Funnels: the way everyone makes money online

You're currently in my funnel. You're also in countless funnels all over the internet. Most of the communication you consume on the internet is a part of someone's funnel. Funnels are how businesses get people to make purchases. After you find a niche and create your brand identities, you need to direct campaigns at your target audience to turn them from unaware internet surfers into loyal customers.

We've explained how niches help their inhabitants avoid being judged and discarded on their ability to conform to the statistical construct of average. But did you know that through the power of the Darkside, you'll be able to use those same statistical constructs to build your own business? What's your standard customer? What do you think the standard set of steps to purchasing from you will be? What will be the standard methods of communication at each step? Answer those three questions, and you've got a basic funnel.

Imagine you're running a brand-new online business, and you're looking for your first customer. Can you think of a basic step a person would take to purchase from you? If you answered something like visit the website, read reviews, or submit a form on your website, your head is in the right place. What messages would be effective in causing people to take those steps, and where can they be delivered? Campaigns are targeted, carefully crafted messages delivered to people at specific touchpoints designed to get them to take a basic step that leads to them becoming a loyal customer.

Campaigns lead a person from the beginning of a funnel to the end. But there is one problem: how is a person supposed to personally communicate with every single person on the internet? We don't. We talk to one person: the fictitious standard member of our target audience. Think of the statistical average of your total customers as a personal contact.

How old are they? Why do they want our product or service? What gender are they? Are they married? What do they do for a living? What are their political views? It is important to remember that campaigns are personal communications, not mass communications.

Targeting specific campaigns at a personal contact is at the core of all the intimidating digital marketing skills you may have heard tossed around. Website design and copyrighting, PPC advertising, Email Marketing, and SEO are all campaigns focused on their step of the funnel. But for any of those tools to be effective, they must be over the target. That's why the first step to developing a production-ready funnel is designing your communication around the target of the average of your total customers.

We're using the same statistical construct that crushed us to build a new life. We talked previously about how standardization involved using averages to find people to include or exclude based on how they compared to a standard. We are doing the same thing. We are designing the type of person we are going to add to our contact list. 

Who is the "average person" who buys your product? Would it make sense to add them to our list if they were 19 years old? What if they were 50? Would they need this product if they were obese? Do we sell to religious people? To answer those questions, we need to talk about what the average is.

The average is a central tendency, a number meant to describe a typical value in a list of numbers. The average is just one of three. The mode: the most common number in the list. The median: the value that is in the middle when the values are sorted. The average, the most common one, is calculated by adding up all the values and dividing the sum by the number of values.

If your median age is 25 and the modal age is 23, you probably wouldn't want a 90-year-old on our contact list. These combined measures of central tendency create the standards we use to add people to our contact list. Our target person represents the standard for our contact list. 

Once a website visitor finds out what the page is about, they start to ask a different question. Is this for me? That question takes longer to answer and may require having conversations that can't be had via that specific page's copy. It is fine if the first page a website visitor lands on doesn't answer all of their questions about your company. Your website's primary focus is turning people who visit it into contacts: people with whom you have prolonged conversations.

The middle-of-the-funnel activities involved in the consideration stage are website design and contact management. A well-designed website answers any questions your target person would ask before making a decision and makes the information easy to find. Not only is it easy to find information on the website, but it is also easy to request additional information. These contact forms should be displayed prominently throughout your website to build a mailing list, where useful information is regularly sent to your new contact. This is the foundation of email marketing.

So, our target person has become a contact. It is time to convert them into a paying customer. This might mean educating them on discounts, upgrades, or new products in personalized emails. Seamlessly integrating the checkout process into your communication can also make a significant impact in this arena. We don't want a purchase to be a one-time thing.

If we want repeat business, we need to make sure to provide great customer service. It may be prudent to use surveys to figure out what you can improve.

You only need a handful of skills to build funnels, and our blog is dedicated to teaching you them. It can be difficult to juggle all of these tasks by yourself. If you need a partner you can trust in this area, please feel free to contact us.