Leveraging the Marketing Funnel
The Online Marketing Process From Lead Capture to One Time Offer
Sep 5, 2008
One of the most important principles in online marketing has become known as the funnel. It is a way to describe the method by which a visitor becomes a client (customer), via a series of decisions that they make whether to stay in the process or not.
As an online marketer, the task is simple - to keep a potential client or customer in the funnel until they reach the final conclusion and actually make a purchase. Once they have bought from a marketer once, the chances that they will do so again increase exponentially.
The first customer is always the most expensive, but the funnel process aims to reduce that cost, by increasing the efficiency.
The Marketing Funnel
Think of the marketing funnel as a generic funnel; something that would be used in the kitchen, for pouring a liquid into a bottle. It has a wide end and a thin end. At the thin end of the marketing funnel is the gold - a product that the whole process has been set up to sell.
At each level of the funnel, the potential customer is asked to do something - the so-called Call to Action. At each level, a portion of the potential customers will drop out, with the population decreasing steadily as they move from one end of the funnel process to the other.
At the thick end of the marketing funnel is the widest lead capture mechanism possible for the niche product. Generally speaking, in online marketing, that lead capture mechanism is the generic sales page and free offer.
The Marketing Email List (Free Offer)
The lead capture page serves one purpose - to be found by as many potential customers as possible. It needs to be keyword optimized, provide genuine content (possibly a sales letter that offers some value), and is designed to persuade the visitor to do one thing.
Sign up for a free offer.
That free offer is delivered via a mechanism known as the List, and once on the List, the visitor will receive, besides the free offer that they signed up for, occasional marketing messages from the email marketer.
Important : Every email list must have a mechanism by which the recipient can remove themselves from it, and they must be aware, by signing up for the list, that they will receive additional messages. It's the law.
The One Time Offer (OTO)
In between confirming their position on the list and receiving their free gift, the potential customer should be made a One Time Offer (OTO).
The OTO must only ever be made to potential list members, and must not be repeated. It can be a reduced rate on an existing product, a unique product, or something similar.
Whatever else, it must overdeliver on value. That is, even if the marketer perceives that they are offering it at a loss, it needs to be so cheap that the customer cannot say no.
Why? Because studies have shown that once a customer has made a purchase from a marketer, the chances that they will do so again increase drastically. It is, in the end, a question of trust.
The Whole Online Marketing Process
The funnel is only the start. Once it is in place, the marketing list will begin to fill up, and the sales should begin to flow in from the One Time Offer (OTO). However, the OTO is not the only sales generator, as the backend sales process should be responsible for at least 70% of online income.
Once these sales begin to flow, based on mailings to the list, the marketer can begin to perform list segmentation, where it is broken up into sub-lists. Each sub-list corresponds to a highly targeted section of the main list : those who have bought a specific kind of product.
The segmented lists ought to be much more responsive than the main list, and part of the whole online marketing process is keeping these targeted lists alive.
