According to one recent study published by Pardot, 70% of buyers turn to Google at least 2-3 times during their search to find out more about their requirements, potential solutions, companies offering those solutions, etc. Many people also turn to public forums and social media platforms for recommendations. At this point, they aren’t looking for promotional content; they’re only looking to learn more about potential solutions.
Some business owners are moving away from the term “marketing funnel” because they think it’s too mechanical or simplistic to describe the lead nurturing sequence by which customers move from awareness to purchase. I think it’s still a useful way to describe a complex process and it’s a good visual to imagine the entire process from start to finish.
Your automated sequence of emails needs to reflect the different stages of the sales funnel process as depicted in the diagram above. Automated emails ideally should guide your prospective students somewhere from the “interest phase”, where they have signed up for a newsletter or downloaded a lead magnet, through to purchase of your course. This requires a good bit of thought to create the right messaging, frequency and content offer.
As you can probably imagine, this sort of thing is particularly frustrating if you’re selling an expensive product or service, but you can even see it happen with something as simple as deciding where to go for lunch. For example, if you’re hungry and in a hurry, you might pick the closest restaurant. But, if a friend asks where you’re going and says, “Oh, that’s where I got food poisoning last week”, there’s a good chance you’ll end up going somewhere else.
This lead capture software ranges from simple to complex. You can have a landing page that captures the data, or you can sign up for a system that tracks your user's accounts once they sign in. You can see what products they looked at, what pages they read and, judging from their account activity, you can see how likely they are to become customers.
