Planning Your Offer Funnel
If you want to be successful in your business and marketing, it’s important to learn about offer funnels so that you can automate the process by which you create awareness, gather leads, and follow up with prospects so that you can seamlessly increase sales. The offer funnel is what you pull people through as they go through the buying cycle.
It works like this: You give away a lot of content given away freely such as blog posts, social media updates and so forth, which will lead people to sign up for a free or low-cost product which requires the customer to opt-in providing their email address.
Once the potential customer signs up, then your email messages will lead them through the funnel until they get to your highest cost products and programs such as continuity programs and high-level one-on-one services.
Parts of the Offer Funnel
Let’s take a closer look at the offer funnel. But first, you need to understand your audience’s buying-cycle, which your offer funnel should closely match. The general buying cycle goes right along with the offer funnel. The customer first needs to realize they have a problem, start searching for information about the problem, and then they’ll identify some solutions and then choose between them.
Awareness
At the top of the offer funnel is awareness. Your leads will come in via the free content you put out online. You’ll work on branding efforts through blogging, social media, advertisements, organic search, and SEO to attract potential leads to your website. These things will bring your audience to you. All you have to do is describe their problems, educate them about them, and yourself, and the solutions you can provide to them while maintaining a consistent brand using different types of content.
Leads
At some point during the awareness phase of buying your audience will potentially take some of your offers that will get them on your list. These people are considered leads. At this point, you can offer checklists, eBooks, short reports, and helpful solutions that solve one problem for the audience member. This may occur with opt-in offers and sales pages. You will start sending information to your leads to get them to become prospects. The types of content you might use to get people on your list are webinars, checklists, and anything that your audience will use and trade their email address for.
Prospects
A prospect is someone who has already proven to want what you have to offer because they signed up for your opt-in above. Now, depending on what opt-in they signed up for because you may have many entry points, you’ll send them email follow-ups and higher tier offerings including upsells, down sells, and cross-sells. You’ll send content to them that nurtures the prospect so that they become a paying customer. Content that can nurture prospects and encourage sales includes small reports, case studies, how-to articles, videos, and webinars. This is where segmentation comes in. You’ll need to send the right content to them at the right time.
Sales
Eventually, a percentage of your prospects will move all the way through your offer funnel buying your continuity plan, higher priced products and services and more. The content you provide to your audience needs to be designed to encourage them to buy more of what you offer due to the solutions you provide. This content will make your customers feel loyal, part of the group, and special.
As you can see, an offer funnel is a very powerful way to weed out unqualified leads, get the attention of your ideal audience, and gently encourage your prospects to become customers. It doesn’t need to be pushy, or even sales like. You can simply use content, and solutions, to help your audience achieve their goals.
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