Marketing Funnels That Drive Customer Journeys
Marketing Funnels That Drive Customer Journeys
If you have seen a customer journey maps, you’ve probably noticed that they look similar to that of marketing funnels?
It has a lot more to do with logistics than you might think.
When planning and organizing a marketing strategy to drive your business, how do you know where to begin?
You begin with the people.
Knowing How To Get Them There
Without people, you have no one to plan for.
Knowing how they think, where they want to go, and where they want to end up can give you the right tools to get them there.
The important thing is to get them to their end result with you; not someone who’s offering the same product with a different pathway.
What will make you stand out? What will make you special? It takes more than a trail of breadcrumbs to lead a bird to the feeder; you need to know what seed that bird is looking for.
Black oil sunflower seeds might attract your cardinals, but what’s going to attract your bluebirds?
The Customer Journey
The customer journey is a simple idea that remains consistent for the majority of your customers.
Yet, every person who is looking for a service or a product has their own reason for taking the journey to begin with.
For example, customers who are shopping for a tortilla press might start the journey very differently. Some are shopping so they can make homemade enchiladas one a year on Cinco de Mayo.
Others are shopping because they’ve recently gone gluten-free and want to enjoy homemade tortillas without it. Still others are looking for a great wedding-shower gift.
The desires that brought people to the start of the tortilla-press-shopping journey are vastly different.
But in the end, they all want to make the purchase.
The Basic Path
Some journeys differ in that a customer might choose you on the recommendation of a friend. Some people might be rather no-nonsense and choose your business because it was the first one the found.
But for the majority of shoppers and seekers, there is a standard and familiar path when it comes to the journey:
- Engagement with the seller
- Purchasing the product
- Using the product
- Sharing the experience with others
- And finally, after some time, replacing or upgrading the product
Will they choose your company to help them with this?
Will you have made such an impression on this customer that they’ll choose you to help them with their future needs?
Or will they seek another competitor to assist on their new journey?
That depends on what type of interactions they had with your funnel.
The Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is the same across all avenues of business, perhaps worded differently, but essentially the same. I have created a Customer Avatar Workbook that will help you create a customer avatar for your customer journey. You can download it here.
Discovery.
This is when the customer discovers that they can buy their product from your website or establishment.
The customer will learn about you; who you are, what you stand for. Why should they consider you to meet their needs?
Your goal at this point is to keep them interested.
Are you providing content that educates them and answers their questions? Blog posts and comprehensive guides can help.
Consideration.
This is the point where they consider if you are the person to help them make this purchase. They know about you, they like what they see, and they want to know more.
You also know more about them and can provide more targeted content.
You need to stand out as someone who provides easy-to-access information that hits the sweet spots. Provide case studies and demo videos, for instance.
Conversion.
This is your time to shine and get the customer to make the purchase from you and not the guy down the block (or down the web).
Explanation of what your product does is no longer important; it’s all about why your product is better than others. Testimonials and reviews can seal the deal.
Retention.
Some call this the loyalty phase. This is where your customer decides to come back to you to purchase their own tortilla press after purchasing the one that they gave away as a gift.
Or… vice versa.
How do you keep them coming back?
Hopefully by the great service that you provided the first time, but the key is to remember: out of sight, out of mind. Stay in-mind with special offers, email outreach, and monthly webinars.
Some marketing funnels point to advocacy after retention; how to get your customer to spread the word about your product or service.
Good word can spread based on a few things.
Was your process easy to follow, filled with service of the highest standards?
Did you take them on the right journey?
Did you keep up with them after the purchase, or did you let them fall to the wayside where someone else could capture their attention?
You may want to check out the Actionable Books summary I write about the book, Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler. This book covers tactics and strategies for various stages of sales funnel.
Driving Your Business
Funnels are created using various tools such as Website CRM (such as Wordpress), landing pages, email autoresponders, analytics and tracking. You can actually create a funnel without even having a website.
The two most important tools are landing pages and email autoresponders.
However, in order to run a successful marketing funnel you will need these 13 elements working together:
- Audience
- Offers
- Copy
- Landing Pages
- Shopping carts & products
- Delivery Pages
- Links and connections
- Autoresponder logics
- Email copy
- Tags and timings
- Pixels, codes and analytics
- Ads copy and images
- Tracking
I will cover all these 13 elements in my future posts.
My favourite landing page tools are ClickFunnels (for advanced users) and LeadPages (for basic users). For email autoresponders, I rarely suggest anything other than one of my top three; Active Campaign, Infusionsoft and Ontraport. In this order.
Perhaps I’ll cover them in later posts.
For those who are using Infusionsoft to drive your funnels, you know that it can help you grow your business, make more money, and give you freedom by helping you manage your business without having to oversee every single minute detail.
This is how you stay one-step ahead of the competition. From behavioral data collection that leads to customized follow-up, to lead scoring that’s based on your own criteria, the options are endless when it comes to this technology.
Unfortunately, you probably know by now that it can take a while to learn the program, and it isn’t an easy-read.
It takes time away from your business to learn the product, and even more time training your team to use it efficiently.
So, how do you get the best product with a shorter-learning curve?
How about a course that will take you from step-one to final product in 15-minutes of training or less?
Everyone knows that when you have every employee from A to Z on the same page, the chances of your business success are higher.
And with a plan program that is designed to get everyone there, and keep them there, your customer journey will become better and more understandable than ever.
Check out my free training “How To Convert a Complete Stranger Into a Paid Customer FAST.” This training is all about tripwire funnels and how they work great with Infusionsoft.
Call To Action
How many customer avatars you have and what is the number of steps in your customer journeys?
Let me know in the comments below.