Journal

How to Map The Buyer's Journey Through Email to Sell More Effectively

22 Jan
2021
How to Map The Buyer's Journey Through Email to Sell More Effectively

Reality check: sales don’t happen by accident.

They don’t happen at first sight, either.

Think about it. When’s the last time you bought from a totally unknown brand without doing your homework first?

Probably, never.

Unfortunately, so many marketers are stuck thinking like marketers instead of buyers. 

Consider first whether your excellent customer service, ideal customer experience , and customer expectations actually makes sense from a customer journey that makes from the moment someone “meets” you to the moment they make a purchase

That means stepping into your customers’ shoes and understanding the buyer’s journey.

In this article, you’ll learn:

  • What each stage of the buyer’s journey is (and how to map out your own)
  • Which types of messages and marketing tactics to use at different stages
  • How real-world brands use email marketing to transform prospects into new customers

What is the buyer's journey, anyway?

That means stepping into your business owner, buyer personas, customer's shoes and customers’ shoes and understanding the buyer’s and customer experience, journey map and buying process.

In this article, you’ll learn:

  • What each stage of the buyer’s journey is (and how to map out your own)
  • Which types of messages and marketing tactics to use at different stages
  • How real-world brands use email marketing to transform prospects into new customers

What is the buyer's journey, anyway?

Let’s kick things off with a quick breakdown of the stages of the buyer's journey. 

Each stage of the customer journey map represents pain points where your potential customer

The good news? You probably already have emails and other types of content ready for each stage of the customer journey. You just need to map yours out.

touchpoints your prospects’ heads are at when they’re interacting with your business. For this post, we’ve broken the pain points on the customer journey map helps three specific stages:

  • The awareness stage: this is where your prospects are introduced to your product or brand, learning about you for the first time
  • The consideration stage: this is where you have prospects who have shown interest in what you’re selling, eager to learn more as they assess your product versus others before making a decision
  • The decision stage: this is where someone ultimately decides to make a purchase

Think of the buyer’s and the customer's actions, customer journeys, lifecycle and the user journey and customer journey mapping as a progression. Much like a sales funnel, you’re going to have more folks at the top who are aware of you versus buyers that actually make it to the “end.”

The problem is that many marketers fail to look at the bigger picture of the customer retention. 

The good news? You probably already have emails and other types of content ready for each stage of the customer journey. You just need to map yours out.

The good news? You probably already have emails and other types of content ready for each stage of customers, customer retention rate, customer pain points and customer journey maps out, the buyer persona and customer retention and customer journey maps out. You just need to map yours out.

What Email Marketers Should Do At Each Stage Of The Buyer's Journey

Now, let’s talk about the email buyer’s ideal and customer experience and customer journeys and customer journey map and maps and map.

Email marketing is perfect for your whole customer journeys with your customer journey mapping and maps ensuring that your customer’s whole customer and journey mapping and map always goes smoothly.

Don’t just take our word for it, either!

There’s an old-school marketing “rule of seven” that says businesses need to have seven interactions (or “touches”)  with someone before they’re ready to be sold to.

Arguably the biggest benefit of creating an email marketing funnel is that you can generate messages that address each of the steps we talked about earlier. Through email automation, you can also put the process of nurturing your subscribers on autopilot. 

And the sooner you define your effective, customer journey mapping and buyer personas map, the sooner you can automate the most effective customer journey map and customer buyer personas mapping process.

Doing so is easier than you might think, too! Below are the key action items for optimizing the buyer’s whole customer experience and the customer journey too, for eCommerce.

Awareness: Making an Impactful First Impression

During the awareness stage, your job is to make a positive first impression on your prospects while also pushing them to become part of your email list. 

Keep in mind that people could be finding you via your top-of-the-funnel content (think: blog posts or SEO) or social media. That means you can’t assume that they know what you’re all about or even what you’re selling. 

On the flip side, people who found out about you via social media team word-of-mouth or ads might be in a “just browsing” mindset. They’re aware of what you’re selling and how to articles it, but they don’t know why they should be a customer.

Yet, anyway.

Getting first-time visitors onto your list is mostly a matter of asking. This means rolling out opt-in opportunities on any given landing page.

For example, Beardbrand promotes its exclusive content, social media content and pre-launch pricing in exchange for an opt-in loyalty program. Simple, straightforward, and in no way spammy.

beard-brand-subscribe-newsletter

Pop-ups are a bit more aggressive, but they're also more effective at grabbing your visitors’ attention. The key here is to provide some sort of meaningful incentive to sweeten the deal.

For example, the online retailer Nalgene offers discounts for new subscribers and first-time buyers. For folks in the brand awareness stage alone, this could serve as a much-needed incentive on the path to purchase.

join-our-newsletter

Meanwhile, Nectar Sleep uses a limited-time offer to entice sign-ups. This sort of “now-or-never” type of pop-up is ideal for product-aware customers exploring their options.

nectar-newsletter-signup

Beyond more traditional opt-in forms, interactive forms such as quizzes are a brilliant way to nurture prospects in the buyer’s journey. Here’s a brilliant example from Warby Parker:

warby-parker-quiz
warby-parker-email-quiz
warby-parker-quiz

Product quizzes do triple duty of not only getting someone’s email and learning more about the products they want but also making some of those ever-so-important “touches” we mentioned earlier.

In terms of customer journey stages of the email buyer’s customer journey map, your welcome email represents your opportunity to get people into the decision stage initial research, google search and buying process. Simply put, you need to highlight your product or service brand’s personality while also inviting people to check out what you’re selling.

This email from homesick is a prime example, simple yet personable, with a special discount tacked on at the end.

homesick-welcome-email

Consideration: Building Buzz and Driving Interest

Congrats, you’ve done the hard part!

But now what?

During the consideration stage, your end-game is to nurture your subscribers and get them ready to make a purchase. It’s that simple.

Of course, doing so is easier said than done. 

Remember the rule of seven? You can’t just go for the hard sell. 

The consideration stage is a balancing act where you build trust while also inviting people to make purchases. 

Let your contacts get to know you and your brand! We love this email from Beardbrand because they let their contacts know exactly what they can expect from subscribing to their emails.

beard-brand-welcome-email

It’s the perfect opportunity to get folks comfortable with your name and share more about your brand and products along the way. 

Now, discounts and offers are fair game; just don’t put them front-and-center. If someone opted-in to your list with the intent of receiving discounts, don't disappoint ‘em!

Considering that nearly two-thirds of shoppers will wait for a discount to make a purchase, you shouldn’t be shy about sending them. The key is not to be too in-your-face about them. Instead, frame helpful content in your offer emails as “Hey, check this out” instead of “HEY, BUY THIS NOW!”

Below is an excellent example from American Giant. Note that it’s framed as a sort of welcome message. The “Learn More” call-to-action (CTA) is a subtle but significant touch to make the message feel a bit less transactional.

american-giant-welcome-discount

This nurturing message from Felina is also effective, providing resources and inspiration for subscribers in addition to a discount:

felina-discount-code

Beyond discounts and education, consider also inviting subscribers to take actions such as following you on social media. This gives sales team behind you yet another place to encourage loyal customers to make touch-points with potential customers beyond their inboxes.

Don’t forget about telling your brand’s story, too! The emails above all highlight how companies can use storytelling and personality to win over customers. 

Building relationships is key to brand and customer loyalty, which means giving potential customers engaged your subscribers encourage customers an opportunity to get to know you before they’re comfortable buying. If you do it right, your patience will be rewarded with customer feedback.

On that note, remember that folks can spend a lot of time in the consideration stage.

Days. Weeks. Heck, even months.

And that’s okay! The buyer’s journey can be a long and winding road. 

What matters is that you’re regularly sending your list relevant messages that bring them closer to buying. Over time, you can refine your messages and email marketing strategy to figure out which messages perform best.

//[inject:ad-ebook-segmentation]

Decision: The Final Push to Make a Purchase

No surprises here! 

If your customers have reached the decision stage, they’re ready to buy product or service. Here we can assume that your existing customer or subscribers have interacted with your brand or consideration emails to the customer touchpoints point where they know you.

And if consideration stage emails haven’t done the trick, consider messages that serve as a sort of last-minute push to make a buying decision.

For example, time-sensitive offers create a sense of urgency and scarcity, proven to drive sales. Since your subscribers have opted-in and received sales messages from you in the past, sending more “direct” marketing messages is a-okay.

Check out this “get it before it’s gone” email campaign from Cole Haan. Because the message is based on previous browsing behavior, it feels more personally tailored than a one-size-fits-all sales message. Meanwhile, limited-time offers like this offer email from Sephora are all the rage in eCommerce.

tarte-email-marketing=buyers-journey


Meanwhile, limited-time offers like this offer email from Sephora are all the rage in eCommerce.

sephora-email-marketing-discount

If you don’t score sales from your subscribers the first time around, don’t panic. Some buyers might require steeper discounts or more personalized offers in order to buy. Trial-and-error combined with email analytics can clue you in on which messages are your top-performers. 

Spoiler: The buyer's journey doesn't have to end! 

To wrap things up, just know that the buyer’s journey isn’t over once you’ve made a sale.

Far from it, in fact! 

It’s well-documented that it costs way more to acquire new customers than it does to sell to the ones that you already have. Plus, the average customer returning customers spend nearly 300% more than the average new customer! Continuing to send messages to satisfied customers and past buyers is a no-brainer, especially if you use email automation to do the heavy lifting.

Below is a snapshot of some of the types of post-purchase emails you can send to existing customers to keep them engaged:

  • Ongoing, personalized offers and discounts
  • Loyalty and referral bonuses
  • Requests for reviews or testimonials (see below)

casper-followup-email

Likewise, you can recommend future products to your loyal customers based on reliable data about customer journey mapping your company's customer experience, feedback from customers journey their review sites and past purchases to keep brand loyalty and drive new sales.

Thanks to marketing automation through Sendlane, you can do all of the above in your pursuit of sales from new and existing customers alike. From tracking customer behavior to timing your campaigns to perfection, our easy-to-use platform allows you to build email campaigns that line up beautifully with your buyer’s journey. 

sendlane-marketing-automation

sendlane-marketing-automation

The more email campaigns you send, the email marketers the easier it is to optimize them. Our drag-and-drop tools make doing so a cinch, even if you’re a total newbie to email automation.

Create Winning Campaigns Faster with Personalized Email Marketing

Spend less time building emails & more time creating experiences that drive your store growth.

//[inject:ad-personalized-email]

Have you mapped out your email buyer's journey yet?

We get it: planning your buyer’s and customer's experience at pain points along the customer's customer journey maps out your customer's journey in stages that might seem like a lot of work.

But honestly? It’s really not.

This is especially true if you’re taking advantage of email marketing tools like Sendlane.

Instead of chasing down prospects and qualified leads, you can put together campaigns and automations that nurture them throughout.

Sure, it might take a bit of legwork to figure out the right message cadence for your campaigns. That said, we can help every step of the way!

If you’re ready to take Sendlane for a spin, sign up for your 60-day free trial!

Email buyer's journey FAQs

Why is email marketing important for the buyers journey?
What is the buyer’s journey?

Share article link

Subscribe to our blog!

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

The 2021 eCommerce
Email Marketing Playbook Part 2

Maximize revenue & customer loyalty in 2021

Mastering Customer
Acquisition & Retention in 2021

Tuesday, July 20

Better features. Better support. Better customer experience.

Get all the same features you need with a more intuitive UI you’ll love. Experience the difference.

No More Guessing; Make Data-driven Decisions at a Glance

Ditch the clunky UI; send high-converting messages with unified email & SMS data under one roof.

Find Hidden Growth Opportunities in your Shopify Customers

Build a retention-first strategy with real-time analytics and multi-channel automation.

Turn sales into reviews & reviews into more sales. All for free.

Collect, manage and dynamically display unlimited reviews all within one snazzy dashboard (and at no additional cost).

Uncover What your Customers Really Want

Get all the same features you need with a more intuitive UI you’ll love. Experience the difference.

Create Winning Campaigns Faster with Personalized Email Marketing

Spend less time building emails & more time creating experiences that drive your store growth.

Unified Email & SMS Marketing for BigCommerce

Send hyper-targeted email & SMS marketing that generates revenue with an easy one-click integration.

Uncover What your Customers Really Want

Get all the same features you need with a more intuitive UI you’ll love. Experience the difference.

Everything Your Brand Needs to Achieve Greatness with SMS

Build lasting, authentic relationships and tap into multi-channel revenue with all-in-one email & sms marketing.

Drive significant ROI for your
online store

Your eCommerce power couple - Unite your email & SMS marketing under one roof with Sendlane.

The Ultimate Guide to Maximizing
CLTV for Digital Retailers

Keep your store cruising onward and upward with these seven strategies to increase CLTV.

The eCommerce
Segmentation Handbook

12 eCommerce Email Marketing Segments to Maximize Your Customer LTV.

The Definitive Guide to Abandoned
Cart Emails for eCommerce

Perfect your abandoned cart email funnel and recover those lost sales on autopilot.

The Big Book of eCommerce Email Funnels

Boost your customer LTV & ROI with these 10 proven automated funnel templates.

Your 2021 Guide to eCommerce Holiday Marketing

9 tried and tested omnichannel marketing strategies to crush holiday sales

The Digital Retailer’s Email Copywriting Handbook

A Marketer's Guide to Writing Killer Email Copy That Sells.

The Future of eCommerce
in 2022

Omnichannel strategies to drive revenue plus trends to watch in 2022 and beyond

The Digital Retailer's Guide to Modern SMS/MMS Marketing

10 Best practices to convert more customers where and when they’re active most with text messaging.

Increase Revenue and Retention by Mastering the Digital Customer Experience

A step-by-step guide to mastering the customer experience and building a base of loyal, repeat buyers.

The BigCommerce Experience: Omnichannel Marketing Strategies for a Post-Cookie World

The Shopify Experience:
A Merchant & Marketer's Guide
to Scaling eCommerce Growth

Get started with your free
14-day test drive!

All our PRO level features at your fingertips.

Try for Free