Simple Yet Effective Marketing Funnel For Your Online Product or Service Business.

(Written by Krishnam Vats)

Creating a funnel for your online business is a daunting task. As soon as you go on the internet and type in the sales funnel, you are bombarded with tons of information. Through this article, I want to help you out with a basic yet most effective and time-tested funnel for any online product or service business.

Stage 1 – Get their attention

Today’s audience is smart, they like to buy from brands, and individuals who they are familiar with. So, the use of social media platforms is necessary to engage with your target audience and get their attention.

Initially, you should try to identify at maximum two channels where your audience is active the most. Say YouTube and Instagram. Now you need to curate content that will appeal to your audience. Ideally, there are three major types of content: educational, inspirational, and entertaining

These contents capture the attention of your audience provided that you did your due diligence in researching the content idea, designing the post, and writing attention-grabbing headlines for these contents.

For example, consider a fitness coach who helps in weight loss. The appropriate content for their social media handle can be as follows

• Educational – Shorts regarding how the mechanism of weight loss works, busting industry myths when it comes to fat loss, and low-calorie foods to eat during fat loss.
• Inspirational – How XYZ person lost 4 kg in 4 months and felt more confident.
• Entertaining – Making memes related to active vs non-active lifestyles.The benefit of doing this will be that more and more people who are in the health space will start following your content. As a result, you will start amassing a customer base whom you can sell to.

Stage 2 – Landing Page.

After getting to a certain number of followers, you should start adding a call to action to visit your website. This website should not directly sell the product to the customer. Instead, it should give them high-value free content that they can implement from tomorrow onwards and get benefit from.

For your audience to get this valuable free content you ask for their email ID. This freebie is called lead magnet and the webpage where you capture the email ID in return for free value is called the Landing Page.

Building on our fitness coach example, this lead magnet can be a workout plan, diet plan, fitness training video, or a two-week free training consultation.

Most business owners hesitate to give free value. They fail to understand that this is the stage where you are building trust with your potential customers.

If you are providing high value in your content and they are benefitting from it, they will surely buy from you. Think about it, if your free content can help your customer achieve their goal, and you tell them this is only the tip of the iceberg. You provide much more value through your paid product. It is only logical to get more valuable content that can help them.

Stage 3 – Welcome and Nurture Emails.

At this stage, they have trusted their contact details with you. The purpose of capturing an email ID is to get their contact details and nurture them. The ideal process of nurturing is to send the following emails:

1. Welcome email – To show them your appreciation for showing interest in your lead magnet and to offer them their free content. You can also ask them to whitelist your email address so that your email does not go into spam. To do so, you can give them one more freebie. Ideally, you should do at least three welcome emails.

• First Email – to say thank you, offer their download, and ask them to whitelist you.
• Second Email – Share your story to build trust and authority with your audience.

Third Email – Provide more educational content in the form of a collection of posts or videos that can benefit your audience immensely.

Stage 4 – Sales Email

Now that your audience is reading your email and you are providing them with high-value content, it is time to pitch your product through a sales email sequence. You can write 5 emails to them regarding your product.

• The first email should talk about the product, what the product is, how this product can help them, and what is the price of the product. You should use storytelling to convey your message memorably.
• The second email showcases social proof to build authority with your audience. This should talk about your expertise in the field and how this product has helped various people reach their desired goals. And how this will be beneficial if you are also in a similar situation.
• The third email needs to add more value to the offer in terms of bonuses, gifts, etc. This helps the potential customer to feel that they are getting more value for a lesser price.
• The fourth email should talk about the common objections one might have regarding this project. This is a must because no matter how beneficial a product is for your audience, they will have certain objections regarding it.

The fifth email should talk about an incentive in terms of discounts, extensions, or anything niche-specific that makes the offer a no-brainer. Finally, to compel your target audience to take action, it should have some element of scarcity like a limited-time offer or the price going to increase to a certain level or the offer stands for the first 100 users and 83 seats are filled.All of these emails must have a call to action that links to a sales page where all the details related to your product are mentioned.

Stage 5 – Sales page

The sales page is where you turn the interest of your audience into desire and finally into action. This is where you sell your product. This page consists of everything your customers need to know about the product you are offering. It should contain the actual offerings, bonuses, cross-selling options, down-selling options, scarcity, and elements of urgency.

Conclusion

To summarize, if you are starting and confused about what should be the funnel of your online business. You should only focus on identifying the content distribution channel.

Creating a lead magnet is suitable for your business to capture the email ID. And, sending nurturing and sales emails to your email list which will direct them to your sales page.

Once you have the above things set up, you need to focus on audience-appropriate content creation, capturing more leads, nurturing, and pitching to your existing and new customers about your product.