You’ve probably heard a lot about email marketing recently. Whether you have a solid email marketing plan or are looking to make one better, using a sales funnel template will not only save you money but will help you close more sales.

Want to learn more? We’ll be listing our favorite email sales funnel examples and templates below.

What Is a Sales Funnel and What Are the Sales Funnel Stages?

A sales funnel is the journey potential customers take in moving from prospect to customer. The stages your potential customer goes through in the funnel are broken down into five steps:

Stage 1: Awareness

Stage 2: Interest

Stage 3: Evaluation

Stage 4: Engagement

Stage 5: Commitment/Purchase

Make sure you track performance with a metrics dashboard to see how effective your email marketing funnel is at converting. 

Most prospects won’t purchase after just one email. That’s why you need a funnel. Generally, your email marketing strategy will include a series of emails that do the following:

• Nurture a relationship with your potential customers/email subscribers
• Educate your subscribers on the benefits of your service or product
• Direct encouragement to buy services or products you sell

7 Great Sales Funnel Examples and Templates

There is a sales email funnel for every business and every situation. Here are some of the most popular templates for email marketing strategies. You might find that combining these templates or using different techniques for different customers is the most effective.

1. AIDA

The AIDA sales funnel template is one of the most popular models in the email marketing industry. Each letter stands for one of the steps you’ll lead your prospect through in every email.

• Awareness/Attention. At this stage, you’ll send urgent, personalized, special offers or any email to pique your prospect’s curiosity. It’s best to do this in the subject line. On top of that, you can also work with personalized explainer videos to get your recipient’s attention.
• Interest. Keep your audience interested with stories, pain points, jokes, and facts.
• Desire. Let your subscribers know the benefits of your product or service.
• Action. Make it easy to act with a clear call to action.

AIDA is a great beginning template to use for your email marketing because it’s uncomplicated and has stood the test of time.

2. SaaS Sales Funnel

When selling a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, you need to introduce your prospect to the product and explain how it works, often by giving them a free demo or trial period. SaaS sales funnels involve several steps due to the research and learning necessary to make a good purchase decision and because subscription-based products often require sales activities for both generating and retaining customers. SaaS companies typically use a model like this:

• Awareness of SaaS product
• Interested in learning about features
• SaaS product demo
• Business proposal
• Consideration
• Purchasing decision
• Client renewal

While this funnel will take a while to create, your customers will feel confident about their purchase after seeing its value through detailed and targeted emails.

3. AARRR

AARRR goes deeper than AIDA, taking you through the customer experience.

• Acquisition. Of course, you need to acquire a subscriber first. You can do this with freebies in exchange for an email. Send your new subscriber a thank you email and maybe a nurture email.
• Activation. During this period, you want your prospect to realize how invaluable your service is. This could be with a free trial, sample product, or free consultation. Make sure your email only has one call to action button so you can track if your marketing is working.
• Retention. Keep your customer’s attention through nurture emails.
• Referral. Encourage referrals with rewards and requests for testimonials.
• Revenue. Make money from your AARRR funnel by encouraging your subscribers to register for subscriptions, sign a contract, or place an order.

AARRR sales funnel template is especially useful for SaaS businesses that may have a harder sell than other companies.

4. Three Email Funnel

This funnel is concrete and won’t bombard your prospects with emails.

• Value. Your first email needs to remind your prospect why they signed up. What value are they getting from reading your emails?
• Authority. Your second email should explain why you’re an expert in this subject and introduce your business.
• CTA. Your third email will be a sales email where you pitch your product or service to answer your subscriber’s pain points.

The benefit to this simple funnel is neither you nor your subscribers will be confused, and the funnel is fast and straightforward. 

5. Flipped Funnel Template

You’ve read enough of these funnel templates to notice that most of them start with a large pool of customers by creating awareness, and gradually the funnel narrows to the target audience. The flipped funnel starts with high-value prospects (current customers) and goes from there.

• Create loyal customers. Keep your customers happy with a strong community, superior customer service, and exclusive offers through your customer-only email list. Make them feel special.
• Make it easy to refer to. Incentivize your customers to refer by asking for reviews and customer testimonials and offering bonuses when a new person signs up.
• Increase your customer base. Those referrals will become paying customers, and the funnel will repeat itself.

The flipped funnel is great for businesses that don’t have a huge marketing budget.

6. Lead Magnet Funnel Template

Customers know that companies want their email addresses. Many potential customers want to see the value before handing over the email. Give your customers something for free with a lead magnet.

• Lead Magnet Opt-in. Customers sign up for a free product or service (like a limited version of your company’s SEO tool, a free consultation call, downloadable eBook about healthy eating, or a blogging course) directly on your website.
• They receive their freebie.
• This triggers an email sequence that includes what you do and sell, how it’ll help the customer and a clear call to action.

Lead Magnets make the most difficult part of email marketing simple, collecting email addresses. Once your subscribers find value in your free lead magnet, it should entice them to trust you and make a real purchase from you. This automated welcome sequence post-lead magnet could offer a higher-priced product like a SaaS subscription or online course. You can view a number of different online course platforms to help you build one.

7. Product-Based Sales Email Funnel

Is your company selling products? In that case, your funnel is going to be different.

• Welcome email. After you get your potential customer’s email address, let them know you’re glad they signed up and what to expect next.
• Warm their interest. Track what your customers look at on your website, and send them an email about the benefits of an item they’ve reviewed or other related products.
• Make them feel confident. You can do this with testimonials and an email that answers common questions and concerns.
• Don’t forget to buy. Just because it’s in their cart doesn’t mean you’ve made the sale. Remind your customers to finish their purchase with a friendly email.
• Email confirmation. Send an email that includes all pertinent information as soon as a customer makes a purchase.

This sales funnel the tried and true method of many huge brands. It can work for your eCommerce business, too. 

3 Sales Funnel Best Practices to Test

Make your email list easy to automate with some of the best sales funnel tools of the trade. Here are three things we use to make our sales funnel work for us.

Shorten the Sales Cycle

You’re probably always trying to find ways to make your work more efficient without sacrificing quality. Personalize your emails and make your sales cycle shorter with an e-signature. Not only will you avoid constantly typing out your name or company name, but your subscribers will also appreciate the individualization.

Signaturely offers free online signatures for you to check out.

Build an Email List

How do you get subscribers to open your email? Before we can even talk about the best sales funnel strategies and email headlines, you’re going to need subscribers who are interested in what you do.

Building a stable and interesting email subscriber list is the first step in a successful email marketing campaign. Having bad email addresses will negatively affect your marketing strategy and could eventually lead to email blacklisting. 

Luckily, you don’t need to spend all your time scouring the internet for good email addresses; some companies will do it all for you.

Lead generating services like UpLead can help you find the current email addresses (and phone numbers) of prospects. They start with a free trial, so you can start building your email list without spending a dime. Find some recommended free lead-generating software here.

Use an Automated Email System

Once you have your email sales funnel, you will want to design and automate your emails.

Services like Benchmark Email will do all of this for you. They’ll let you design your emails based on your skill set and offer multiple email campaigns and email template options for different types of leads. 

Plus, with Benchmark Email’s robust tools and features, you’ll be able to personalize your email sales funnel, create campaigns, and track your open and click-through rates. 

Creating a successful email marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. By using a consistent sales funnel and planning your campaigns in advance, you’ll be able to enjoy the high ROI of email marketing with minimum time and effort.

Author Bio

Will Cannon, the founder of UpLead and Signaturely, has considerable experience in lead generation, email marketing, customer acquisition, and retention. He provides actionable insights to marketers on customer relationship management and ways to drive higher business ROI.