Having a marketing funnel that you can take your customers through is important if you want to increase conversions. The best way of setting up a marketing funnel is by capturing your potential customers’ e-mail, and taking them through a series of e-mail messages that are designed to firstly gain their trust, provide informative content, and when the time is right, put an offer in front of them that they cannot refuse.
Why E-mail Marketing Is an Important Part of the Marketing Funnel
The reason why e-mail marketing is the holy grail of marketing and is crucial to the marketing funnel is because of the ability to market to a customer repeatedly until they unsubscribe. You might have heard of the expression “the money is the list”, and to this very true because the list is an asset that has value. You can use it to get a large amount of sales in a short period of time if it is used properly in the marketing funnel, because if you have a new product that you want to promote, you simply insert it into the e-mail messages and you will have a way of reaching many potential buyers very quickly.
The Beginning of the Marketing Funnel
The start of the Marketing Funnel is when you first make contact with your potential customer; this might be when they first see your website link on a search engine, or when they notice a video that you have uploaded onto Youtube. The first thing you must demonstrate to your potential customers is your ability to produce high quality content that will actually help them with whatever problem or need that they have. Then once you have drawn them into your marketing funnel, you need to have a system in place for capturing their e-mails. The most traditional way of doing it is to have a freebie that you give away in exchange for their e-mail. However, you can be more creative than that; you could ask for their email in exchange for entering a prize draw, or something along those lines.
Once You Have The e-mail
During the initial stages of an e-mail marketing campaign you need to refrain from doing any selling in this part of the marketing funnel; this is because you will scare away a large portion of your potential customers. For the first couple of e-mails, send them informative and entertaining information that they will find valuable; this will create the right atmosphere for a pleasant customer journey. Also make it a two way type of communication by asking the members of your list to send in some questions; all of this will ensure that you build the trust you need to make your Marketing Funnel more effect. By getting their trust first, you will increase your chances of getting them engaged with your e-mails, and in turn, that will make them stay until the very end of the marketing funnel, which in turn will allow you to have more control over the consumer decisions making process. Having good quality content throughout your marketing funnel is a great way of keeping a prospect right until the end of a marketing funnel because it will keep your audience coming back again and again to digest your content.
The Marketing Funnel Never Stops
There should never be an end to a marketing funnel because you will simply be missing out on money. Even after you have repeatedly marketed all of the products that you have there are hundreds of offers out there in most niches. You can get sales as an affiliate for them, which means you can potentially sell numerous products to the same lead. You can even sell your leads to companies that specialize in buying them once they have gone through a large portion of your sales process. As soon as you decide that a lead is not responding to your marketing funnel in terms of what you have to offer, you can still make money from them by selling them on to companies that buy them.
Make Sure You Get Feedback
Once you set up a marketing funnel don’t assume that it is perfect; in most cases it isn’t, you will constantly need to be on the lookout for ways to improve your marketing funnel and one way to do that is to get feedback from the people on your list. You could look at what questions your list members are asking, and then use them to improve the quality of your freebie. For example, your list might be having a specific problem that they can’t find an answer to, your freebie should include this problem. If you can show them to be an authority that can solve their problems for them then they will stick around for much longer, and that will improve your chances of getting them to buy something.
Carry Out Split Testing
Split testing is important of you are to improve the conversion ratio of each person that enters your marketing funnel. You can do things such as test out different subject lines and see which ones provide you with the highest open rates. Or, change the intervals of which your emails are sent out and see what effect that has on your open rates. Playing around with your call to actions is also important, and you can find out more about them by checking out our other article called “What is a Call To Action?”.
You must have a lot of tracking in place in order to carry out proper testing. You need to know how many people click on your e-mail’s, and then how many go on to click on the links in those e-mails to your offers. Most e-mail marketing services such as Aweber and Mailchimp have a wealth of tracking options available for you that you can utilize to get a better understanding of how the different parts of your marketing funnel are playing out.
Create a Buyers List
Once your lead has bought something from you through your Marketing Funnel, then you must put them on a special list that has its own effect Marketing Funnel. There is no sense of marketing the same product to someone that has already bought it. The buyers list should be treated with great care because these are people that have already bought from you, and will be willing to do so again if you put in front of them another great product.
Make sure that you have a selection of products ready for your Marketing Funnel so that as soon as you have a buyers list you can have something to market to them. For more marketing information download the “Small Business Marketing Made Easy Guide”. It is a guide that will greatly improve your understating of how you should market your online business, and ensuring that you
