No Code Tools For Sales Funnels

Selling to customers across the internet is a necessity for almost every business. A strong online marketing funnel will increase your chances of success to convert into revenue.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the total e-commerce sales in the U.S. in 2022 was an estimated $1,034.1 billion. That’s an increase of 7.7% over the previous year. Those numbers only take into account retail sales. 

Ensuring that you have an optimized sales funnel will move potential customers and clients from discovery to all the way to conversion. An effective funnel doesn’t happen overnight.  

If your business is looking to improve your existing digital marketing funnel or seeking to adopt one, we’ll discuss everything that you should know here. 

What are Digital Marketing Funnels

Digital marketing funnels are a framework for understanding the customer journey from initial awareness to a final conversion. The goal of a digital marketing funnel is to move prospects through various stages of the buying journey, from awareness to interest to consideration to action.

A digital marketing funnel typically consists of three stages:

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): The awareness stage, where prospects are introduced to your brand or product. The goal is to attract as many relevant leads as possible and create awareness about your brand.
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): The consideration stage, where prospects are evaluating your brand and considering whether to do business with you. At this stage, the goal is to nurture the leads and provide them with valuable information that will help them make a purchase decision.
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): The decision stage, where prospects are ready to make a purchase decision. At this stage, the goal is to provide a compelling offer and make it easy for the lead to take action.

Each stage of the funnel requires a different type of marketing approach and messaging. At the top of the funnel, the focus is on creating awareness and generating interest through content marketing, social media marketing, and other inbound marketing tactics. In the middle of the funnel, the focus is on building relationships and providing more targeted and personalized content through email marketing, retargeting ads, and other tactics. And at the bottom of the funnel, the focus is on providing a compelling offer and making it easy for the lead to take action through landing pages, lead magnets, and other tactics.

By understanding the customer journey and tailoring marketing efforts to each stage of the funnel, businesses can improve their conversion rates and ultimately drive more revenue. Digital marketing funnels provide a framework for doing this effectively and efficiently.

How Digital Marketing Funnels Work

Digital marketing funnels guide potential customers through a series of steps that encourage and increase the likelihood that they will take a desired action, such as a purchase. The funnel has stages that represent the level of engagement and interest that the potential customer has. A different approach to messaging and marketing is taken at each step to guide the prospect to the next step. These stages include the following:

Awareness Stage

This is the top of the digital marketing funnel. The intent of this stage is to create awareness about your brand or product to attract as many potential leads as possible. Customer research discovery and marketing campaigns are the main ways that prospects get attracted to the brand. The brand may establish itself as a thought leader in the industry and establish trust through a mix of advertising, trade shows, content marketing, social media, and other inbound marketing tactics. This interest must be generated without becoming overwhelming or it may turn off the prospect.

Interest Stage

After a prospect has expressed interest in your brand or product, the focus shifts to building a relationship. The interest stage involves more targeted and personalized content. Email marketing, retargeting ads, and other tactics are used to help move the prospect from the interest stage to the next. By providing information and guidance, the prospect can make an informed decision during this stage.

Consideration Stage

Once a prospect has entered this stage, it means that they are evaluating your brand and comparing it to others. The focus at this stage shifts to providing more detailed information and addressing concerns or objects the prospect may have. Case studies and targeted content on tactics are typically used in this stage to demonstrate the benefit and value of the product or service. Building trust and credibility with the prospect is the key goal during the consideration stage.

Decision Stage

When the prospect decides to make a purchase or make another desired action, the focus shifts to the decision stage. During this stage, a compelling offer that makes it easy for the prospect to take action is introduced. Lead magnets and landing pages are among the tactics used to achieve the end goal. These tactics must provide clear and concise information about the offer and how to take advantage of it. Removing barriers or obstacles that could prevent the prospect from taking action is the key to the decision stage. 

What is Digital Marketing Automation?

Digital marketing automation is the use of technology and software to automate aspects of the digital marketing process. Lead generation, lead nurturing, and customer engagement are typical examples. This can include everything from ad retargeting to social media scheduling, to email marketing campaigns. 

Using digital marketing automation allows brands to streamline and simplify marketing tasks, while also improving efficiency and effectiveness. Marketers can focus on more strategic activities and improve their ability to scale campaigns and reach larger audiences by automating routine tasks and workflows. 

Here are some examples of digital marketing automation below:

• Lead Nurturing Automation: This involves using targeted content and automated workflows to move leads through the sales funnel, from initial awareness to final conversion.
• Email Marketing Automation: This involves setting up email campaigns that automatically trigger based on certain actions or behaviors, such as signing up for a newsletter or abandoning a shopping cart.
• Ad Retargeting Automation: This involves using software tools to automatically retarget ads to users who have previously engaged with your brand or visited your website.
• CRM Automation: This involves using software tools to automate customer relationship management tasks, such as lead tracking, pipeline management, and customer segmentation.
• Social Media Automation: This involves using software tools to schedule social media posts, track engagement, and analyze performance.

Benefits of Automating Digital Marketing

Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads and nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads, according to the Annuitas Group.  Digital marketing automation can provide a range of benefits to businesses, including:

Increased Efficiency: By automating routine tasks and workflows, marketers can focus on more strategic activities and improve their ability to scale campaigns and reach larger audiences.

Improved Lead Generation: By using targeted content and automated workflows, businesses can generate more leads and move them more effectively through the sales funnel.

Better Customer Engagement: By automating customer engagement and communication, businesses can provide a more personalized and consistent experience for their customers.

Better Data Analysis: By automating data collection and analysis, businesses can gain insights into customer behavior and campaign performance, which can inform future marketing strategies.

Overall, digital marketing automation can help businesses optimize their marketing efforts, improve efficiency and effectiveness, and ultimately drive more revenue.

Digital Marketing and Customer Experience

With the rise of digital marketing, the expectations of customer experience (CX) have rapidly changed in the last several years. Customers expect multi-channel engagement from all brands across industries. Maintaining simple and clear communication across multiple media channels is possible with increased efficiency through using digital marketing technologies. 

For brands to maintain higher retention rates, an effective digital customer experience is required. These goals are possible by using customer data to enable this marketing strategy. 63% of customers are more likely to share data with brands that offer a better experience. To drive more engaging and successful CX requires personalization, enhanced customer service, and curated content. 

Here are a few examples of ways that CX is changing digital marketing:

Natural Language Process (NLP)

The customer experience is being enhanced by leveraging NLP which interprets human language to offer specific terms. Understanding the user intent allows businesses to make strategies to meet them where they are. NLP enables these businesses to dig deeper and understand the meaning behind user searches. 

Likely the best-known use care for NLP is how it will be integrated into chatbots. The blending of the two will allow for powerful resolution, personalized recommendations, and answers to their questions. 

Product Recommendations

If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon, you’ve likely encountered the product recommendations generated by their advanced recommendation engine. It’s a prime example of how eCommerce giants are leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the customer experience. Similarly, businesses can utilize similar strategies to improve the CX of their digital marketing campaigns.

Demonstrating empathy and understanding towards customers in pursuit of enhancing their experience can help establish a strong brand image. However, ensuring that customer data remains private and secure is equally important.

Innovative Approaches to Engagement

The traditional methods of customer engagement are being constantly challenged by the rapidly evolving landscape of digital marketing. According to research by McKinsey, CX leaders believe that relying solely on survey-based measurement systems provides only 16% of the necessary insights to gauge the effectiveness of current strategies.

While many organizations still rely on online surveys to gather data from customers, investing in advanced technologies and analytics is crucial. For example, the rise of voice commerce, powered by intelligent assistant technology, has created a burgeoning market that offers improved CX performance for numerous businesses. According to Marketwatch, the voice commerce market reached $30.4 billion in 2020 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 77% to reach $1,377.0 billion by 2027.

However, voice assistants are not the only innovation driving digital marketing strategies aimed at enhancing CX. Other technologies, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), can be leveraged for numerous marketing applications.

Best Practices for Businesses using Automation

Here are some recommended practices to consider when developing your marketing automation strategy:

• Clearly define and present your goals, using real data to justify the investment in a marketing automation platform to stakeholders.
• Collaborate with other teams within your organization. Your marketing automation strategy will likely affect multiple departments, so it’s important to get their input and buy-in before proceeding.
• Utilize process visualizations. Use detailed diagrams of your marketing automation workflow to communicate your objectives effectively to your entire team.
• Plan for database segmentation. Consider your customer data and identify the target audience you’d like to engage.
• Prepare your content strategy. Build your content library and create messaging that is interesting, engaging, and relevant to customers at all stages of the customer lifecycle.
• Plan for a gradual rollout. The most successful marketing automation firms typically launch their programs in stages. Testing early and optimizing programs incrementally increases the likelihood of success.
• Continuously analyze and evaluate your progress. Monitor what’s working and what’s not and use the time automation frees up to analyze your analytics and make data-driven decisions that will grow your business.

Tools for Automated Digital Marketing

If your business is ready to start automating its digital marketing or looking for a new tool, there are plenty of options out there. Here are some of the tool that we’ve compiled and what they do:

• Constant Contact – An email marketing automation tool that packs automation capabilities that can take your marketing to the next level. It has an autoresponder that’s highly adaptable. Some of the automated email campaigns you can build include drip campaigns and welcome sequences. Constant Contact allows you to embed custom forms to your landing pages.
• LeadSquared – Small and medium-sized businesses can automate the customer journey with tools that LeadSquared offers. Inbound email, online campaigns, chat, website, and phone calls can all be captured using its platform. 
• Sendinblue – Missing out on sales opportunities is not an ideal scenario for any marketing. Sendinblue allows you to close those games with powerful automation capabilities that come standard. You can also build your own automation workflows if you wish. 
• Hubspot – This inbound marketing tool is intended to turn outbound leads into inbound ones which makes it great for content marketing. Plans include smart content, attribution reporting, user roles, Salesforce integration,and  A/B testing for CTAs and emails. 
• Bizible – If your goal is to track marketing interactions across different channels, Bizible can help close the gap between sales and marketing. Keyword-level metrics for AdWords, campaigns and ad content, and custom reporting are among its features. 

How can we help to validate your funnels

If you’re validating your business model, use our Online Startup Program to validate your funnels and move to the next stage in your funder journey.