Marketing Funnels Beginner’s Guide: Best Practices & More

Using a funnel and the AIDA model helps marketers visualize the stages and tasks advertising campaigns should fulfill first before the consumer makes a decision to buy a given product or service. If you’re not convinced, take this sales funnel template as an example.

Marketing and sales funnels will help you keep your campaigns organized and drive your target audience strategically towards action.

For each stage of this so-called customer journey, marketers can choose different tools and marketing tactics to help their consumers advance down the funnel and towards the buying decision.

At the same time, for each of the stages, marketers will be using different metrics and KPIs to report on their campaign progress.

To give you a better overview, here are a few examples of metrics you’d likely report on across the three key areas of your funnel – Top of the funnel (TOFU), Middle of the funnel (MOFU), Bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

Your audience isn’t yet aware of your brand & your products/services. To change that focus on lead generation.

Build a landing page, create a lead magnet, & drive traffic to it.

Use social media ads, Google ads, add banners to your pages, send an email to your existing email list (this has to be a target email list consisting of people who you potentially convert at a later stage), sponsor a podcast, or partner up with another business.

Remember to pick the right lead magnet for your audience. Not everyone will be interested in an ebook or a checklist.

Retarget those who’ve engaged with your ads.

To help them realize that what you’re offering is the right solution to their problem create an autoresponder email cycle that’ll discuss the different aspects of the topic your subscribers are interested in. Emphasize the strengths of your offer & why your brand should come up naturally when they’re thinking of the topic.

During this process, you’ll want your prospects to engage with your brand & products.

To step up your game, try email automation. Send them in response to your subscribers’ and users’ actions. You’ll soon see why triggered emails outperform regular emails multiple times.

To convert your email subscribers into paying customers your email communication should motivate your audience to take action & commit.

Emphasize the reasons why they shouldn’t waste any more time. Use the language that works for your audience. Overcome the hesitation by using testimonials, customer reviews, & case studies. 

If you’re selling an item with limited stock – this is the time to make this clear. If you offer a money-back guarantee, easy or free-returns, a free trial period – all of this should be emphasized in your email sequence.

It’s not about driving any kind of traffic to your landing page or squeeze page. It’s about driving the right traffic.

Focus your efforts on identifying the audience that’s likely to convert.

This means narrowing down your segmentation when setting up social media ads, using lookalike audiences, and observing which users perform your desired action.

If you’re seeing that some groups, in particular, are visiting your site and not converting, it’s probably best to remove them from your target group or tweak your ads to fit their needs better.

Your website, landing pages, and emails should be optimized for all types of devices.

At the same time, if for some reason the mobile experience for any of those assets isn’t working, ask yourself whether you want to target mobile users at all?

See whether mobile users are converting and if not, make a strategic decision whether you want to include them in your targeting.

The same lead magnet won’t work for everybody. That’s why you need to understand who you’re targeting and then test your gut feeling.

Perhaps a checklist is going to win over an ebook? Or an email swipe file over a 1-on-1 consultation? Evaluate each lead magnet, but don’t just focus on money.

Sometimes it’s about how quickly your audience can benefit from the lead magnet and not how comprehensive it is. Ever downloaded an ebook you never actually read because it was too big? That’s what I mean.

The whole idea behind marketing funnels is targeting customers with the right type of content at the right moment. Don’t ask for a commitment right away.

You hint at the address of your order form for those who already arrived with the ‘I’m ready to buy’ mindset. For others, you’ll have to nurture them first.

This is something we as marketers often get wrong. What we’re looking at are vanity metrics. But what we’re interested in are actionable metrics.

Are you really interested in how many people visited your page or how many of them converted? Are you interested in how many people opened your email or how many of them clicked through to your upsell offer?

Write down your objectives and then make sure you’re focusing on the right metrics – the ones you have an influence on and which bring you closer to business growth.

Even if you know your target audience very well, chances are that you’ve got more than one idea on how to approach them best.

Rather than going with your gut, you can evaluate your ideas by running A/B tests. For example, test your squeeze pages or follow up email sequences.

When doing so, change:

• the color of your CTA buttons
• the copy
• the placement of your signup form
• the placement or type of social proof
• videos

& more – these elements can help you improve your conversion rates & grow your business, too.