How does a marketing funnel work?

A marketing funnel is an important step in sales. In fact it is the gateway to sales. Marketing funnel is generally a number of steps to curate your leads into customers. Let us check out more about how does a marketing funnel work.

What is a marketing funnel?

A funnel is a way to introduce yourself to people and lead them through to a final sale. It is like a relationship like when a guy marries his wife. When he first meet her, he probably wouldn't propose to her right away. What he does is ask her out on a date or ask her to go maybe have some coffee. That's like the very beginning of a marketing funnel, which is typically called something like a lead magnet.

Lead Magnet.

It's a way to get people to exchange their email addresses with you so that you can have that first date together. So a lead magnet is usually something that's quickly consumable, it's something that they can download right away and they'll give you their email address for it.

Tripwire

Next in the funnel is what's called a tripwire. This is generally a one-time low-cost purchase. So it might be something that costs let's say $7 or something like that because people who purchase something are 20 times more likely to purchase from you a second time. So you want to have a way for them to purchase something small. So this is like and again to like not just a coffee shop date but maybe to go out on a full-fledged date

Core Offer and Profit Maximiser

The third step is the core offer this is the actual "Hey, how would you like to go steady with me?". This is the actual proposal where you offer your core product to your leads or potential customer. You try to build a good relationship with them by engaging with them through the previous steps so that when they get to the final offer, they trust you for their investment and the value that you provide and finally purchase the product. This final step is called the Profit Maximizer.

So so these are the items again, lead magnet, Tripwire, Core offer, and Profit Maximizer. you lead them right through.

For a real-world example, if you are an author who would like to sell a mentoring program, you can let people download a quick short story for the lead magnet. For the tripwire, tripwire you can sell them one of your books for a cheaper price. As the core offer, you can sell them an entire series of books and for the Profit Maximizer, you can finally introduce your mentoring program. So those four steps, really lead people right through from the initial invite to the final sale.

Diving into the technicals of a funnel.

A funnel generally starts from an opt-in. This opt-in can be on a blog post, social media post, youtube video, or a paid lead generation ad campaign.
An opt-in is a form where your potential customers put in their name and email address and other information if required in exchange for something free or cheap, this will cover the lead magnet step and maybe even the tripwire phase.

From the opt-in page/post instead of taking them to a place where they can directly download the lead magnet, you can take them to an Upsell page/location. An Upsell is a process where we offer another product for a cheaper price than its original price after the initial purchase. There are platforms where the upsell happens with the initial purchase so that the leads/potential customers just have to put in their payment information once during the process. In the Upsell phase, you can offer them another product for a cheaper price as they have already committed for the initial product. This way you can increase the average order value per customer.
And for the lead magnet, instead of giving them an option to download it from the internet directly, it is better to email them the product. That way you can ensure that people who have downloaded the lead magnet have put in their genuine email addresses.

Self-Liquidating Offer.

You drive traffic from ads to your tripwire and you recover the ad cost from your tripwire, that's called a self-liquidating offer. So to put that in perspective, let's say a person is spending 25 bucks a day on Facebook ads for promoting his book. He is getting $7 is as lead cost and the book cost is $7.95. So if someone comes and purchases that $7.95 offer, essentially, he has liquidated the ad cost by selling them that tripwire. And now it's up to him to move them down the funnel and then sell them the higher-priced offer. And that's where he will be making money.

Building and Executing a Funnel.

The objective for designing a funnel should be building a good relationship between the brand and its potential customers rather than generating more sales. Having a good relationship with the leads give the brand more edge into moving them down the funnel and selling them the product. Once someone signs up for a lead magnet or a tripwire, it is important to communicate and engage with them to keep the relationship going.

 Sending out pieces of information through email campaigns can be a good way to engage with the leads. People love free stuff, you can send additional freebies which might be useful for them. Also, it is important to time the communications as sending a lot of emails or promoting products in tight intervals can cause leads to unsubscribe, which is called a "leak" in the funnel.