Marketing funnels are critically important to attract new leads, collect contact information, engage and indoctrinate prospects, and help convert them into paying customers.
Every business has unique offerings, target customers, value points and marketing stacks. You need to design each marketing funnel specifically for the target audience, offer and buying journey you want each prospect to take.
There is no such thing as an off-the-shelf canned “funnel” that works for every business. In fact, every successful marketing funnel should be customized to deliver the right message, value and experience for your target buyer.
7 Marketing Funnel Components
A digital marketing funnel is comprised of 7 components that drive traffic and “funnel” it down to deliver quality leads to your business.
- Traffic Source(s)
- Custom Landing Page(s)
- Call To Action (CTA)
- Lead Capture
- Integration
- A/B Testing / conversion rate optimization (CRO)
- Performance
Optimizing each of these 7 components ensures that your funnel performs at the highest level and generates the greatest ROI.
Types of Marketing Funnels
Content Marketing Funnels
Content Marketing Funnels engage and nurture your ideal prospects using high-quality “authority” content. This entails creating and publishing content on your website and other platforms such as LinkedIn, SlideShare and Medium. You can then funnel visitors to any sort of offer or subsequent content — an email or SMS opt-in, free resource, video, webinar, survey, e-commerce product, affiliate offer, calculator or contact page.
Content Funnels are ideal for attracting highly targeted visitors searching for specific topics and keywords on Google, Bing or Yahoo. This “self targeting” leads to unparalleled visitor quality. Authority content “leads with value”, educates prospects, and naturally converts them into warm leads and buyers.
Email Funnels
Email Funnels are designed to rapidly grow your email list. They use lead magnets, email opt-in tools and high-converting landing page designs to drive email list growth.
Email funnels work hand-in-hand with marketing automation. Your campaigns should leverage automation capabilities. They should also have well-written subject lines and email content that engages and ascends your subscribers into paying customers.
Email campaigns can engage with any type of offer, such as a video course, webinar, physical product, service, survey, subscription, affiliate product, your website content, event, or even joint ventures with partners in your niche.
Webinar Funnels
Webinar Funnels are ideal for selling complex education, technology, consulting and coaching offers. Webinars can be live or recorded (or both). The latest webinar technology combines a high-converting registration page and a pre-webinar email campaign to encourage registrants to attend.
In-webinar surveys, offers and post-webinar email campaigns can be used to convert attendees into paying customers. A post-webinar email, SMS, call or direct mail campaign can be used to follow up with registrants who did not attend (for example, watch the recording). Finally, attendees can be routed to an email funnel or call funnel to offer additional value and upsell or cross-sell your offerings.
Viral Sharing / Referral Funnels
A Viral Sharing / Referral Funnel multiplies the exposure of your website or offer by incentivizing shares with a rewards-based referral system. It uses an automated system to track and reward social, email or verbal sharing with free products, contest entries, financial bonuses or other incentives.
Placing the viral sharing offer on the thank you page after a freebie or newsletter signup is ideal, because it creates an opportunity to share what new subscribers just signed up for, costs the subscriber nothing, and rewards them with something they want if others join using their link. Companies such as Dollar Shave Club and Paypal have built multi-$billion businesses using viral sharing offers.
Survey Funnels
Survey Funnels are ideal for collecting detailed market intelligence and insights from your customers and prospects.
You can use information gathered in surveys to develop new product / service offerings, segment your list, make personalized upsell and cross-sell offers and solicit new ideas for content. Survey Funnels are very effective at increasing engagement and building your prospect list.
LinkedIn Funnels
LinkedIn Funnels are designed to engage your network by publishing and directly sharing high-quality LinkedIn articles. LinkedIn allows you to directly share authority content with hundreds or thousands of key individuals (i.e. your ideal customers) using LinkedIn’s unparalleled targeting capabilities.
The first step is to build your network with ideal target prospects. Then create, publish and message your LinkedIn articles directly to those ideal prospects. In the article itself you can embed a video or a soft call to action (CTA) such as an invitation to discuss further or engage by LinkedIn Messenger.
Engaging with content on LinkedIn in this manner “leads with value”, demonstrates your knowledge and expertise, exposes your brand and value proposition to thousands of potential buyers, and naturally engages them to become customers or followers.
Call Funnels
Call Funnels lead prospects to schedule a discovery call or consultation with you or your sales team. Phone or video conversations are essential for high-ticket offers to complete the “last mile” and close sales with interested prospects. A call funnel can significantly increase the flow of high-ticket customers into your business.
Call funnels are ideal to place after a video or webinar, and help you close deals with prospects while they are focused on your offer and warmed up. It is essential to have inbound closers trained to handle these calls before you start the flow of leads.
Upsell / Cross-Sell Funnels
Upsell / Cross-Sell Funnels drive up your customer value by linking together a sequence of related offers. This allows you to quickly progress new opt-in leads and low-ticket buyers into larger sales.
Upsell and cross-sell funnels create an automated chain of ascending offers and sales that substantially increases the LTV of your customer, cash flow and ROI%.