Generate more revenue with your Marketing Funnels
You’ve worked hard to create an inbound funnel for your company - you’ve created a beautiful landing page, captivating content and a set of interesting follow-up emails. Why aren’t the leads rolling in?
This article aims to help you plug the leaks in your marketing funnel and capture the maximum number of leads.
What is a Marketing Funnel?
For those new to inbound marketing, a marketing funnel is the content/educational journey you want your leads to follow through from their first exposure to your brand to the time that they decide to buy your products or services, which of course includes the tools which facilitate the process. During this journey, the content you write helps your leads understand the problems you can solve and establish you as a credible company with the expertise to do it.
This is a slightly unusual definition of a marketing funnel (less focus on tools and structure) but one that I believe captures the true purpose of a marketing funnel: To educate your potential customers and convince them that you are a credible source of information and the best provider to solve their problems.
A properly automated marketing funnel generates qualified leads for your sales team, but many marketers do all the work only for the results to fall short.
When execution falls short it can be a disappointing and expensive failure - wasted expenses, as well as the lost revenue that a working funnel would have generated. If a marketing funnel is so simple, how can it be so difficult to execute correctly? That’s where good structure, strategy and established best practices come in.
One of the most important factors influencing the success of your funnel is to say the right thing at the right time - to make your content answer the questions that your prospects have, when they have them. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to read Using Marketing Automation to Build a Buyer’s Journey written by my colleague.
Now we’ve established what a Funnel is, let’s jump right into how to generate more leads with the funnels you already have. We’ll go through retargeting, which will let you re-capture leads that leave your site without converting, adding more CTA’s to your funnel communications to make sure you’re making it easy enough for them to reach you when ready, and lastly some general copywriting tips and funnel building best practices to get your funnel up and running in as little time as possible.
How do you Generate More Leads and Revenue from Your Marketing Funnels?
Retargeting
On average, 98% of your website visitors leave without filling out a form, never to return. Retargeting gives you a chance to bring back some of those lost visitors by advertising to them on Facebook, Google and a host of other sites across the web when they don’t convert. FunnelBud includes Perfect Audience (a Retargeting platform) with your license, contact your Project Manager for help setting it up, or get an introduction to Retargeting here. Whether you are a FunnelBud client or not, retargeting can significantly increase the number of conversions on your site using SharpSpring Ads or any other retargeting platform of your choice.
Good Calls to Action
In any funnel, you need to give your leads a way to indicate to you that they’re ready to take the next step. You’d be surprised at how many marketers write funnel emails where there are no calls to action, or they just lead to more informational resources. We recommend that you include a call to action allowing your leads to reach you (or to tell you to reach out to them) in most or all of your nurturing emails. These could be:
- Start a Free Trial:
Assuming you offer this already, getting your leads to try your products or services first hand is a sure way to impress them - provided you have enough educational materials or personal help to make sure your prospect has a good experience. If you don’t, live demos are a good alternative. - Book a Demo / Free Consultation:
If you offer a demonstrable product or service, demos or consultations are likely going to be a key way that your company establishes your credibility and expertise in the market. At the same time, they are a great way to break the ice with your leads, learn more about them and how well suited they are to your business.
After someone books a demo, they should generally be set as a qualified lead and handed over to the sales team. FunnelBud includes a meeting booking feature, reach out to your Project Manager if you need help setting it up. - Request a quote:
If quotation requests are part of your normal sales process, this can be a natural way for your leads to express interest and for you to get more information about them. This CTA can link to your quotation request page or trigger a notification to a sales person telling them to reach out to the prospect. - Contact Me
If your funnel has captured your prospect’s phone number as part of the gated content process, this can be a quick and easy way for your prospect to tell you that they’re ready to talk. Most Marketing Automation (MA) systems can be triggered by clicks on a specific email link and use that to send a notification email to the relevant sales or pre-sales person. - Refer a friend
This is a great way to get additional leads from those that you’ve already converted but tends to be most applicable to physical events or Webinars. These CTA’s can simply link to a referral form where they can provide a friend or colleague’s information, which will then send them an invite.
Marketing Funnels Best Practices
The most sophisticated funnels out there have multiple branched email sequences, versions of content for each persona, and other advanced components that might leave you bewildered. Setting your sights on one of these as a benchmark for your own is a lofty goal that few marketers will ever reach - so don’t try (all at once)!
It is well known that people aren’t great multitaskers - we really can’t do more than one thing at a time. Building an inbound marketing machine for your business is a long process that can be very giving along the way (even before it’s finished!) when you keep these principles in mind:
- Always follow the shortest path to creating something valuable
What is the smallest working funnel you can create? Let’s say you aim to create a landing page with a confirmation email and 6 follow-up emails. Assuming you don’t have highly interdependent content, there’s likely no reason why you can’t publish the funnel when the landing page and confirmation email are ready.
Simply add the opted in leads to a list and schedule the follow-up emails manually when they’re ready, in addition to adding them to the automated sequence. Just make sure that your Marketing Automation system doesn’t allow the same person to receive the same email more than once.
The same applies when writing persona-specific emails - start with your generic version, then write the versions that address the pain points experienced by each persona and incorporate it as dynamic email content. - Perfection takes double or more the amount of time compared to something 80% as good.
We all want to give the best impression of our business to the outside world, and can sometimes spend massive amounts of time perfecting our content. It’s a worthwhile goal to perfect your messaging and optimize it for your personas, however your 5th draft is likely almost as good as your 20th. With the exceptions of certain industries, in most cases you can publish your content when it is “good enough”, and update it later. Just make sure to run it through Grammarly first! - Landing pages need to offer value without a purchase
Your landing page isn’t meant to finish the selling process, it’s just the first step in capturing your lead’s information and getting them ready to be sold to. The most successful landing pages always offer your visitors something in return for their email address and without requiring them to buy your product or service - guidebooks, checklists, white-papers and so on.
Your headline should make that value entirely clear to the visitor with as few words as possible (8 or less recommended). Keep it simple and straightforward, those are always the easiest to read and understand without going back. Let’s break down this article’s headline as an example:
Generate more revenue: The benefit to our reader is established with the first 3 words
with your Marketing Funnels: This gives further context to the benefit, and also hits some of our important SEO keywords.
Where do we go from here?
These tips should help you leverage the work that you do sooner and with less effort. Success with Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation is always easier when you have expert help - make sure the service provider you choose has your back, not just with technical support but also practical and strategic help as well.
We invite you to check out our Building Your First Inbound Marketing Funnel recipe. If you are a FunnelBud client or are considering our services, our project managers can help you create a well-oiled inbound marketing machine that creates a continuous stream of leads for your Sales Team. Click here to get a free demo or here to reach out to your project manager.
