4 Types of funnels you should know about if you’re in digital marketing

4 Types of funnels you should know about if you’re in digital marketing

Mahdi Kechroud (Zeus)

co-founder | The Write Brothers

Jan 12, 2024

Jan 12, 2024

A lead funnel captures attention and converts it into a lead by gathering contact information. In exchange for their contact details, potential leads receive something valuable. This strategy allows businesses to further market to potential customers, guiding them up the value ladder.

Lead Funnels

Basic Lead funnel

  • Capturing attention: Social media, YouTube, google search

  • Drive them to an opt-in page: saying I have this valuable thing if you want to have it just give me your email (you have a way to contact them now), and I’ll send it to you.

  • Free content: after submitting their email they will get to a thank you page with access to the free content

  • You get access to their email address you can send them emails, moving forward, forever and ever you can send them, as long as you are sending valuable content.

  • Example: there are lots of free things you can offer as a gift; mini-training, 15% off their first order for e-commerce stores.

Blog Post Funnel

  • We get attention from social media, google, and YouTube, your favourite form says a lot about you.

  • Instead of just driving them straight to an opt-in page you can send them to a blog post with useful information, especially if you’re doing search engine optimizations and stuff like that.

  • Somewhere in that article, there will be a place for them to opt in, there’s going to be a pop-up or a traditional opt-in message, and then you’ll be able to opt in and get access to the free resource

  • They enter their information, now you can email them and give them access to valuable content.

  • Now you can email them, send them new announcements, you can give them new valuable content, you continue to sell to them and help them move up the value ladder.

  • Examples: Hubspot, is one of the biggest examples that use this funnel strategy, go visit their website right now and you will find useful articles about marketing and social media then at the bottom you will find some sort of pop-ups.

Survey/Quiz offer

  • We get attention from social media, google, and YouTube (from wherever in the universe).

  • Instead of sending them to a regular opt-in, saying hey there’s a gift signup and you can have it, this is where you offer to give them a quiz, so they can come in enter a bit of information, learn a bit about themselves and you’re gonna ask for their email, they give it to you, and then you email them the results.

  • So kind of the gift is the result.

  • Example: Primally Pure is like a deodorant company, they ask you some questions, you select the things that represent you, and boom they’re gonna say give us some information. You enter your details, and now they have your email address they can send you some rubbish promo emails, but they give you the result as a gift.

These types of funnels (lead funnels) as you learn, you can see them everywhere, there’s nothing wrong with these funnels, they’re just a big chunk of how this world works.

These are some examples of lead funnels these are ways you can offer people, you capture their attention, you can offer them valuable things in return for getting a closer connection with them and also getting their contact information so you can continue to market to them. Now that they have become a lead that you can sell to.

When you’re trying to help a business increase its scale, aside from capturing attention, you need to then kind of start to convert that attention to a lead, to a customer.

Sales Funnels

We saw how to take someone whose attention you capture and turn them into a lead. Now we’re going to see how to turn a lead whose attention you captured and turn them into a customer. This is where we are getting into sales funnels, Instead of getting someone to become a lead now we’re gonna be converting them into a customer (this is where copywriting starts to get fun).

Basic Sales Page

  • Get their attention from anywhere in the universe: Social media, Google, YouTube.

  • Instead of sending them to an opt-in page and asking them to put in their information, we send them to a product page, where you present it in the most compelling way possible, this is Long-form copy, you’re going to persuade them, in my newsletter I teach you how to do all this, so they go from being interested to deciding to buy your product.

  • Once they decide to purchase your product, there are usually a few steps on the back end, you go to purchase a product usually that’s not the only step, often they offer you something like an upsell.

  • Example: you go buy a course and 47$, usually you go to a page and it says hey if you want my advanced training, pay 197$ for the group coaching if you don’t decide to do that sometimes they’ll give you a down-sell, they’ll be like “you don’t want to pay 197$ how about 97$?”

Video Sales Page (VSL)

  • As usual, traffic comes from either a Google Ad, a YouTube video, or social media.

  • Instead of having a long list of texts with different headlines and different sections, it’s got kind of a big video that plays in there and just sells the product through the video, and at the bottom you can decide to pay from it, instead of making you read the whole page it makes you watch the whole thing in the video.

  • They offer you an upsell, if they decide to get it cool, if not, no worries.

  • For example, fitness coaching sales pages are almost always a VSL, like Keno Grego Gallagher, he’s got a headline and a little VSL, testimonials, and CTA so you can click on it and purchase the product.

Advertorial Sales Page

Disguises itself to some level as a news article, instead of positioning it as a straight sales page, it tries to super educate the reader first, and kind of show them a breakthrough or something like that, It was popular before, and it’s getting popular new. Then an upsell and as usual.

Application Funnel

  • This is useful for selling high-ticket programs. You drive traffic to your page, people love it, and they are like “Oh, this is great”, but they can’t just buy access immediately, they have to apply first, this is pretty common for high-level masterminds or high-ticket programs.

  • People have to apply to answer some questions about themselves, and usually, they’ll book a call on a calendar to talk with a sales representative.

  • Sales call: the sales rep gets them on a call pitches them the product, and boom sends them an order form, and they purchase it.

  • Usually, after they book that call-in the call you’ll send them emails to follow up and get them all hyped for the product.

These strategies have a common theme: guide the audience through a sales process, culminating in a purchase and potential upsells.

Event Funnels

Webinar Funnel/Live Event Funnel

  • This works for the courses, value propositions, and learning together communities. Then turn around and sell them a product on the backend to help them go up the value ladder. You drive traffic, then they go to the opt-in page, and you tell them, about this cool live class. You’re gonna teach them a bunch of valuable information. They put their information in and it gives them a date “Wednesday 4 p.m”

  • You’re gonna send them emails between the time that they sign up and the time that it’s time to attend, so they can get excited about the event, you can teach them some of the basic things in your emails, so their curiosity is through the roof.

  • They attend the live event or the webinar, you teach them a bunch of valuable stuff, and you give them a lot of value, webinars are a really powerful way to prep someone to purchase a high-ticket product, and at the very end you offer them access to the sales page

  • On the sales page, they buy your product, life’s good. Basic sales page from here on after.

  • Now, if they attend the webinar but they don’t purchase the product, there’s a follow-up sequence of emails or different forms of communication, where you get someone who signed up to buy the next product. Usually, there’s a time-based discount or something for people who attend and the emails to get people to attend but don’t purchase immediately to purchase, a certain percentage of them buy this way.

  • The people who didn’t attend signed up but didn’t attend the webinar, you send them a follow-up email, to get them to watch a replay of the webinar (I will show you how to do that in upcoming emails), or you invite them to the next one. They watch the webinar like it get excited about it and purchase.

  • For Example, Mason the biggest Copywriting and hiring copywriters advocate on social media right now (he’s right by the way), sells a course called CopyMBA, he uses this tactic and it is generating a ton of revenue.

  • Webinars can speed up the trust-building process, which takes a month you build it in a week or less

Product Launch Funnel

  • This doesn’t have a live event, you’re working with somebody or you’re building a course, what you can do is a month or two before launching the course, you can announce it to your audience: “Hey guys, got a new course coming up, if you sign up now to be notified, you get a 10% off, or it will be limited enrollment”, you get a lot of people to get excited about the course. They opt-in, they’re super excited for the product to come out, you send them a bunch of emails to keep them hyped, so when you release the course you send them all a link to the course, they sign up they pay, they get their course, and your course gets sold out from the very beginning

  • One of the cool things about this is you can test how much people are excited about your product before you invest in making it. If a lot of people sign up, you probably got a winner, if not, maybe your course needs some tweaks to get people excited.

The value provided in these sessions fosters trust, enhancing the likelihood of conversions. A variation is the launch funnel, where potential customers sign up in anticipation of a product release. Upon launch, there’s a rush of eager customers ready to purchase.

This method can gauge market interest and validate the potential success of a product before its full release.

Home Page Funnel

A home page isn’t a funnel, but it’s kind of the crossroad where funnels bundle up. It has multiple funnels in it, so:

  • You generate traffic from where people have heard of you, they might google you they might click on the link in your profile.

  • Once they are on your homepage, they are there for many reasons, they might just want to learn more about you and you want to capture them and turn them into a lead, or they may be actively looking to purchase your product.

  • There are a lot of jumping points on a homepage, usually, there is a pop-up where people can opt-in for your newsletter or opt-in for a gift, or you can have a kind of miniature opt-in on the top or bottom of your homepage, (check out our website, you’ll see an example of it at headlinehustlers.com, but you’re probably coming from there) so you can capture them as a lead and start marketing them better

  • You can also have a list of links to your products, for example, if you sell an info product, you will have a list of your products, and you can send people to your sales page, so they can buy things, a lot of e-commerce stores have like a storefront of their products and categories on the home page, you can search through it, and then you can go through to individual product pages.

  • Sometimes, you will have other kinds of links, maybe you will have social media accounts, so they can go follow you there, maybe some about me, testimonials page, usually these pages link back to sales pages or opt-in pages.

  • Example: Supplement store, they have links to all their products on the home page so we can purchase, they have links to their clothing, their courses, a bunch of case studies and reviews to build trust, and when you look down you will find a CTA to sign up to their newsletter (same way you found us).

From here, various funnels like lead funnels or sales funnels can be accessed, depending on the visitor’s interests or needs.

If you’re a business owner online or you do digital marketing then Lightning Struck the weekly newsletter is the secret weapon you always needed. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out on the weekly marketing updates, trends and secrets. Subscribe Now

P.S. Visit my Twitter profile I post there regularly about marketing and copywriting, if you’re a business DM me.

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