One of the foundational marketing theories has to do with the purchase funnel, also known as the conversion funnel, or sales funnel. Every customer goes through a process that eventually leads them to purchase the product or service. It starts broad, and ends specifically–thus the term “funnel”.

The most basic form of the funnel looks something like this:

Email marketing smooths the funnel.

Regardless of how long, complex, or expensive your product, email marketing smooths the funnel at every single stage.

Let’s look at one classic funnel formulation, the AIDA model, and how it benefits from email marketing:

●      Attention – A marketing email can attract the attention of a potential customer.

●      Interest – The potential customer becomes interested, due to the email’s content, subject, quality, or relevancy.

●      Desire – The marketing email helps to elicit in the potential customer a sense of desire for the product or service.

●      Action – The customer converts on the email’s Call to Action (CTA).

At every stage in the process, email marketing can play a critical role.

Email marketing sells big.

Email marketing is especially critical for high-ticket items. Many marketers aren’t just selling a pair of jeans or a web template — $75-100 purchases. They are selling hugely expensive items with price tags in the millions of dollars.

Does email work for this type of marketing? Absolutely. Email is simply one method of communication, and sales requires communication. In the digital era, email is a secure, trusted, and personal method of communication, suitable for selling anything from companies to kids’ toys.

Email marketing scales up.

In behavioral psychology, there’s a technique known as “Foot-in-the-door” (FITD). The expression refers to a door-to-door salesperson who sticks their foot in the door to prevent it from being closed.

When the customer opens the door (a small request), the salesperson is then able to make a big request. Because the customer complied with the small request, he or she is more likely to respond positively to the bigger request. Psychologists Freedman and Fraser refer to it as “compliance without pressure.”

Email marketing is one of the most successful applications of the FITD compliance tactic. Asking for an email address is a small thing — a modest request. Soliciting the purchase of, say, a $500 SaaS is a bigger thing. However, since the user responded to your first request, they are more likely to respond to your next request.

Your next request doesn’t have to be a $500 purchase, although it can be. Your next request can be a webinar attendance, a PDF download, a new blog article, a video to watch, or any number of smaller requests. Each of these “successive approximations” improves the likelihood of an eventual sale.

In this way, email scales upward — leading to ever bigger purchase decisions.

If you consider marketing at its most basic level — customers, a product, and a funnel — email makes total sense. It is an indispensable tool for creating the funnel, smoothing the funnel, and leveraging more and more sales power in the process.