An online marketing funnel is an automated system, which when setup correctly once and managed, will operate 24/7 creating new leads and generating sales for your business.

1. What is a funnel?

The purchase funnel, or purchasing funnel, is a consumer focused marketing model which illustrates the theoretical customer journey towards the purchase of a product or service.

According to the original model, the stages of the funnel are: Awareness, Opinion, Consideration, Preference & Purchase. However not all funnel models use these exact stages and descriptions.

Each funnel is made up of different sections representing a unique stage of the userʼs journey.

The funnel becomes narrower as you move further along or down, as more and more individuals naturally loose interest and drop off.

2. Path To Purchase Customer Stages

When creating an online marketing funnel, we can define the potential customer stages as follows:

1. Visitor: Unaware of your brand, services or products
2. Reader: Interested and consuming your content
3. Email Subscriber: Has taken action to opt in and provide you with their email address
4. Customer: Someone who has purchased a product or service from you

Two additional stages that can be added are:

5. Repeat Customer: Someone who has purchased multiple products or services from you
6. Brand Ambassador: Someone actively recommending your brand, products and/or services

An email funnel would include stages 1 - 3 and a sales funnel would include stages 1 - 4.

For now we will ignore stages 5 and 6 to keep things simple.

3. Funnel Stages: Top, Middle, Bottom and Outer

Top of the funnel represents the stage where visitors are just getting introduced to your brand. Theyʼve just become aware of what you do and what you offer.

Middle of the funnel represents the stage where subscribers, that are aware of your brand and are on your list, are engaged with your content (emails, blog posts, videos, etc.) but have not made any purchases yet.

Bottom of the funnel represents the stage where your customer becomes a buyer by purchasing your product or service.

Outer funnel refers to anything outside of your funnel. Deciding if youʼve got a market/product fit or if your ideal customer avatar has been accurately defined are both outer funnel questions.

4. Marketing Funnel Terminology Explained

A lead magnet is something of value that is offered in exchange for the visitors email address. This asset is usually a digital item like a video or PDF, but can also be a free discovery call or a physical item.

A landing page or squeeze page is a page specifically designed to get a visitor to opt in (provide their email address) or buy a product.

A sales page is a page specifically designed to sell a product or service.

A email marketing service provider is online software as a service (SaaS) platform used to create your email list and send out email broadcasts and autoresponders.

An autoresponder is an email broadcast that is sent out automatically based on some other trigger or action.

Double opt in refers to a process where the email subscriber needs to take to actions to confirm their subscription to your email list.

Single opt in refers to a process where the subscriber needs to only take a single action to add themselves to your email list.

A tripwire offer is a low priced item offered to a subscriber right after theyʼve subscribed. The idea is to get the potential customer, while they are warm, to commit to a small purchase turning them from a subscriber into a customer. Itʼs easier to sell an additional product or service to an existing customer compared to aquiring a new customer.

A lead is an individual who has provided contact information, which signals a potential future sales opportunity.

A prospect is a qualified and interested individual who engaged in two-way interaction with you and thus demonstrated that they are preparing to make a purchase decision.

An up-sell is an an additional offer that is made to a user that has just committed to making a purchase. If for example a user has purchased a course, you can offer them an up-sell of purchasing the accompanying pack of templates.

5. Planning & Mapping Out Your Funnel

6. Creating A Simple Email Funnel

The simplest email funnel is made up of the following stages:

1. An opt in landing page offering the visitor a lead magnet in exchange for their email address.

2. The process of being added to your list, which happens in the back-end straight after the user has clicked the subscribe button. For this to work, your landing page needs to be integrated with your email service provider.

3. A thank you page which the user is directed to after theyʼve successfully been subscribed to your list.

4. Lead magnet delivery - the promised item of value can either be delivered on the thank you page or in a link inside an autoresponder email, which is triggered by the subscription process.

7. Creating A Simple Tripwire Sales Funnel

The above email funnel can easily be upgraded into a simple sales funnel by adding one additional step.

1. Tripwire Offer: On the thank you page you can offer the new subscriber a tripwire offer. This could be a discounted ebook, a $1 membership trial, a half price consulting call or any other low priced digital product.

2. Transaction Process: If the subscriber purchases, then the transaction needs to be facilitated by a merchant gateway. A service provider that lets you accept payment via credit cards, PayPal and/or Apple Pay.

3. Purchase Thank You Page: After purchasing the product, the buyer needs to be redirected to a thank you page.

4. Product or service delivery: After the purchase, the product or service needs to be delivered. This can be done on the thank you page or the buyer can be redirected to a page to create an account on your membership site.

8. Avoid Complex Funnels

As you can imagine itʼs easy to develop and add any number of additional steps to create highly complex funnels. Itʼs important to keep things simple and effective, especially if you are just getting started.

9. Step By Step Funnel Setup

Some of the other landing page tools and apps include LeadPages, ClickFunnels, UnBounce, etc. If you have an active account with any of these, then use whatever you have access to.

3. Landing Page & Email Provider Integration

This is a crucial step in order to make sure that you subscribers email address gets added to your list.

The exact details and complexity of this step depends on what tools and apps you are using.

If you are setting up your landing page using your email providerʼs built in functionality, then this step wonʼt be a problem, however if you’d like to host your landing page on your website, then you need to make sure your page integrates with your website. Most apps generally have built in integrations that are (fairly) simple to setup, but if you’re just getting started then I don’t recommend this option. I’d just stick with ConvertKit.

4. Setting Up A Thank You Page

After adding your new subscriber to your list they somehow need to be shown a confirmation or thank you message. Again depending on what tools youʼre using, there are different ways of doing this. You can redirect your subscriber to a new thank you page URL or you can simply display a message on the existing page.

5. Lead Magnet Delivery

One step not to forget is giving your new subscriber what youʼve promised them - your lead magnet. Depending on what tools you are using this can be done in various ways. You can add a download link or embed your video on your thank you page, which gives them immediate access. Or you can send them a link to the lead magnet in the first email they receive, which can be setup as an auto responder confirmation email.

10. Progress Over Perfection

When setting up your funnel make sure to focus on progress over perfection. Get something that works online as soon as possible and then make improvements over time.

11. Watch Over My Shoulder

Interested in a step by step course about how to create online marketing funnels for your business? Leave a comment below and let me know what type of business you're in.

12. Get Implementation Help

In this post I’ll be sharing 15 of my best recommendations. These are tips, tricks, best practices and strategies that you can apply to your email marketing using ConvertKit. So let’s get started.

1. Remember that your subscribers are people just like you and me

Whether you send them down a funnel of opt ins and thank you pages, with up sells or whether you send them a broadcast email. Always remember that you are speaking with a person with dreams, hopes and challenges. Write to them accordingly.

2. Respect Your Subscribers

Always remember that by reading any one of your emails your subscriber is taking time to pay attention to what you have to say. Respect that commitment and share value — help them solve their challenge. Also always give them an option to opt out of your sequence or unsubscribe from your list.

3. Make Use of the Resend to Un-Opens Feature

ConvertKit has a very powerful feature which is really easy to use. The “Resend To Un-Opens” function, let’s you resend an email broadcast to those subscribers that have not opened your email. When using this, I strongly recommend making some slight changes to the subject and the body of the email. Avoid sending out the exact same email.

4. Track Your Numbers

ConvertKit provides a bunch of metrics that we can use to better understand how our emails are performing. 

Track these numbers. They will give you the insight to understand what’s working and what isn’t working. What’s resonating with your subscribers and what they don’t care much about.

5. Get To Know Your Subscribers Using Tags

Every time we send our subscribers an email we have an opportunity to learn something about them and tag them accordingly. But the thing is, we need to build this into our emails.

Whenever you include a link in an email, make sure to tag the user if they click this link. Don’t overdo this, but tags are there to add additional information about each one of your subscribers. 

Make use of tags to better understand each subscriber.

6. Use A Descriptive Tag Naming Scheme

When setting up your tags in your account use some naming convention that makes sense and document the process so you can share it with your team or with whoever needs to understand it.

You might use LM: Descriptive Name, Purchased: Name of Product, AS: Name of Sequence, etc. 

Just keep it standard and keep a record of these names in your own internal documentation.

7. Use Trigger Links To Save Time & Avoid Errors

When including a link in an email you can either set this up in the email or you can create a trigger link as a Rule under Automations. If you’ll be using this same exact link and associated tag in multiple emails, then set this up as a Trigger Link under Rules. 

It will save you time in applying this inside of emails and you’ll avoid making mistakes. Also if the link changes, you’ll be able to change it in one location and it will automatically update in all emails where you’ve made use of that specific trigger link. 

8. Use Sequences & Automations

What makes ConvertKit so powerful is sequences and automations. 

In ConvertKit you can setup sequences and automations that will run based on events and triggers. This might be a simple onboarding sequence that you send to subscribers after they’ve signed up or it may be a more complex automation of a purchase funnel.

9. Broadcasts vs Sequences

Broadcasts are time specific and sequences are event specific. If you need to send an email at a specific time, send it or schedule it as a broadcast. 

If the email needs to be sent out after a specific event has happened (for example an opt in, or a purchase), then set it up as a sequence.

I often see people get confused with these two. Understand them and use them accordingly.

10. Exclude Subscribers From Irrelevant Emails

Make sure to exclude subscribers from broadcasts and sequences that are irrelevant to them. The best example is sending a buyer the remaining emails that are inside a sales sequence. As soon as someone becomes a buyer, they should no longer receive emails promoting the product they’ve purchased. 

You do this by always tagging a subscriber when they make a purchase. This will depend on what system you are using. I’ve used this with SendOwl and WishList Member and it will work with all the other eCommerce integrations that ConvertKit offers.

Assuming you tag buyers with a purchase tag. Then when setting up a Sequence, you can add that tag to the Exclusions field. That means that any subscriber that is tagged with that tag, won’t receive future emails in that sequence.

It’s simple enough, but unless it’s setup and configured, buyers might still be getting sales emails, which is what you want to avoid.

11. Automations Are Powerful 

I’ve setup an email course in ConvertKit for a client that takes into account engagement. When a subscriber opts in for the email course, they immediately receive lesson 1, but what happens next depends on their engagement. 

A: if the user clicks the link in the lesson 1, then they will receive the next lesson 24 hrs later.
B: if the user does not click the link, then they will only receive the next lesson 72 hrs later.

The idea is to reward a user for engagement by sending them the next lesson sooner.

12. Make Use of ConvertKit Integrations

I’ve used ConvertKit with many other apps including Thrive Leads, SendOwl, WishList Member, and Gravity Forms to just name a few. There are loads of integrations and what you will want to integrate with, will depend on your specific setup. 

Just keep in mind that the functionality of ConvertKit can be expanded tremendously using integrations.

13. Cleaning Your List

Our main aim is obviosuly to build a list, but we want a quality list. A quality list has a high level of engagement, so high open rates and click rates. We don’t want subscribers that have gone cold on us. So, there is a simple way of deleting these subscribers to increase the quality of your list.

ConvertKit has a page explaining this process, which is fairly straightforward.

1. Select all your cold subscribers
2. Tag all your cold subscribers with something like “Cold Subscribers”
3. Create an automation rule — link to a page that says “Thank You, You’re Still On The List”, and when a subscriber clicks that link, the “Cold Subscribers” tag is removed.
4. Send A Breakup Email
5. Re-Send The Email using the “Send to Un-Opens” function
6. Wait 7 - 14 days
7. Delete everyone that’s still tagged as a “Cold Subscriber” — these are the people that did not click the link in the email to remain on your list.​
   

14. Use Segments To Group Subscribers

Make sure to use the segments feature to group subscribers. This can be very useful when it comes to including or excluding subscribers from future email broadcasts or sequences. 

Using Segments is a great way of better organizing your subscribers into groups or buckets and it will definitely save you time and avoid any errors.

15. Important Things To Remember & Consider…

… when setting up sequences and automations.

Keep those in mind when planning and developing your sequences and automations inside of ConvertKit, because I know from my experience that it can get complicated and confusing.

Bonus Tip

Keep it simple and build things up over time and enjoy the power and simplicity that ConvertKit offers you. Wishing you all the best for using ConvertKit to manage your email marketing. 

I am always working on improving and expanding my content so that it provides the most value. Let me know if you found this useful and if you have any other questions — I’m happy to answer.