Marketing Funnels 101: A Guide to its Components
Understanding how a marketing funnel works will bring valuable insight to your marketing strategies.
It’s the process of converting leads into actual customers, which begins from the first time someone learns about your business and ends when they purchase your product or service. While all your customers begin at the first stage of the funnel, it’s important to make sure they progress through all stages until they ultimately engage with your company.
The leads in each stage must be treated carefully in order to coax them into the next one. Pushy sales tactics to force them along will easily turn them off.
Instead, offering informative and relevant content will encourage them to do business with you, which is ultimately the goal. Here are the most important components of a marketing funnel and how they help make a sale.
Tripwire
A tripwire is a product or service that is very attractively priced to encourage potential customers to pay for it.
This cannot be a throwaway product that has little to no worth; the tripwire must be game-changing enough to convince a person to engage with your content and purchase it.
Customers must see the worth in your tripwire in order to be convinced to progress to the next stage in the buying process.
A tripwire helps them see additional value in your company, and make them curious enough to browse through your offerings until they see one interesting enough to purchase.
Lead Magnets
These usually act as the entry point in a marketing funnel, as it is an initial offer that is promoted to your audience in exchange for their contact information.
The lead magnet convinces your target market that a valuable piece of content offered by your website is worth exchanging their email address for, which is crucial for your funnel.
Sometimes, lead magnets alone are enough to promote your business’s products to your customers. Other times, a tripwire is needed to nudge them further into the buying process.
Landing Pages
A landing page is where your customers have the choice to sign up for newsletters or a specific offer, which will give you access to their email address or payment information.
Your tripwires and lead magnets will be found on your landing page, and they should lead to a thank you page. This page should lead to other valuable content on your website, such as relevant blog articles, videos, or your business’s social media platforms to persuade them to visit your other pages.
Your thank you page should also include the option to download a free product via email. This will train your customer to standby for emails from you, which can encourage them to engage with you further.
There are many platforms available to use to create your landing pages. You’ll be able to test them and duplicate the pages to test your funnel, which will help you create an attractive and effective landing page.
Core Offer
Apart from the tripwire and the lead magnet, you’ll also have another component to convert your customers through the core offer.
This is the ultimate goal you want to achieve with your customers, as this is what they’ll be purchasing at the end of the buying process.
By the time this core offer is promoted to your customers, they should have already engaged with your company in some form, whether it’s reading your content or browsing your website.
They see the value in your brand and need a little encouragement for them to purchase the offer.
If you have different subgroups of your target market, you can utilize different core offers to entice them.
Regardless of the product or service, it should be the principal item you’re aiming to tell in your marketing funnel.
Email Automation
A strong email marketing strategy is crucial to the digital marketing funnel; in fact, an effective and high converting funnel cannot exist without it.
If a customer signs up for your newsletters without purchasing a product, then inbound emails are the perfect way to nudge them towards a purchase. Email automation will help your customers stay engaged with your company regardless of where they are in the marketing funnel.
These emails must be specially crafted according to customers at different stages of the marketing funnel. Otherwise, your customers may lose interest and unsubscribe to your emails.
Beginning with a welcome email once they engage with your lead magnet or tripwire will help them stay in the loop.
After a certain amount of time has passed, you can send them emails that advertise your core offer, especially if these are potential customers who have not yet made a purchase.
Nurturing all leads, from those that have already purchased to those who only signed up for emails, is incredibly important. Keeping them interested by offering valuable content will keep customers in the funnel until they’re convinced to finally buy your product or service.
Ad Management
Lastly, online ads are a crucial component of the marketing funnel. Facebook ads, in particular, is an effective way to promote your content to your target market while reaching new customers.
Facebook has the exceptional ability to hone in on target audiences, which will help your business reach the right people while moving them towards the purchase stage of the buying process.
Facebook ads are also a great way to retarget customers and to convert people who are already in the marketing funnel but have yet to make a purchase.
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This will help support email strategy and encourage prospects to move further down the funnel to buy the core offer.
However, Facebook ads will work only if you have a solid marketing funnel, so you have to make sure the other stages are strong before promoting your business through the platform.
Conclusion
While a marketing funnel may seem complicated with its many components that must be in sync, it is effective at improving conversion rates.
Now that you know the components of a marketing funnel, you’ll be able to craft a funnel strategy that expertly guides your audience through each stage of the funnel until they finally purchase your product.
If you need a funnel mapping and tracking tool to help with your marketing strategy, we’ve got what you need at Market Plan. Our all-in-one software is specially designed to help you plan, execute, and optimize your marketing strategy all from one place.
