What is a Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel is a visualization of the sales process. All your marketing efforts ultimately focus on having a company or an individual become your customer. Customers then help drive further awareness and lead toward your products and services through word of mouth and brand loyalty. Basically, you have a big pool of your target audience at the top, and they’re interested in your products through your marketing efforts and funneled through all the way down to become customers.
Let’s briefly talk about each stage. Awareness is obtained through content and ads. You attract your audience to your website and share social media content. As we have discussed, content can be a variety of articles, videos, podcasts, magazines, and email newsletters. You drive this awareness into a focused interest in your services and products. What is your offer? How are you different? What are your costs? The intent in consideration, also known as leads, is obtained through educational resources, free downloads, giveaways, checklists, guides, webinars, targeted ads, case studies, email campaigns, customer feedback, and reviews. After purchasing your product or service, you’ll need to continue a relationship with your customer to maintain retention and drive brand loyalty and advocacy to increase awareness. So, in other words, brand loyalty and advocacy feed into awareness.
Leads Through Giveaways
One of the best ways to obtain customer leads is with a Lead Magnet. A lead magnet is a free service or product that you give away in exchange for contact information. The lead magnet must be strong enough to attract (“the magnet”), and the giveaway content must focus on your target market. The content must be valuable, useful, and relevant.
Examples of a lead magnet are checklists, cheat sheets, blueprints/roadmaps, templates, free trials, samples, training, and cast studies.
Real World Example
The International Security Driver Association generates leads by offering case studies on vehicle ambushes and free eBooks. These two types of giveaways helped grow the email list from 1500 to close to 5000.
The lead magnet example we’ll use is a free 24-page eBook filled with tips and advice on social media. Our target market is protection professionals. In exchange for the free eBook, our target market must supply at least an email address and, if they’d like, a first name. The less information you ask for, the more likely the target market will sign up to receive the giveaway.
Creating the Giveaway Page
In our example, we decided to use a page on our website for our target market to sign up and receive the free eBook. Does it have to be a page? No. You could use social media ads, other hosted page platforms like Click Funnels or Lead Pages, or your email management provider’s hosted website or landing page.
On the lead magnet page, we include a picture of the eBook, a description of its content, what the reader will learn from it, and, most importantly, a simple sign-up form from our customer relationship management (CRM) tool, Mailchimp.
How do we let our target market know about our giveaway?
In the interest phase of the marketing funnel, you should have garnered some awareness of who you are, your brand, what you do, and whom you do it for. You can communicate about your giveaway through social media networks—organically or paid ads, email audience (previous sign-ups, customers, etc.), or other content such as videos or podcasts.
The Process
Once a lead signs up to receive the free giveaway, we immediately send them to our website’s custom thank you page. The thank-you page includes the giveaway download link and a short welcome message. The reason for the redirection to the thank-you page is two-fold – the immediacy of the giveaway and the fact that they can explore our website, services, product pages, about us, and articles.
Additionally, our lead gets added to our list in our CRM with a special identification, such as a label or tag. This helps us organize which lead has received which giveaway and sets up the bigger part of the giveaway equation.
Signing Up is Only Part of the Equation
Getting your target audience to sign up for the giveaway is only part of the equation. Once they have signed up for your free giveaway, the second and more important component is converting your lead to a customer. It would help if you didn’t immediately engage in a hard sell. You want to nurture your newly acquired audience into purchasing your products or services.
You’ll need a strategy to take them by the virtual hand and walk them down the sales funnel. You do that through a series of emails. Depending on your CRM, these emails are usually automated with a time and schedule. The first email content should include a thank you message and an introduction. The introduction should contain information on who you and your company are and if your subscriber needs any help or assistance or has questions about the information in the giveaway. The last email in the series is your offer – the product or service you want your lead to purchase.
Over the following few emails, you want to personalize your messages. Focus your content on understanding your potential customer’s problems and how your services and products can help solve those problems. Be supportive and inclusive of your potential customers’ needs—put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Build your trust factor.
Set up goals and use the analytics from your email campaigns to understand what content interests them. What emails are they opening? What time are they opening the emails? What links are they clicking on? Your series of emails or “nurture sequence” is not a set-it-and-forget-it. Depending on your CRM, you may want to use decision trees, paths, or journeys to help nurture your leads down the sales funnel using analytics. For example, if a potential customer clicks on a particular link, use the logic from paths or journeys to send a different email with content specifically on that subject.
After the Offer
After you send an offer email and a lead becomes a customer, your email communication does not end. It is only the beginning of your relationship with your customer.
