Automate your impact with this simple inbound growth funnel

Inbound growth refers to the use of content and paid campaigns to grow a user base, and driving the users to take action. Part of the same family as growth hacking and inbound marketing, this process uses a couple of specific marketing strategies to push users through a funnel to reach a particular goal.

Once advanced, this process can take place in an almost entirely automated system. You can automate, and therefore scale, your impact. That’s why all brands – nonprofit, for-profit, or somewhere in between – should consider how it can play a role in their marketing efforts.

Here’s the standard marketing process on which inbound growth is built:

In inbound growth, we prioritize email marketing and retargeting/remarketing (advertising served to people who have already visited your website or are a contact in your database) to build, segment, and message our target audience(s).

Essentially, the goal is to build a community of website visitors and email subscribers, and use email and retargeting/remarketing to convert these prospects. Let’s take a look at a basic funnel:

In the above funnel, we’re segmenting our target audience into three key segments and creating mini-marketing campaigns for each:

Website visitors that do not subscribe are retargeted with ads to drive them to subscribe.

Subscribers that have not taken your final action (often a purchase) receive emails and remarketing ads to drive them to take the final action.

Customers (those who have converted from this funnel and taken the final action) are placed in a new segment and will become part of another funnel.

Let’s take a quick look at each step highlighted in this funnel:

1. Webpage: The webpage you push users to where they can subscribe to your email list.
2. Thank You Page + Action Request: Those that subscribe are taken to a thank you page. This is (a) so you can track the sign up from an analytics standpoint, and (b) so you can engage them appropriately. They’ve just shown interest in what you have to say – now is a great time to display your final call-to-action (usually a great deal/offer to convert them immediately into a customer).
3. Email Campaign To Push Action Request: For the subscribers that don’t immediately take you up on your deal/offer (which will be many of them!), you can deliver an automated email campaign that offers more info on the value of your product or service.
4. Retargeting/Remarketing Campaign: You can also retarget subscribers that don’t convert (set up ads that display only to those who visited the Thank You page) and remarket to them (set up ads that display to a specific set of email addresses).
5. Thank You Page + Next Steps: Once a subscriber converts, again they are taken to a new Thank You page (for data and engagement purposes), where next steps in receiving their deal/offer/product are identified.
6. Retargeting Campaign: Many site visitors won’t convert at the first step. Set up retargeting campaigns to give them another opportunity to subscribe.

In each of these steps, you’ll have many folks who don’t take the action you want them to. Evaluate each step independently and consider what their objection is. Here’s some great insight into why some users don’t convert – and what you can do to change that.

Inbound growth funnels are extremely effective whenever you can tie in a free offer to get someone subscribed to your list with a higher level offer (such as a product).

For example, whitepapers, giveaways, or free trials are great ways to capture email addresses and bring users to your website. Each of these also provides the opportunity to advance the user, through an inbound growth funnel, to a higher level offer.

Digital Marketer offer great ideas for the types of content you can use to create an inbound growth funnel.

Before you can start running an inbound growth campaign, you’ll need to create your content and set up your audiences. How these look will depend on your offer and which platforms you’d like to use. Future blog posts will dig into each of those, but if you need a little help in setting out these foundations right now, our private marketing community is a great place to get answers.

With the right content and inbound growth funnel in place, your business will become a lead and sales generating machine, creating scalable, automated value and impact within your communities.