With all the talk about design, segmentation, analytics etc, most advice on email marketing runs the risk of leaving you blind-sighted to fundamentals. Those that truly get people to want to read your email. Or any marketing artefact for that matter. Those rooted – like all marketing best practices – in human behaviour.

So, if the question you’re trying is to answer is “how do I get my audience to open my email?”, take a step back. Instead ask, “what does / would my audience want from me?”. Or “from a business like mine?”.

Here’s a list of some of the things they do – in no necessary order of priority.

1. Recognize you quickly – without having to put in additional effort
2. Understand – equally fast – what your value proposition is
3. Be rewarded for time spent on your content – leave feeling smarter, entertained or trusted

Your mission, then, is to address these needs. You can leverage the power of email marketing and its tools to do so. How? Exactly what we’re on about in this blog.

IN THIS BLOG

1. Why bother about Open Rate, anyway?
2. Up-to-date Back-end
    a. Qualified Subscriber List
    b. Segmented Subscriber List
    c. Anti-SPAM Approach
    d. Timing & Frequency
3. Relevant & Efficient Front-end
    a. Optimized Envelope 
    b. Efficient Design & Layout
    c. Quality Content 
4. In Conclusion

1. Why bother about Open Rate, anyway?
Of the many good people who have subscribed to your email updates, only a few will actually open it. Even fewer will open it regularly. Some emails, in fact will bounce and stay undelivered. The percentage of how many of your DELIVERED mails get opened is your Email Open Rate. 

Open Rate and Click Through Rate (CTR), which is the number of people who click on the link in your email, combine to form the most important metrics used to measure success of an email campaign. Give this read from mailchimp a glance to know more about email marketing metrics and benchmarks. 

Open rate is a top of the funnel metric. If no one opens your email, other metrics like CTR will definitely suffer. 

2. Up-to-date Backend
The backend system of your email marketing campaign is like the foundation of a building. A passer-by doesn’t see it, yet forms a quiet opinion about it. At the most basic, the backend support of your email campaign requires you to work on 4 components – quantity and quality of your subscriber list, navigating through SPAM filters, and the timing and frequency of your email.

A strong, up-to-date backend is the secret sauce to directing consistent, relevant, and high value email content to the right consumer at the right time. 

a. Qualified Subscriber List
Amongst the first decisions you make about your subscriber list is about how you want them to confirm their interest in your content. Through a single opt-in or a double opt-in. Former is when the user fills a subscription form and gets added to your list. In the latter, you follow up the form with a confirmation link in the email. A link they must click before they’re added to your list. 

Single opt-in obviously gets you more leads but the double opt-in gets you more qualified ones. Those who shared their interest through your subscription form, and in the interim you sent the confirmation link, did NOT lose that interest.

In the battle of quantity vs quality – choose quality. Successful Digital Marketing is not about numbers. It is about ensuring you or your clients get good return on those numbers.

No matter how good you are, you will have a few people lose interest in or value from your offerings. It’s a good idea to periodically remove inactive subscribers – those that haven’t shown any engagement for 6-months or more. A few ways to gently nudge your sleeping beauties:

– Check if they want to update their contact details
– Take their feedback on what’s working and what’s not – incentivise it. Throw in a goodie – gated content, limited period offer etc
– Craft that one win-back email campaign/last ditch effort

b. Segmented Subscriber List
Fact check – Segmentation of subscriber list means classifying your customer database into smaller groups and adapting contents to their profile, interests, and implied needs. 

How does it impact your email open rate?
– Ensures your emails are relevant to the groups you’re writing to. For example, if running a campaign to promote a Life Coaching business, your email marketing content to entrepreneurs should be VERY different from that you send to corporate professionals 

– Helps prioritize groups that have historically given you a higher ROI – that, my friends, is what Digital Marketing strategy is about

– Helps send emails in accordance with the funnel stage your subscriber is in 

How can you segment?
At the most basic level, you can start with geographic, demographic, and psychographic classification. The foundational exercise of spending a couple of days interacting with your targeted consumers and crafting that buyer persona/s will go a long way in making this quick and dirty.

c. Anti-SPAM Approach
For that email to be opened, it needs to move past the SPAM gate keepers. Doing a few basic checks and sticking to some proven best practices are an absolute must. 

– Ensure your recipients have actually opted-in to receiving your emails; double opt-in safeguards you against SPAM filters

– Place a tiny section in the email that educates subscribers about how to whitelist your emails, add you to their address book, and if needed – how to opt-out

– Send emails from a safe IP address that has NEVER been used to send spams 

– Use verified domains and keep the code clean

– steer clear of “salesy” language and excessive use of words like rich, wealthy, cash, mortgage, casino, win, act now, click now, limited time, open now etc 

– avoid too many URLs, ALL CAPS, exclamations!!!!!!!

d. Timing & Frequency
The best day and time to trigger emails for a student who is in classes from 9am to 3pm is very different from the one you should choose when targeting a middle-aged working professional. So, what’s the best way of getting the timing right? Get clear about what a day in the life of your buyer persona looks like.  When do they wake up? What do their commute time looks like? How late do they stay up at night? 

Here’s a fun fact for you – Campaign Monitor in its study revealed that emails sent on Friday saw the highest open rate and its close cousin Saturday was the worst. 

A question that plagues marketers and small businesses about email marketing is about the right frequency of emailing customers. Too many may make you look like a spammer and too few may disengage. To know what’s best for your campaign, take note of these…

– Make a schedule to ensure have a steady, consistent and productive campaign

– Ensure it allows you to send at least one to two emails per week so you don’t run the risk of losing sales opportunities 

– Unless you have very strong content that is delivering high value, do not send emails every day or alternate day – that too will lead to lower engagement levels

A simple tweak to test what subject line works or what timing is great for your users could significantly increase your open rate. That’s why A/B diagnostic tool must be a part of your email marketing strategy.

2. Relevant & Efficient Front-end

a. Optimized Envelope 
The most important part of the front-end that gets your subscriber to click on that email is your envelope. A 2019 Litmus study revealed that the 3 components of your email envelope combine to convince your subscriber to open that email and give it a gander. 

Read more about optimizing envelope content here. In the meantime, here are a few musts you shouldn’t lose sight of. 

– Use merge tags to personalize the “To:” field of your campaign
– Keep your subject lines short but powerful – employ personalization
– Consider including numbers, whenever you can realistically – they draw attention
– Don’t build unwanted hype by using deceptive subject lines or spammy pre-header texts
– Consider including Call the Action in your pre-header
– Do A/B testing of your shortlisted subject lines & pre headers 

b. Efficient Design & Layout
Efficient email design means your readers spend less time in sifting through your email to find what’s relevant to them. 

A clean, uncluttered layout is crucial in ensuring that the reader feels ready to open the email right now and does not resort to that proverbial “later” part of the day.

Read more about efficient design here. Meanwhile, follow these basics:

– Generally speaking – keep your emails short
– Design keeping your mobile users in mind – vertical, therefore, is preferable
– Use white space to afford easy understanding and synthesis of information
– Follow visual hierarchy – large images and fonts carry important information
– Make your CTA prominent and quick to understand

c. Quality Content
Eventually, whether or not your subscribers open your emails regularly is a result of how much value they derive out of your content – each time. What is this effort giving them in return? 

– Do you enrich their lives with tools and tips they could deploy every day? 
We recommend that at least 50% of the mails you send in a campaign include a clear, easy-to-use tool or tactic. For example in the email campaigns for a Life Coach, we give productivity hacks and performance optimizing tips that readers can implement immediately.

– Do you invest time in creative story-telling, narrative, design techniques that carry an element of interest – leaving them entertained?
This may sometimes mean beginning with a startling fact or a hard hitting question or just some interesting, funny punch line.

– Do you trust their intelligence? And therefore offer greater, deeper insights into your world? Or does your content move in circles about the same beaten to death idea that they probably lost interest in about 5 years ago?
While it’s important to repeat information that’s directly relevant to your value proposition, too much repetition is boring, predictable, and ready to be blocked. Weave in novelty through new trains of thoughts. For example campaigns of one of our ecommerce clients that sells hand-made clay artefacts range from informing readers about local artisans and their lives, to specifics about certain deign and its historical relevance, user stories, impact on environment etc.

When crafting that copy, it helps imagining you’re writing to one person only and not thinking all the thousands you’re aiming to address. In fact sometimes it may also help to imagine yourself and write about what else you would like to read and know. This mental shift allows you to write more personalized subject line and message as well as bring novelty.

In Conclusion
First up, invest in healthy email practices so that you never find yourself in that dreadful, old SPAM bucket. Once you’ve crossed over to the inbox, your biggest bet in ensuring the readers open your email in the few second break they’re taking from work is the right envelope content and your reputation. Optimize your envelop by ensuring your Subject and Pre-headers are relevant, powerful, and super easy to understand. 

The reputation of your email lies in its copy. Good copy adds value to the subscriber. Good copy is why your subscriber will open your mail – again and again. 

Have you tried any of these practices in your email campaigns? Tell us how that worked out for you. Or let us in on something else you did to improve on this metric.

Whether you are getting ready to launch your own webinars or you need to find the right tool for your organization on a shoe-string budget – choosing the right webinar software can be daunting. Realities like the growing need for online collaboration, plummeting budgets, and increasing number of options to choose from don’t make it easy.

Two important facts before you we run through our short list: 

1. Webinars are here to stay. The ongoing pandemic has really shone the spotlight on this ubiquitous too. Research by Demand Gen Report in collaboration with GoToWebinar – a LogMeIn product, shows that 77% of B2B marketing teams use webinars and 15% plan to assimilate a webinar platform as a vital element of their marketing mix. 

2. Not all webinar software is created equal.

Whether you want to host a small meeting with 5-15 people or host a huge online event with up to 100,000 participants, this blog will provide a helpful comparison of the most popular webinar software today. It gives an insight into the tools that matter, features you should pay for and those that you needn’t. 

IN THIS BLOG

1. First Considerations
    i. What are the must-have features of a good webinar software tool?
    ii. Do I need multiple presenters and how often?
    iii. How many attendees do I want at a time?
2. Comparative Analysis – 2021
    a. Demio
    b. Webinar Ninja
    c. Zoom
    d. GoToWebinar
    e. Webex
3. Comparison – At a glance
4. Last Thoughts

First Considerations
Your choice of the webinar platform has to be driven by your business requirements. Knowing the business situation you’re hoping to solve for through the webinar software will save you time and money. At the outset, therefore, ask the following questions.  

i. What are the must-have features of a good webinar software tool?
At a basic level, a webinar software is an audio-visual tool that enables communication amongst dispersed groups. All options currently available in the market will offer you multiple plans each with its own capacity of attendees, hosts, and features. The advanced, complex features you choose possess should primarily depend on the goals  of your webinars. But keeping the basic utility of a webinar software in mind, here are some common denominators you should check for irrespective of your goal.

1. quality video and audio content – that has a direct impact on how your attendees view your brand

2. recording and storing (locally or on cloud) – especially if you want to repeat, repackage, sell, and profit from past webinars

3. reporting – webinars are more than a presentation, They are a business opportunity to brainstorm, sell, and engage. Some degree of reporting webinar activities is a must. To track trends, coverage, and effectiveness with internal and external customers

4. audience participation – you will need ways to seek inputs from your attendees. Most tools have a variety of simple and advanced interaction tools built-in. You will need some for sure. How many and how complex? The nature of your webinar should determine that 

5. security – of your data and your attendee’s confidential information has become increasingly important especially in the light of data breach incidents cropping up 

6. customer service – in the form of live reps, onboarding help, or dedicated account managers to answer questions promptly is a must. You do not want to be stuck in a sticky tech situation with little to no help from your service provider

Generally speaking – the more technical and academic your subject of webinar, the more advanced your attendee interaction tools should be

ii. Do I need multiple presenters and how often?
This is an important consideration because you do not want to overcrowd and clutter your screen. Most webinars allow more that 1-2 hosts in their premium plan – if you don’t anticipate needing more than a few presenters on a week to week basis, you may want to get a more expensive plan.

iii. How many attendees do I want at a time?
Consider how many attendees your webinar tool can hold at the highest level. Even if your current number is small, you do not want to host your webinars on a platform that limits your long-term growth. That’s not say that higher is better – the number should be slightly futuristic while being cost effective for today. Changing platforms each time your attendee list increases is cumbersome – for you and your users 

Comparative Analysis – 2021

Webinar Software 1 – Demio

Demio proclaims itself as “a webinar platform built for marketing”. It’s clean and minimalistic user interface allows you to create feature-rich live and automated webinars for training and marketing purposes. 

Key differentiators:

1. fast and easy customization with choice of landing pages to insert your logo, colours and presenter bios 

2. ease of use – copy previous webinar with preferred settings and then use it for later

3. flexible scheduling a single event and series of recurring events

4. interactive features like polls, “Featured Actions” or Calls to Action to augment engagement, sharing an existing resource or building a new one on the spot

5. everything you share appears above the chat area, which helps grab and retain attention; host can choose to alter emphasis on the screen, show/hide polls and CTAs

Webinar Software 2 – WebinarNinja

Reckoned one of the easiest webinar tools, WebinarNinja gives a choice to create 4 different types of webinars. Live – broadcasted with a live host for audience interaction; automated – recorded / on-demand webinars; series – a group of several webinars; and hybrid – a combination of live and recorded videos.

Its pleasant, professional and modern interface gives statistics of your past and future webinars including landing page templates, recordings and integrations. Like most tools, it does offer seamless integration with auto responders such as MailChimp and Hubspot as well as other marketing apps via Zapier.

Key differentiators:

1. easy to use and customise landing page template

2. four different templates for registration and thank you pages, which are well designed and totally customisable

3. different layouts to help the host alternate emphasis between presentation slides and presenter/s 

4. presentation chat and questions are placed under different tags helping you separate general chatter from questions you need to address

Webinar Software 3 – ZOOM

With 2020 unfolding, Zoom literally became a household name overnight. Zoom Video was the largest contributor to the 84.8% increase in the adoption rate of web conferencing tools from January to April 2020. Why Zoom more so than the others? Because of its feature rich free of cost plan coupled with a fool-proof, highly intuitive interface and excellent video quality. This primed a much larger population to pay for its advanced features like longer meeting duration, reporting, custom personal meeting ID, or company branding. 

Adequately powered for all types of businesses and professionals, Zoom is a great web conferencing tools. That’s perhaps why it is also used for marketing webinars too a great deal. But is that a good idea? Not really. It lacks some of the best marketing and webinar automation features needed for a compelling, engaging marketing pitch.

Key differentiators:

1. excellent HD video and audio quality along with screen, desktop, and app sharing options

2. free sign-up, no one -time fee, free access for 40 min meetings with up to 100 participants

3. user-friendly and easily navigable dashboard, efficient host controls and virtual whiteboards

4. private and public chats allowing participants to communicate during the event without causing interruption

Webinar Software 4 – GOTOWEBINAR

Even though the oldest webinar tool in the market, GoToWebinar has managed to maintain a formidable presence in spite of a spate of competitors in the last few years. Trusted in the marketplace for its reliable, real-time streaming and marketing features, it continues to be a choice of millions.

Key differentiators:

1. integrates with your marketing automation, CRM tools, and more to streamline your workflows and push your webinar data where you need it

2. features such as flexible scheduling, event management and customisable webinar invitations help create an optimum business environment

3. while the interface may not be as clean as some of its competitors like WebinarJam, it’s still a very easy to use tool

Webinar Software 5: WebEx

Cisco Webex is a web-conferencing tool that provides a suite of video-conferencing products from webinars to meetings. For webinars specifically, its solution called Webex Events (and Webcasting for bigger events) functions with a native app and through phone dial-in.

Do note Webex is first a video conferencing tool and webinars is one of the many features in its large suite of offerings. So, while its a perfectly fine and trusted solution for basic webinars it does lack some of the more complex features like

Key differentiators: 

1. Cisco has a history of network technology successes and its WebEx platform is already regarded as one of the most stable with broadcast quality audio and video

2. excellent audio-video capabilities

3. excellent features such as the WebEx Meeting Centre make it easy to organise and conduct online meetings; WebEx Training Centre intuitively loads controls and tools depending on the type of file you upload Live edits possible for attendees who have been assigned privileges by the host, which facilitate brainstorming

4. if your plan includes the “Call Me” feature (an additional fee), attendees can receive a call directly on their device at the time of the meeting, rather than dial in and use a passcode

Comparison – At a glance

Last thoughts
All the webinar software reviewed in this blog are high quality with good functionality. All of them make webinar creation simple and intuitive for the non-techies amongst us.

Eventually, the webinar platform you finally opt for will be dependent and defined by your business requirements. Are you selling? Then, Demio and WebinarNinja are great options. If your webinar content is informative and/or educational, then you may want to check out Zoom or WebEx or GoToWebinar.

If you are doing a webinar for the first time, then choose one that offers you a free sign-up or a free trial. Once you have done a couple, you will understand the ropes better. This will help you to choose an effective platform, tailor your presentations, reach out to your audience and provide the right kind of experience.

Unless you woke up today with a dream to kick start your Marketing career and landed on this article, you’ve heard of the ubiquitous Marketing Funnel somewhere. That said, most of us do know a handful about the What and the Why of a Marketing Funnel but struggle to figure out the How. How to mould it to the nouveau digital marketing platforms and users, how to leverage it to measure their marketing ROI, or how to gain from it without getting sucked into analysis paralysis mode. 

Some of these are exactly what we walk you through in this read. 

IN THIS BLOG

1. A quick refresher on WHAT
2.Introduction to the New and Improved 21c. Digital Marketing Funnel
3. The big WHYs of using Digital Marketing Funnels
4.The best ways of using them – simply and effectively
5. The Funnel in action – case study

A quick refresher on WHAT
Prima facie, a Marketing Funnel is a visual tool that helps understand the process of turning leads into customers. It is based on the premise that people do not buy immediately – for several reasons – price only being one of them. In effect, you don’t start selling the moment you set eyes on someone who looks like a potential customer. Much like in romance, there’s need for building trust and credibility, and displaying competence. Definitely until you earn yourself the right to ask for customer’s money, and even after that – if you want their continued business. 

This tiny, agile tool has been the go-to model for marketing and sales professionals across industries & eras since 1890s. No, that’s not a typo. The Funnel is really amongst the longest living business models that continues to kick ass even in the world of Facebook and Email marketing.  

Fun Fact – The origin of the Marketing Funnel is traced back to Elias St. Elmo Lewis. No. Frank Hutchinson Dukesmith. No. Lewis. Er… Don’t know that for sure. To put the curious cat in you to ease, give this a read. 

What we do know for sure is that the acronym AIDC – Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Convert – eventually evolved into its visual avatar now known as the Marketing Funnel. No. Wait. The Sales Funnel. Or is it the Purchase Funnel. Nope, they haven’t agreed on that one either. 

Along the way, the Funnel has been subjected to much customization. There are variations to what the stages may be called or the sub-stages it may be divided into. Across industries, they differ in length, layers, and in use of tactics. There is, however, consensus on the fact that marketing strategies need to differ as your potential customer moves from being at the top of the funnel, to being in the middle and at the bottom. In fact, this consensus contributed to the widely accepted terminology of Tofu-Mofu-Bofu. 

1. Top of the Funnel – is where your journey to market a brand begins. Here, your marketing efforts focus on building awareness of your brand amongst the new, unaware or as they are commonly called “cold” users. You identify your buyer persona’s explicit and implicit needs and build high quality, original content to establish your brand’s competence in addressing them. 

2. Middle of the Funnel – Now, your prospects know about your brand. You begin to reach out to these “warm” users with a more detailed account of the brand and its offerings. Your marketing efforts seek to nurture them with value-adding and credibility-building content. In the process, you collect information from your interested leads and qualify them for the sales pitch

3. Bottom of the Funnel – Having figured out that there is a problem which your brand can address, the lead is now ready to consider your brand worthy of his/her money. Your marketing and sales teams now collaborate on enabling the buyer to make that purchase.

New, Improved, and Agile 21c Digital Marketing Funnel 
The new-age Digital Marketing Funnel shares the DNA of its predecessor in structure and functionality. As you build your digital marketing strategy to promote your next brand on the internet, use this funnel as a roadmap. Align your content to each funnel stage and in effect to the readiness level of your prospects and leads. 

This ensures you don’t shoot from the hip hoping that something from your many digital marketing toolkit will get your buyer’s attention. You don’t take every step in the digital marketing rule book at the same time nor do you resort to that one tool you and your firm are good at. Flaws that many new digital marketing teams are plagued with. 

Instead, you strategize. You allow the funnel to tell you the platforms your user is most likely to reach at different stages. You allow it to guide you to the content they’re most likely to understand or get drawn with. 

A complete 21c. Digital Marketing Funnel is a step up from its predecessor on 2 counts:

1. it extends the funnel by taking within its scope the after-sale engagement. Hence, it requires you to strategize how to retain customers and build brand loyalty. Given that a company loses up to $1.6 trillion a year when customers leave them, this has only become more critical in the post Corona world

2. since there are finite digital platforms, the funnel allows you to design a tight mapping of strategies and content to each stage – this contributes to greater accuracy and higher ROI while leaving scope for creativity in content strategy

6-stages of a Digital Marketing Funnel 

1. Awareness: Your leads come in the garb of viewers, visitors or fans and begin to get familiar with your brand. You aim to strike that right first impression by thoughtful combination of educational and viral content. And no matter what channel you choose, this content should be ungated so it can be distributed and shared freely with no need for a signup.

2. Interest: Fuelled by relevant content, the lead now starts to engage with your brand online – investigates your solutions, consumes more content, is willing to part with important information to get hold of your content. You aim to heighten curiosity and interest about the brand.  

3. Desire: Leads that reach here are your Marketing Qualified Leads. Basis the information you have collected from them, you are now equipped to nurture them with personalized content that propels them to consider your offering as a viable solution. Your aim is to make it easy for them to evaluate your offering against that of your competitor. 

4. Convert – The step where your leads become customers. Your aim is to enable them to take the decision in your favour and commit to your offering – smoothly and swiftly.

5. Retention – Your marketing efforts now aim to turn one-time buyers into repeat; one-time subscribers into continuous ones. Through well-engineered onboarding, help and assistance gateways, your content focuses on keeping your customers. Hopefully, for a long time to come.

6. Loyalty: The ultimate destination, this stage is set for your most loyal customers. Through a combination of incentives, contests, user-generated content, you aim to deepen your relationship with them and take their permission to leverage them as your brand ambassadors.

The Big WHYs of using Digital Marketing Funnel
The Marketing Funnel has really stood the test of time. Today, as we shift our marketing journey to the digital terrain, the funnel continues to punctuate it with structure, guidelines, and goals for each milestone. Of the many reasons why it is a must in your Digital Marketing tool kit, here are the top 3.

1. It provides you a framework with which to analyse how well your customer conversion process is performing. These inputs, across campaigns, will give you a keen insight and necessary foundation on which to build your marketing strategy. 

2. This helps drive a thoughtful content strategy. Armed with a clear rationale and objective to connect with your audience, you ensure your messages stand out amongst the cacophony of content in our lives. For example, as your lead progresses towards the loyalty stage, you’d begin to notice one-to-one channels like emails and specific customer-offers draw more attention than testimonials or campaigns that boast of your expertise.

3. As a measurement tool, the funnel provides a window to monitor every step of your marketing process. It helps determine how well your ads, social media posts, blogs, landing pages, offers, emails, and instant messages are performing. 

The best ways of using funnels – simply and effectively

1. Align it with your persona
As you onboard a new client and devise your personas, build a practical, user-friendly marketing funnel right at the outset. Ask yourself the following questions to ensure you take into account key dynamics of your buyer persona.

1. How will the personas find the brand at each stage?

2. What kind of information do we need to provide to move them from one stage to the next?

3. How will we know if they have converted or moved to the next stage?

2. Project Manage the funnel
There will be a lot that will happen simultaneously the moment you start working through the funnel. And if your funnel is doing its job, it’ll all be happening very fast. Content, lead management, traffic management, remarketing. In fact, all these linear paths will need to move at the same time because of interdependencies. To ensure you don’t drop the ball at any stage, Project Manage your funnel well.

Download this free resource that can function as your cheat sheet to truly leverage the Digital Marketing Funnel in your next campaign.

3. Customise it to client industry and business model
One of the biggest reasons why the funnel has stood the test of time is that you can customize it. From one digital campaign to another, one business model to another, your funnel will and should change. For example the funnel for a subscription based B2C firm like a health and wellbeing app, should be short – connecting leads to freemium or paid account creation landing page, and intensifying post-purchase engagement so that users keep coming back. Prospects of a high-ticket training or education product, on the contrary, should be able to explore a lot of ungated content at the Top of the Funnel. 

Your goal as a marketer is to make that funnel as cylindrical as possible, guiding maximum potential customers towards conversion.

In practice, the funnel really allows you to play around with tactics at each stage. Fuelled with the right strategy and creativity, it can enable you to deliver the best conversion results in the form of increased email response rates or opt-in rates, higher frequency and value of repeat purchases, improved click-through rates for ads and social shares, better customer purchase rates and number of loyalists.

The Funnel in Action – Case Study
Let’s deepen our understanding through this case study of the funnel our team built and executed for a cosmetics company. 

Client:
A new Indian cosmetic brand specializing in skin care products designed by dermatologists. 

Their USP/s:
1. Cosmetics curated by expertise of 3 generations of dermatologists

2. Especially crafted for Indian Skin

3. 99.9% organic ingredients

4. Vegan

5. No animal testing

The Strategy:
Step 1: A few engaging dialogues with the client and a deep dive into their industry had us walking out with 2 clear goals.

1. Increase sales from digital marketing campaigns

2. Build brand awareness 

Step 2: We set out, then, to design our buyer persona and paint an accurate picture of what our target audience may want. Focusing, amongst others, on the questions here… 

1. What skin concerns do they have?

2. What solutions do they currently have?

3. What solutions do they seek?

4. How many of these solutions do we offer?

5. Where will we find our target customers? (To lead us to preferred platforms / channels) 

6. What are the best means to communicate our solutions to them? (To fuel content strategy)

Step 3: What followed were a series of iterations, discussions, & split testing. Its findings came together in the final version of our campaign funnel that looked like this. 

In Summary
As the funnels have evolved to suit the online world, they have become increasingly complex too. But there is no doubt that they offer a roadmap that assures your prospects, convert. You have to establish the basic funnel as a part of your campaign scope if you want it to work. Without it, you will find it difficult to take a grip of all the marketing and sales activities, let alone ensure high conversion. 

It’ll be worth your time to master this model and use it to monitor, direct, and optimize your marketing efforts. As is the case with any tool, with consistent and intentional practice, you’ll reach a stage where it begins to serve its true purpose – effortlessly.