Getting Started With Marketing Funnels

Getting Started With Marketing Funnels

This article is about marketing funnels. Marketing funnels are something that I’ve had to learn by osmosis and simply copying what other companies seem to do. I’m far from an expert, but I can cover the basics, and seeing as that’s what I’ve been writing today, that’s what the topic of the day is about!

The Yes Ladder

In sales, you have what’s called a “yes ladder.”

In short, you can’t just go up to someone on the street, give them your product and then take their money out of their wallet. You have to sell the product to them, so that they willingly give you the money in exchange for the product.

The problem is that most people aren’t wandering around waiting to buy something. You have to convince them to buy. The second problem is that people don’t go from not looking to spend any money to wanting to spend lots of money.

In practice, if you’re selling $0.99 burgers, you’re probably going to get a lot of customers on a whim. If you’re selling higher priced items, or non-essential items, you’re going to need to bridge the gap between a completely uninterested person and a person looking to spend lots of money on your product.

For that, you need a “yes ladder.”

Essentially, you get your potential customer to say “yes” to something small. Then you get them to say “yes” to something bigger. Gradually, you increase their complicity until it’s only a single step further to buy your product.

This is what you use a marketing funnel for.

What Is A Marketing Funnel?

You’ve all seen marketing funnels already. Have you ever been bribed into entering a competition? Has anyone knocked on your door and offered you a free quote? Have you ever put in your email address in exchange for a free book?

If you have, and you’ve said “yes,” you’ve taken the first step up a yes ladder and also entered a marketing funnel.

A marketing funnel tends to be, in online business, a set of web pages and emails deisnged to push you towards buying a product.

It generally works something like this:

• You read an interesting sales piece article that titillates you in some way.
• You’re offered more information on the subject if you give your email address.
• You confirm in an email that you want to receive your free thing and sign up for the newsletter.
• You’re taken to a “Thanks for signing up page” which will tell you to look out for a second email.
• The second email will confirm you’ve subscribed, and give you a link to your free thing.
• In your free thing, you’ll be offered a product or service.
• You’ll get further emails asking about how you found the free information, whether you’d be interested in the paid product, and you’ll probably get other offers and deals.

A lot of people will look at the above list and think that it sounds shady. A lot of people would read the list above and think it’s too complicated.

In reality, it could be very shady, or it could be completely legitimate. It could also be incredibly complicated, or very simple.

The beauty of marketing funnels is two-fold:

1. Once you have a customer in a marketing funnel, their contact details are yours to do with what you will. You can determine how interested they are, what they’re interested in and build a relationship with them whilst making money from them.
2. They are incredibly Sure, there’s the simple “Get a free e-book so I can spam you with affiliate links” but there are also years’ long campaigns, monthly newsletters, private clubs and all kinds of media. Your funnel doesn’t have to be exclusively online/offline and it can encompass pretty much anything that will grow your business.

What’s The Secret To A Good Marketing Funnel?

There are very few rules… at least, that’s what you’re supposed to think.

In reality, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. (Hence shady stuff doesn’t tend to work for very long.)

There are three things to consider, and they relate to what your marketing funnel does. Generally, you have three goals:

1. Get people to opt-in to being your reader.
2. Retain people as your readers.
3. Have them be customers at some point.

Most mistakes come from neglecting those three in some form or another. The majority of email lists fail on the second point; they don’t retain a person as a reader.

How many email lists are you subscribed to that get deleted every time they come through?

I know there are a lot in my inbox that I never read.

But the major mistake comes from the fact that people ignore the underlined point: They go for the sales jugular with every single email, from as soon as you sign up.

Remember, if you have a marketing funnel and somebody has given you their details, they’ve opted in to you contacting them. After that, you have to retain them as a reader. Do this by being the person that gives them enough interesting stuff to keep reading.

Sales can wait.

P.S. This is a massive topic which I didn’t really realise the full extent of until I started writing.

Let me know if there’s anything I should go into particularly in future writings!