What to Send Email Contacts in Different Stages of the Marketing Funnel

Subscriber

A regular subscriber is the most basic type of contact you will have in your database. This is someone who has simply opted into your email communications, but you don't yet know much more about them, or how interested they are in your company.

What do you send subscribers?

Your priority is to send them something of value to encourage them to give you more information about themselves in exchange. For example, we will send our latest educational ebook to our subscriber base so that they will fill out a conversion form and tell us their business, role, etc. From there, we can tell which type of subscriber they truly are and send them more relevant content.

Lead

A lead is someone who has filled out a conversion form on your site and may be a potential customer for you.

What do you send leads?

You already know a bit about this person, so you're more able to tailor your follow-up based on their interests with something that's relevant to them. This is someone who is a potential customer but is only at the research phase, having downloaded some educational content from your site. Your goal, then, is to move them further down the sales and marketing funnel to make them more qualified for your sales team. Taking your goal and their interests, you can craft emails that combine content aligned with their interests (e.g. a case study on someone having success with social media marketing) along with calls-to-action aligned with your goals (e.g. a consultation with a specialist).

Qualified Lead (MQL or SAL)

Leads that have met some qualification criteria can move to a stage of Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or Sales Accepted Lead (SAL). The qualification criteria are up to you, but essentially this is someone who is a *good* potential customer, and someone who warrants a sales follow-up.

What do you send qualified leads?

It depends, because now is the time to facilitate the handoff from marketing to sales. It's best to reinforce the call-to-action of talking to the appropriate sales rep, while giving this lead content that is still valuable to them, but more aligned with your product benefits. If you need help coming up with product marketing content, take a look at this blog post that outlines all of the different types you could create to send your MQLs and SALs.

Opportunity

An opportunity is someone who has successfully connected with a sales rep and is in a conversation that's working towards purchasing your product or service.

What do you send opportunities?

At this stage in particular, marketing is supporting the sales process. That may mean *not* sending content separately from the sales team, but rather, arming the sales team with the content their opportunities may request. This content includes case studies and product collateral and any very bottom-of-the-funnel content. Again, visit this blog post, "13 Types of Product Content Sales Needs to Close More Deals" if you're short on this type of content.

Customer

The customer stage is what we're all working toward -- having someone actually purchase your company's product or service and become a happy user. There is plenty of segmentation you can do among your customers: new customers, happy customers, repeat customers, etc., to better target these emails, too.

What do you send customers?

At this stage, a customer likely wants to keep learning from your educational content, but also wants to learn how specifically they can better use your product or service. Case studies are great to send for this, because they both motivate and educate your customers with product- or service-specific tie-ins.

Evangelist

The final -- and often underutilized -- contact type is the evangelist. Evangelists are subscribers that are not potential customers but are fans of your content. This may include press, influencers, job searchers, or even students. Evangelists are fantastic because they will download your content, share it, and possibly even write about you.

What do you send evangelists?

With evangelists, your goals are different - you want them to simply download and share your content. So, in your email communications, encourage them to do just that! Keep them in the loop about all your latest and greatest content (even consider getting them early access) and encourage them to share it with their networks. This will help grow the top of your funnel by expanding your reach and generating more subscribers.

Original Article