–or even become our brand advocate.

Next Steps

Most companies have at least a welcome email that is sent when someone joins their list, but email marketing is much more than that. By investing in the creation of attractive lead magnets, strategizing how to promote them on your website, and creating email marketing automation sequences for every stage of the email marketing funnel, you can harness the power of the email marketing funnel and reap the rewards of a high email marketing ROI for your business.

Of course, as important as it is to have an email marketing funnel, every company and brand must make one for themselves. Just as each company is unique, their products and customers are different from others. At the same time, sales funnels work on the same principles regardless of product.