The marketing funnel is a model which begins from the product and continues till a customer sale and beyond. It is a series of events designed to create brand awareness. There are several stages of customer engagement in the funnel.
The marketing funnel is optimised to generate more leads and conversions by understanding how to increase customer engagement.
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What are the different types of marketing funnels?
Every stage of the marketing funnel can be made more productive with the right approach. To understand funnels, we have to understand the challenges marketers face. Whether they want to get organic leads, leads from paid channels, book sales calls, or identify payment patterns or customer abandonment, each funnel requires a different strategy.
One of the best marketing funnels you can see is that of Netflix.
- Their homepage offers a free trial.
- The free trial can be cancelled anytime.
- The price information can be easily checked by scrolling down.
- The premium plan is selected by default, and you can downgrade if you desire. There are multiple payment options with a high level of security.
You would do well to understand the difference between the sales funnel and the marketing funnel. A marketing funnel is a broader term and covers the entire customer journey from awareness and consideration to conversion.
A sales funnel presents a brand to different audiences. When prospects are identified, they become qualified leads.
The Marketing Funnel Tools
Designrr
It is easy to convert your podcasts, videos and blogs into lead magnets with Designrr. It automates the whole process and creates flipbooks, ebooks and transcripts, which attract leads.
It’s an excellent way for businesses to attract attention to their brands. All your content can be automated and shared on Designrr.
Designrr’s main benefit is creating instant books, reports, whitepapers, etc., from your podcasts and videos. It also generates offers that increase your subscriber base. It is easy to use and offers many features like embedding YouTube videos.
Ebooks, white papers, and flipbooks are highly beneficial in driving SEO, marketing faster, and improving Google search engine rankings.
Typeform
Typeform is an online “Software as a service” (SaaS) specialising in online form building. It creates highly engaging and visually attractive online surveys that find a lot of traction.
It allows for different visuals to be inserted for various questions to increase engagement. Typeform has a high level of customisation to align with the needs of multiple brands. It also provides a clean user interface that makes beautiful quizzes.
The ability to add conditions is an advantage, based on which the quiz progresses logically. (For example: Are you an existing Netflix user?). This ensures data is collected which is relevant to the brand.
Typeform is also easy to integrate with the landing page of brands so that they can collect real-time feedback.
Wishpond
Wishpond provides you with a variety of tools to drive the marketing funnel. To begin with, you can create mobile responsive landing pages quickly. Then it drives lead generation through customisable forms, pop-ups and overlays.
It also lets you create sweepstakes, Instagram contests, and a variety of other contests to drive user engagement. These activities are designed to create a large follower base around your brand.
Discover this excellent tool for email marketing automation. It is very easy to set up email campaigns and execute them flawlessly. In terms of prospect engagement, it is right up there.
Time saved on automated social media activities can be better utilised for other business activities.
Funnelytics
Funnelytics provides you with the pathways the customer has taken before converting to your brand. Once you know what works, it is easy to replicate the same methods.
The entire customer journey is mapped in detail, and you get to know the channels through which most customers are coming to you.
By comparing customer journeys, analysing segments, campaign performances and channel performance, you can divert your resources in the right direction.
You can monitor the funnel in real-time and see where the leads are rising and where they are dropping. This way, you can get more bang for your paid advertising bucks.
Most importantly, you get a good sense of why the customer made the purchase or turned away. Ultimately, you can create a lead conversion strategy that eliminates bottlenecks and drop off points.
Intercom
Intercom is an engagement Operating System that enables companies to chat with their customers. They go with the company through the customer journey, not only for engagement and purchase but support service as well.
One of their main benefits is creating chatbots that provide automated responses to common queries, thus reducing support time.
Messages are also sent through multiple channels to drive customers to align with the marketing strategy.
They even design product walkthroughs and live messages and offer personalised support for customers. The bottom line is even when the message is automated. The customers feel they are interacting with a company representative. This increases the trust factor.
As a support chat, it is incredibly easy to send outbound chatbots and resolve multiple customer queries. You can also attach articles that the customers need to resolve their issues.
Snitcher
If you were selling clothes in a physical shop, you could guess which customer is interested in buying by the way he takes trials, etc. In the same way, you can now know which customers are interested in buying your product online.
Snitcher detects buying signals by analysing site visits. And the amount of time spent on the site. By understanding what information clients are looking for, the site can give it to them.
Snitcher gathers insights on leads and has detailed information on those leads. While understanding who is looking for your products, you also understand why they are looking for them.
For B2B marketing, it becomes easy to optimise ads as per the industry to make them more relevant. It is also easily integrated with popular social media platforms and marketing tools.
Companies spend a lot on paid advertising. This generates a lot of traffic to their site. Using Snitcher, it is ensured that the traffic is converted to leads with a razor-sharp focus.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a category based customer experience automation (CXA) platform that helps companies to engage with their customers globally.
It has pre-built automation for emails, CRM, social media, chat, text, and messaging companies of all sizes.
The platform integrates the forms, and emails are sent after specific events. Email sequences can also be mapped out and enabled. Creating social media campaigns and periodical newsletters with a predefined schedule is also great. It finds precise targets that become prospects and grow your audience. Personalised messages that they can understand are delivered to them.
Increased customer interactions and open rates are benefits most clients find after onboarding with ActiveCampaign.
They also keep track of customer behaviour, including what products they are buying, making it easier to focus marketing efforts.
Exceed.ai
Most of the traffic you get from paid advertising is from prospects who will not convert. Using Exceed.ai can weed out the duds with lead qualification and automation.
Using AI and chatbots, you can also replicate genuine employee interUsingactions, and come that much closer to an event. With a virtual sales assistant who will complement your marketing team, meetings can be scheduled using automated responses.
The virtual sales assistant guides the funnel, and the qualified leads are taken to physical sales representatives to close the deal.
Unbounce
Unbounce is a conversion intelligence platform. Its primary aim is to convert regular website traffic into actionable leads and convert them into customers. It is a specialist in creating landing pages with a specific Call To Action (CTA).
It uses AI insights from billions of landing pages to create higher conversions. It is also an AI copywriting tool that can repurpose content with a click.
It also allows you to test different versions of a landing page to understand which ones are more compelling.
There is also a pop-up builder, which you can integrate into your marketing tools. It is easy to build and run A/B tests.
Conclusion
These tools will not only help you in streamlining the process in your company, but will also help in speed up your marketing planning.
These tools will also help in having a Competitive advantage by moving fast and providing solid analytics on the available data, using which, one can take right actions to attract right customers.