As you can imagine, a prospect’s throwaway email is useless for email marketing.  You want the home or work email. You want the email address that is opened daily because you have something important to share. Note: Many businesses are shy about email marketing. They don’t want to annoy their base. I agree. We don’t want to send spam.  But if you offer a good product or service, doesn’t it help your customers live a better life?  Don’t you want your customers to have a better life? The key is positioning - to give your customers what they need in a way that’s genuine and sincere. The goal is sales; and the mission is to be helpful. There’s nothing spammy about that.So how do you create an effective sales funnel for your business?

 Well, it requires some masterminding and a bunch of testing to get it right, but here’s what you do:

 1.  Determine which space you want to dominate.  Don’t try to be all things to all people. The first impulse for most marketers is to chose a hugely popular search phrase.  The problem with high volume search terms is they tend to be too broad and too competitive.  Instead, run a campaign based on a highly specific search phrase with far less competition.  The best place to start is listing the types of questions prospects usually ask you when considering your products and services. So in my industry, instead of targeting an ultra competitive search phrase like ‘web design companies’ I might instead focus my campaign on ‘how much does a new web site cost.’ Fewer competitors, higher conversions, and higher ROI.

 2.  Think about how you can segment your prospects.  This is the part where you reverse engineer the sales process. You probably sell a range of products and services.  You may want to select the higher margin ones for now, but you still need to get the right sales message to the right prospect. If I capture someone in my funnel who is asking ‘how much a does a new web site cost’, I need to map the sales cycle backwards based on the types of websites we sell.  A new e-commerce site is a different product and requires a different sales cycle than a simple brochure-type site.

 3.  Create a landing page with an explainer video that encourages the prospect to take a survey. This step is critical. The point is not to say something like, “To serve you better, take the survey below.” You have to be much more persuasive than that.  Basically, the prospect needs to realize that he/she runs the risk of making the wrong the decision and/or missing a valuable opportunity by NOT answering the self-discovery questions. Motivate the prospect to take a few micro commitments. Once they have taken a few small steps, it’s easier for them to take bigger action. You also want to be sure the overall message is convincing enough for prospects to relinquish their real email addresses, not the throwaways.  In the example ‘how much does a new website cost’, the info I need to collect and thus engineer into the survey includes: name, email, type of site they want, number of products (if e-commerce site), samples of sites they like, and budget. For other industries, e.g. health care, you can imagine gender and age may be important capture fields since healthcare is different for men versus women and young versus old.