How To Build A Sales Funnel That Sells

#1. Bewustzijn

As with dating, you’re starting out from a position where you and your prospect don’t know each other. You do — or should — however have a clear-cut idea of who your type is, who your buyer persona is. These are the people you know you can provide value to. Showing them that you can is what will enable you to build trust and establish a relationship.

Dit is de fase waarin ze je verkooptrechter binnenkomen.

Conceptually, there’s two ways this can happen. Either your prospect comes to you (inbound) or you go to your prospect (outbound).

Outbound is what most people know as traditional marketing: tv, radio, direct mail, billboards. Digital examples of outbound marketing include PPC, banner ads and cold email. It’s pushy, unaligned, impersonal and doesn’t take the context of individual recipients into account. The idea behind this kind of online marketing is if a large enough audience is reached, a small minority will identify with your message and convert. Small, but big enough to make it worth the investment. You push answers and hope to capture people that have the questions.

Inbound turns that idea upside-down. It’s prospects acting to solve their problems and ending up on your doorstep because you have the answers. As an inbound marketer, it’s your job to make it easy for people with questions to find your answers. You do this by finding out where they look and being there with your value (SEO, social media).

Forget inbound and outbound. Focus on giving value.

For many people outbound marketing and spam are two names for the same thing and understandably so. Unsolicited emails with content that’s not relevant doesn’t do anything but waste your time and energy. They’re stealing your attention and you don’t get anything in return.

Back when I was still in my marketing diapers, I’d sent out cold emails blatantly pitching Salesflare to unsegmented lists, asking recipients to check it out and get back to me with feedback. This won’t come as a surprise to you: no one replied.

Why would they? Who in their right mind would take out valuable time out of their day to do something for someone who’s a total stranger to them?

Vooral als die vreemde duidelijk een marketeer is.

Now watch what happens if you send them something that is worth their time, like a piece of content that directly addresses a problem they’re struggling with in their business or an invite to your Facebook community with lots of people like them. That last one tends to work particularly well: it takes little effort to join a Facebook group and getting a personal invitation makes people feel special. Once in your group, they’ve effectively entered the first stage of your sales funnel.

Are you selling marketing automation software and targeting founders from design agencies with around 20 employees? Send them an article with actionable tactics they can use to get more clients. Or what about an interview with a founder of a design agency that doubled its business over the last year? I know I’d want to read that if I were a design agency founder.

Will everyone reply to your email now? No. You’re still targeting people you don’t know anything about other than superficial characteristics like role, industry and company size. Their unique context is unknown to you and that context may still cause them to reject you or at least not reply. Not every girl or guy you’re asking out is going to say yes, even though you have some many shared interests — but hey, they can’t blame you for trying.

Even if they don’t reply, by offering relevant value you drastically reduce the risk of people resenting you for sending them something they didn’t ask for. There’ll always be people who want to bitch about it, but overall you’ll have made a positive first impression with your brand.

Dit is een andere manier om te denken over inbound en outbound.

Once you have value that is relevant to your audience, it’s merely about who the conversation starts. You can make it easy for people to find it (inbound) or you can offer it to them (outbound). Or both. The point is that neither one is going to work if you don’t have content that is of value to the people you’re targeting.

Know your audience

Om te weten welke waarde je moet creëren, moet je eerst weten wat waardevol is voor je doelgroep. Dit vereist inlevingsvermogen en toewijding. Daarvoor moet je zijn waar je publiek is en in hun schoenen staan.

Nooit eerder in de geschiedenis was dat zo gemakkelijk als nu. Sociale media is als real-time marktonderzoek: mensen komen naar buiten en uiten hun problemen, pijn, strijd, wensen en verlangens. Je hoeft er alleen maar bij te zijn en je oren open te houden.

Aside from immersing yourself in online tribes, you can look at a site like AnswerThePublic to find out what kind of questions people are asking around a given keyword. Here’s a peek at questions revolving around the keyword ‘CRM’:

Een andere geweldige bron om erachter te komen wat mensen willen weten is Quora.

When starting out at Salesflare, we’d get tons of leads from simply answering to CRM recommendations asked on Quora. People asks questions of all sorts on there and that makes it a great inspiration for content creation.

Hoewel het aantal bezoekers en volgers een goede indicatie geeft van hoe gewild een vraag is, kun je waardevolle onderwerpen op Quora het beste identificeren door ze te koppelen aan SEO-zoekwoorden en het zoekvolume te controleren.

Met behulp van een SEO-tool zoals Ahrefs, Moz.com of SEMrush, kun je de meest gezochte Quora-vragen opsporen zoals te zien is in de schermafbeelding. Je kunt dit ook doen voor Reddit, een andere plek op internet die je veel inspiratie kan geven over welke waarde je kunt creëren.

Ultimately, the best way to find out what is of value to a group of people is to become part of that group of people. It’s no coincidence the best entrepreneurial stories start with founders scratching their own itches. If you yourself are part of the target audience, you’ll know exactly what kind of value is needed. Friends make very good customers.

Inhoud creëren en deze promoten zijn twee heel verschillende dingen

Marketing has finally caught up with understanding that targeted value beats unsolicited ads. Competition in the organic content marketing space is growing fierce. Great content isn’t going to read itself the same way great products don’t sell themselves. If you want eyeballs on your value, you need a strategy.

Het geld zit in lijsten. Hoe groter en gerichter je lijsten, hoe meer mensen je inhoud zullen lezen en delen, wat de verspreiding en het unieke verkeer zal stimuleren.

• E-mail lijst
• Facebook chatbot-lijst
• Retargeting-lijst

If you’re not building a Facebook chatbot list, now’s the time. Messenger is the lowest-threshold medium to deliver content through right now. Its open rates make your emails’ look ridiculous but they will go down as more businesses start to use it. If you jump on the train today and build up a big fat list by the time that happens, you’ll beat everyone else who didn’t. Apps like Chatfuel and ManyChat make it dead easy to build a chatbot without coding in minutes so no excuses there.

Your retargeting list isn’t going to get you a lot of unique traffic but it will get people to buy, which is the whole point of doing content and basically anything else anyway.

Technically, list building happens further down the sales funnel stages. They’re about capturing interest, which awareness is meant to trigger. You can build lists without having your prospects approval (opt-in), but I don’t recommend this. This takes you down to the level of unsolicited mass cold emailing, a.k.a. throwing $#*! and see what sticks without caring what the people you threw $#*! at now think about you.

The reason we need to talk about lists already is that they’re an essential building block of your content promotion strategy and thus key to triggering word-of-mouth over the internet. Getting new people to read your content passes through the ones that are already likely to dig and share your it.

We’ll go over capturing interest and getting people to sign up for your email list in a bit. First you’ll want to focus on distribution strategy that triggers interest of more people so more people sign up to your lists.

Zodra je klaar bent met een nieuw stuk content, ga dan helemaal voor de distributie.

1. Send it out to your email list. State that it’s an article in the subject line and make a short introduction. And remember: you’re sharing, not selling.
2. Stuur het naar de abonnees van je Facebook-bot. Zelfde idee.
3. Run your content as Facebook Ads to any audience that may be relevant. This is how you beat hundreds of thousands of other pieces of content battling for your audience’s attention. Use paid traffic to fuel organic traffic and build your lists.
4. Hergebruik je inhoud. Quora antwoorden, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, tweets, Google Docs in Facebook Groups, microblogs op Instagram: waar je doelgroep ook is en waar ze ook maar zin in hebben.
5. Dien je inhoud in bij relevante directories met een groot publiek. In mijn geval is dit GrowthHackers.com en Zest.is. Zest is een Chrome-extensie voor marketeers met gecureerde artikelen.

6. See the guy on the top-left? That’s Daniel Kempe, the founder of Quuu. You can use Quuu to automate sharing great articles relevant to your niche on your social media channels. The articles that get into your feed are curated from the input the guys at Quuu get from QuuuPromote. If you want your articles to be automatically shared by influencers from all over the world, submit your article there.

Become a familiar face

Mensen zeggen vaak dat ze mijn inhoud overal zien.

Dat bedoelen ze op een goede manier. Tenminste, dat denk ik.

Dit is geen toeval. Ik heb het zo ontworpen.

Put a face to your content by being everywhere your target audience is. People buy from people they know, like and trust — give them the opportunity to build that kind of relationship with you. Serve your helpful content with a friendly face.

I connect with prospects on LinkedIn. I also follow them on Twitter and on Quora, lots of them follow me back. Now everywhere they look, they’ll see my face. And my content.

Sounds a bit stalky? Maybe. But don’t underestimate how special people feel when they see that notification telling them someone’s following them. Besides, platforms like LinkedIn were conceived for this purpose: to make business personal. Growing an online network is about connection, value and nurturing. The principles of human rapport building apply everywhere.

You can avoid being weird by letting them take the first step. Only connect with people who have given you some kind of signal your value resonates with them: a reply to an email, a subscribe to your email list, a like on your Facebook page. If they’ve done any of these things, they’ll know who you are and they’ll appreciate you wanting to become friends on social media.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give you here, is to treat every profile you have on the internet as a landing page. Similar to how you optimize landing pages to get people to sign up or perform another kind of action, you can optimize your landing page to maximize follow-back ratio. Make people want to hit that ‘Follow’ or ‘Connect’ button when they land on your profile. This is about headline, tagline, profile picture, background picture and everything else you have available on a particular profile page. Establish yourself as a giver, a helper, a creator without diluting your own personality. Above all, you need to come across as authentic and valuable.

If you don’t feel like going through the trouble of going to LinkedIn, look up your prospect, hit ‘Connect’ and write a note — you can automate sending LinkedIn invites to people you’ve emailed with by connecting your business email from the ‘My Network’ tab.

Periodically automating this may however cause you to lose momentum with a prospect. Reaching out after an email exchange solidifies the young relationship and keeps your prospect warm. A little trick that can help out here is to link your LinkedIn in your email signature. You’d be surprised how many people will click it.

Voor het geval je het een beetje wil opdrijven: de meeste mensen die actief zijn op Twitter vermelden hun profiel op LinkedIn, zodat je hen in twee klikken kan volgen op Twitter.

Note that if you’re going to be everywhere, you better make a good impression. Establish yourself as a helper and a giver. Someone people can easily connect to. Being all over their news feeds isn’t a good thing if they think you’re in it to take something from them (sell to them).

Now that we’re on the subject: don’t you ever dare to unsolicitedly pitch your business to prospects on LinkedIn.

Als iemand zich eenmaal in je LinkedIn netwerk bevindt, kun je ze ook op Facebook voeden met advertenties met jouw inhoud.

Click your avatar and head to ‘Setting and Privacy’. From Account > Account, choose ‘Download your data’.

You’ll get an export with all sorts of stuff, amongst which all your connections with their primary LinkedIn email addresses. You can turn these into a custom audience to run Facebook ads to.

Consistently providing value on different platforms at the same time is a great way to quickly build up your know, like and trust factor. You’ll stop being the gazillionth founder that wants to desperately sell his beloved baby product and become recognized as someone people can trust to solve a particular problem.

Establishing personal social media connections with prospects in the awareness stage of the sales funnel helps trigger people’s interest in your product or service. Once the interest is there, you’ll already have a connection in place to develop into a relationship. A customer relationship, for example.

Automate your reach

Een vraag die mensen me vaak stellen is hoe ze consistent geweldige content kunnen creëren.

Het antwoord is eenvoudig: automatiseer al het andere.

In order to go all-in on mindful work like creating value and building human connections, you need to outsource as much mindless work as possible. Technology like automation and auto scheduling software has matured up to a point where it doesn’t need your supervision anymore. Take advantage of that. Have the robots take care of the robot work so you can focus on stuff that matters.

De tool die je hier moet kennen is Zapier.

Zapier allows you to connect a whole bunch of apps (750+) and make ’em work together without you having anything to do with it. Just tell it what you’d like it to do.

Het idee is vrij eenvoudig: elke app heeft een reeks triggers en een reeks acties. Je kunt een stroom maken waarbij een specifieke trigger in de ene app triggert een actie in de andere.

Such an automatic flow is a ‘Zap’.

What to automate? Everything that doesn’t need your human touch.

This notion goes beyond the sales funnel stage of awareness. It’s valid for everything in your business, your life even.

We of course use Salesflare (straight from the CRM) to automate our email outreach. In a manual world, we’d have to feed leads by importing. CSV files with data every time again. You can just as easy have Zapier take care of this for you.

The most basic example here would be to use Zapier to hook up your Salesflare contacts to a Google Sheet. Every time you’d add a lead to the Google Sheet, it will be added as a Salesflare contact with a specific tag and the email workflow will start.

Een meer geavanceerd voorbeeld: koppel een e-mailzoekprogramma zoals VoilaNorbert aan Salesflare en trigger het aanmaken van een nieuwe ontvanger in een Salesflare e-mailworkflow telkens wanneer VoilaNorbert een nieuw e-mailadres heeft gevonden.

Tread carefully when you’re doing email automation however. Email automation tools can personalize the copy of your emails using data like name, company and more but just getting someone’s name right isn’t quite what ‘personalization’ is about. Most people stop there and then act all surprised that their emails aren’t working.

Personalization is about getting the right value and message to the right person. If you want to rhyme getting a piece of content outlining how design agency founders can get more leads to actual design founders with email automation, you’re going to need to segment your list thoroughly. Segment lead lists on characteristics like role, industry, company size and then match these lists to a piece of value that is perfectly aligned with them. That’s how you get the right value to the right person. That’s how you properly personalize an automated email.

Verderop in de fasen van de verkooptrechter, maar het vermelden waard als het gaat om automatisering: gebruik Zapier om een planner voor vergaderingen in te stellen (zoals YouCanBook.me of Calendly) om leads vast te leggen als ze uiteindelijk een vergadering bij je boeken en laat deze leads vervolgens automatisch naar Salesflare of een ander CRM pushen, helemaal klaar voor een efficiënte follow-up. Bekijk voor meer inspiratie hierover ons bericht over De subtiele kunst van het opvolgen met automatisering.

Here’s another one: send out automated emails to customers giving you a NPS-score of 8 and higher, asking them if they would like to write a review on a review website or Product Hunt. Growthscore.io is NPS-software that has this feature built-in.

Think beyond processes that are directly linked to your sales funnel: anything that doesn’t need your own personal attention and talent is eligible for automation. It’s all about freeing up time for stuff that really matters: creating value and building meaningful relations.

If you’d like to automate something but can’t see how, you can always hire a freelancer to do it for you on Upwork. There’s tons of talented people from all over the world who’d love to work with you.

#2. Rente

Iemand heeft op je link geklikt en is nu op je landingspagina.

Wauw!

Niet zo snel.

A prospect clicking through to your landing page is like a first date. It’s great that they agreed upon that first date, it shows interest. But the game is only just beginning: you now have a shot at proving that interest is justified. Your price: their permission to contact you again for more value: a new date, a new piece of content, an offer. Whatever you want to call it.

What you’re after is the marketing game’s equivalent of getting someone’s phone number: their email address. Interest only becomes real once you manage to capture it.

Build an email (or chatbot) list

An email list is so much more than just a list with email addresses you can send messages to. It’s your audience, your fan base, a life line that helps you thrive when times are good and keeps you above the water when times are bad. Empires have been built on email lists.

When people opt-in to your email list, they give you the permission to contact them with value. It’s them effectively entering the first stage your sales funnel. The game is on.

E-maillijsten opbouwen wordt meestal gedaan met loodmagneten. This is where you trade in value for email addresses, also known as the ‘want access to my FREE ebook on making a million dollars in one day?!’ tactic.

The problem with bombarding people with such a lead magnet is that it can feel deceptive. The title may sound great but that doesn’t guarantee the value behind it, is too. If your leads gives in and gives up their email address to then discover the content doesn’t deliver on its promise at all, they’ll feel tricked.

Dit is het clickbaitfenomeen.

Yes, you’ll have their email address but instead of capturing interest you have now sown aversion, making that email address utterly useless. And if they did like the value, there’s no way to know — you’re in the dark either way.

Je kunt subtieler te werk gaan. Merk op hoe Sumo.com mensen probeert over te halen om zich in te schrijven op hun e-maillijst vanuit dit geweldige artikel over Intercom door ze bonuscontent aan te bieden.

The article in question is an awesome breakdown of Intercom’s marketing tactics. They give you an inspiring story with tons of takeaways you can use in your business but leave out the cherry on top of the pie. Not only is this way more effective in building up your goodwill, Sumo’s marketers can also rest assured that people really did think the value they got from Sumo was great. Their interest is as real as it can get and deserves to be captured.

It doesn’t always have to be an article, whitepaper or ebook. One of the greatest lead magnet examples of all time is HubSpot’s WebsiteGrader, an online tool that assesses the quality of your website and turns its findings into free advice on how to get it right. Since its launch in 2006, this gimmick has graded over 4 million websites. Getting HubSpot not just a huge email list, but also a lot of valuable data that can be used to identify and qualify prospects.

Or you can just keep it simple and put engaging CTAs to ‘never miss anything’ on strategic places, next to that great content you’re consistently putting out.

De e-maillijst van de toekomst ziet eruit als een chatbotlijst. Prospects kunnen zich aanmelden door te klikken op een CTA zoals hieronder (geen echte) en krijgen je updates automatisch in hun inbox.

As a channel, it has less friction than email. For some reason, people seem to find it less painful to clean up their Messenger inbox than their email one. Open rates on messages broadcasted via Messenger are reported to be around 85–90% — huge compared to email.

The email list is not dead yet and won’t be for a long time. For now, I’d advise you to use both alongside each other. Chat bots are a fun, low-threshold way to keep the conversation alive and regularly nudge your audience with small chunks of value— though it heavily depends on your target audience. Email on the other hand is still more universal, the backbone of the internet.

Onthoud echter wat Andrew Chen ooit zei:

Na verloop van tijd resulteren alle marketingstrategieën in $h*tty click-through rates.

Thanks to text annotation and LLMs, chatbots are the next big thing now. They’ve become easy to use and they work. You can either wait until everyone uses them and your audience has grown annoyed with them or you can be an early adopter, jump on the boat today and have a loyal audience built up by that time.

Unleash the Facebook Pixel

Niet iedereen bijt de eerste keer dat je je kunstaas laat zakken.

That’s okay, sometimes love needs some nurturing to grow and blossom. Besides, nothing worth-while comes easy. Hard-to-get just makes it all the more sweet when you do eventually get it.

The good news is that in online marketing you can automate keeping the spark alive. It’s called retargeting and Facebook made it ridiculously easy.

Let’s put it this way: you don’t need your prospect to budge for your awesome lead magnet in order to keep on nurturing them with great value. They lost the power to deny you that the second they clicked through to your landing page or blog post.

Meer specifiek kun je met de Facebook Pixel websitebezoekers segmenteren in Custom Audiences die je vervolgens kunt targeten met advertenties.

Enkele voorbeelden:

• mensen die uw website de afgelopen 24 uur hebben bezocht
• mensen die uw website in de afgelopen 180 dagen hebben bezocht, maar er in 30 dagen niet meer zijn geweest
• mensen die een specifieke pagina op uw website hebben bezocht
• mensen die een specifieke pagina op uw website hebben bezocht, maar niet een andere specifieke pagina

These options enable you to show the right value to the right audience. Say you’re creating a series on do’s and don’ts for job interviews. The Facebook Pixel makes it dead easy to show the second blog post to just the people who read the first one. Pro tip: avoid having the Facebook Pixel capturing users by setting a delay time. You don’t want to spend your money on bounced users.

You can use the Time Since Last Visit — filter of your Pixel to create a smart retargeting sales funnel for website visitors. Gently guiding them towards conversion.

It’ll take some time to figure out the sequence that converts best, but once you do, you can just sit back in your couch, play Mario Kart and watch it happen.

The stages of a basic retargeting sales funnel would look something like this 👇

• Day 0–6 since last visit: promotion for free trial signup
• Day 7–11: offer lead magnet to get email address (ebook, etc)
• Day 12–16: highlight benefit #1 of product with CTA to signup for trial
• Day 17–21: testimonial video highlighting the value of the product with CTA to signup for trial
• Day 21–25: highlight benefit #2 of product with CTA to signup for trial
• Day 26–30: promotion for free trial signup with new image in the ad

Om je een idee te geven.

You’ll need to figure out what works best for your conversion process. Play around with times since last visit and different types of content. Try to build a narrative into the sequence to make it stick more.

The practical side of this boils down to creating Custom Audiences for each of the time windows you‘d want to target with different ads. Then create ad sets for each Custom Audience.

Een andere manier is om automatisch retargetingcampagnes te starten op basis van de gegevens in je CRM met software zoals LeadsBridge. LeadsBridge kan Custom Audiences maken van klantsegmenten in je CRM en deze targeten met specifieke advertenties. Bijvoorbeeld, bij Salesflare gebruiken we LeadsBridge om onze proefgebruikers te retargeten met onboarding video's.

Making creative use of the Facebook Pixel will make it easy to keep on nurturing the part of your audience that is still on the verge in a targeted and automated way. If you keep this up, they should eventually cave and sign up for your list. Or immediately go for purchasing whatever it is you have to offer. Not wanting to opt-in doesn’t always equal not being interested.

If they do stay idle, it just wasn’t meant to be. Good thing you barely spent energy on it.

Come running when they need you

My female friends often tell me to play hard-to-get, counteract my instincts and ignore girls I’m interested in. They say it‘ll make me more desirable.

I have no idea if it works. I’ve never tried, or am to weak to try — you decide. Whatever it is, don’t take this advice if you’re serious about keeping your sales funnel alive.

It’s your prospect who gets to do the ignoring. You better make sure you’re available whenever they call upon you for whatever.

Forms are so 2016, 2015, 2014… ‘Prehistorical’ is the word we’re looking for. Today you can have a direct line with your prospects and customers using livechat software like Intercom or Drift. This is a key element of establishing yourself as someone your leads can trust to solve their problems. They have a problem, you solve it. In real-time.

Both Intercom and Drift aren’t your everyday chat-services anymore. They have matured into intelligent specimens that can cover for you when you’re not around. At present this doesn’t go much beyond some auto-responses, but they’re getting smarter by the day.

Prospects in staat stellen zichzelf te helpen

I’m a resourceful guy. Whenever I look for a piece of information on a website, I first check out the Help or FAQ section before I’d turn to reaching out to customer support. Some people just like to find things out on their own, you know.

There’ll always be people who don’t like calling, chatting or even emailing. That doesn’t mean you can’t get them as a customer. Provide them with an elaborated self-help section, whatever that means for your product or service.

You can easily merge this tactic with your live chat support. Solving customer problems goes a lot quicker if you can refer them to articles that answer exactly the question they have. It doesn’t even have to be you the one referring them. Whenever our live chat at Salesflare isn’t manned (we sleep sometimes, you know), the bot will suggest the customer to check out articles from the HowTo section. Creating tons of content around your product is also great for SEO.

We build our HowTo section within Intercom. If you’re using Drift or something else, you can take a look at SupportHero.

Bring it all together in your CRM

CRM-systemen werden ooit gezien als een hub waar al je klantrelaties samenkwamen. Ergens te midden van het leed van handmatige gegevensinvoer en de likings, is die essentie verloren gegaan. Salesflare is onze manier om het terug te krijgen. Eén centrale plek om uw gegevens samen te brengen en u in staat te stellen om eenvoudig en moeiteloos zinvolle relaties op te bouwen met meerdere prospects tegelijk.

Whether you use Salesflare or something else, think of your CRM as your Batcave. It’s the base from where you reflect on your actions, contemplate your next move and pull the strings. The one thing that allows you to do all of that, is data.

Contact data, company info, social profiles and networks of contacts. Emails you’ve exchanged, pages on your websites they’ve visited, links they’ve clicked, phone calls you’ve had and meetings you’ve held. Your sales funnel. All in one place.

Salesflare gets you this without you having to lift a finger. But it’s only when you link it up to other tools that it becomes really powerful. In addition to all the other data, we pull in Intercom conversations, NPS scores and trial data to get a full-fledged in-depth overview of every lead and customer in our sales funnel, organized by stage.

If you think we’ve reached that stage of our relationship, here’s a CTA 👇 If not, no hard feelings.

“Love Salesflare. Simple but elegant and always improving. Love the UI. Great team to work with. Also, appreciating the Gmail integration and other 3rd party integrations.”

Lonnie Mayne, Red Shoes Living

More about CTAs in a second…

Voor meer inspiratie over hoe je je CRM kunt gebruiken om te winnen in follow-up en leads door je sales funnel te leiden, bekijk The Subtle Art Of Following Up With Automation.

#3. Actie

Je kunt veel leuke afspraakjes hebben, maar uiteindelijk wil je dat er iets gebeurt. De vriendenzone is een donkere plek.

You can be putting out great content over and over, at some point you’re going to need to get serious and make your move.

Make your intentions clear with CTAs

You’re flirting, you’re having a good time, they’re enjoying your stuff. But at some point this relationship has to land. You started this whole thing looking to get a commitment. It’s your responsibility to drive your prospect down the sales funnel stages towards that commitment with clear call-to-actions.

Have a goal in mind with everything you create and have your prospect lay eyes upon. Be it an email, a piece of content, a landing page or a Facebook Ad — you want your prospect to perform a certain action. Make it easy for them to do just that. You can use software like Poptin to make the CTAs on your website as attractive as possible.

Make them fearful of missing out

FOMO or ‘Fear Of Missing Out’ is more than just a pop culture buzzword. It’s a real psychological occurrence, driving behaviors in people of all sorts, especially in millennials.

As a marketer, you don’t want to miss out on FOMO to drive decisions.

Weinig dingen drijven de beslissing meer dan de angst om het later niet meer te kunnen. Kortingen zijn het krachtigst als ze beperkt zijn in de tijd. Daarom is Black Friday de gekste winkeldag van het jaar: de kans om al je kerstinkopen op één dag te doen. Niet de volgende dag, alleen op die dag.

You need to be subtle about it though. Trying to create FOMO can give people the feeling that they’re being sold to and nobody likes that. The secret is to instill FOMO in your prospects without them being aware of it, gradually along the lines of all that value you’re giving them across channels.

Voeg enkele getuigenissen van klanten toe

Your best tactic to avoid giving people the feeling that they’re being sold to, is having someone else tell them how awesome your product is (and how sucky it would be to miss out on it). Beyond all tools, channels, hacks and techniques, the strongest driver of sales is and will always be word-of-mouth.

If you paid attention before, you’ll have noticed that there’s a customer testimonial in the example Facebook Ads retargeting sales funnel stages laid out before. Ideally, the customer testimonial represents a case many among your target audience can relate to. The testimonial then becomes both relevant value and a decision-driver to your prospect. They see someone like them solving a problem they’re having too and will start asking themselves what they are doing about that problem.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a Facebook Ad. Testimonials are a great way to back up the claims you’re making on your landing pages too, like Unbounce is doing here.

Create scarcity and urgency

The Black Friday technique. Drive decision by making prospects feel it’s ‘now or never’. It’s ‘limited’ edition. There’s ‘only a few left in stock’. This deal ‘ends tomorrow’.

Je kunt gegevens gebruiken om ervoor te zorgen dat je dit soort aanbiedingen alleen laat zien aan mensen die zich in de derde fase van de verkooptrechter bevinden, op het omslagpunt om tot aankoop over te gaan.

Gevraagd naar de essentie van groeimarketing, zei Sean Ellis, de peetvader van het concept:

Sustainable growth comes from understanding best customers and figuring out how to find and acquire more of them.

What this means in the context of creating urgency is that you should have a clear idea of the signs a prospect shows when they’re close to cutting the knot and just need one last push, that last push being your CTA with a limited offer.

Voor een SaaS-product zoals Salesflare, kun je dit afleiden uit de acties die gebruikers uitvoeren in hun proefaccounts: dagelijkse activiteit, aantal aangemaakte accounts, gebruikers toegevoegd aan hun teams. Voor e-commerce kan dit gaan over gebruikers die meerdere keren terugkomen om een bepaald artikel te bekijken.

This kind of data will tell you who to create urgency for. It’s like your date seeking a lot of eye contact and giving you little touches with every opportunity they get. It tells you that if you would make a move now, your chances of success are pretty fair.

#4. De langetermijnrelatie

Congratulations, you’re married now.

Dit is geen eenmalige deal. Jij en je prospect hebben zich aan elkaar gecommitteerd en zitten er voor de lange termijn in.

Don’t worry, you still get to date and marry other prospects. On the condition that you honour your standing commitments, that is. Don’t get carried away chasing other prospects and neglecting existing customers, it will come back to bite you in the ass.

Driving traffic to your website isn’t hard. Getting them to sign up for your email list is fairly easy. You don’t have to be world class to get them to buy your product or subscribe to your service.

Just as with marriages, the hard part is what comes after. Keeping them happy, getting them to come back — over and over again.

Kijk eens naar deze grafiek over retentie voor Android-apps die Andrew Chen een paar jaar geleden op zijn blog deelde.

If 100 users download your Android app, you’ll have about 20 left after three days. About 80% of those will have you left you 90 days later.

This is as much about activating users as it is about retaining them, but you get the message: you can’t afford to only focus on driving purchases to new customers. Keeping current customers happy is at least as crucial for sustainable growth.

Not convinced? How about this report from eConsultancy saying that “the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70 percent, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is only about 5–20 percent.”

Loyal customers are worth way more than new ones and creating loyalty takes consistent hard work just like a long and happy marriage takes consistent hard work. Don’t just engage, stay engaged.

Make sure you know how to get this right before you scale up your marketing strategies. Customers you can’t retain aren’t just gone, they’re often also not very good ambassadors of your brand. Staying friends with your ex isn’t for everyone.

Maak gebruik van uw Net Promotors

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this app to a friend or colleague?”

This question helps measure customer satisfaction and identify Net Promotors, people who like your product so much they’d happily refer it to other people.

Net Promotors are people who voted 9 or higher. 6 or lower indicates Detractors, customers that aren’t very happy with your product and are likely to file for divorce in the near future. They won’t exactly recommend you as a satisfying party to peers either.

First and foremost, NPS score will tell you if your product and retention strategy still needs work or if you’re ready to scale up and unleash marketing mayhem. It will tell you if you’re marriage material.

Als dat zo is, kan het de moeite waard zijn om je gelukkigste partners (Net Promotors die je een waardering van 9 en hoger gaven) aan te moedigen om te vertellen hoe geweldig je feest is.

We hooked up NPS-software Growthscore.io with our referral software to automate outreach to Net Promotors asking if they would consider referring in exchange for commission on the sales they bring us. There’s also automated emails going out asking them if they would do us the favor of phrasing their contentment in a review on G2Crowd or Product Hunt.

And just like that, you’ve closed the loop. Now you have happy customers pushing new prospects into the firs stage of your sales funnel.

There’s a lot more to say about making customers happy and keeping them that way. We’ll keep that for our next date 😏.