Thinking in Funnels | The Long Game is Profitable

The following is an answer that I offered in a Facebook group catering to writers. It was a question from someone who is writing a newsletter, and their concern was that each article in the newsletter was as long as a typical post.

This made me imagine that she might be ‘over-educating’ in a free newsletter – which is pretty common. It often happens when someone hasn’t laid out their process of doing business as a funnel.

Your coldest prospects should be invited in from the cold, to sit by the fire and begin to understand how you can help them. But the best invites are short, and full of concern for the wellbeing of the prospect whose teeth are chattering from being outside.

Always remember that the strength of an email list is that it gives you a way to initiate contact. Its weakness is that you can’t nurture a lead in one email, so you’ll need either the miracle of convincing the prospec to dig in and read your entire sequence OR you’ll want to send them somewhere for a more immersive experience.

If your business is personality-driven, like consulting or coaching, a website full of that vibe is a much better way to warm your visitor. Whereas an email newsletter might be the equivalent of stepping out your front door with a hot cocoa for your frozen prospect, a website can be the roaring fire that makes them decide to linger.

Steer them in gently and make them comfortable before the conversation turns toward what YOU do. Once they understand that you have their best intentions as priority, it becomes so much easier to them into a customer.

Here’s my original answer:

I’d first ask WHY you do a newsletter and then begin looking at it as part of a funnel. For example, no one bothers to create a newsletter (er email sequence) unless it’s a paid subscription -or- they believe it leads to more profit. So, how do you generate that profit?

If this is a free newsletter, what’s your plan for their next step? Possibilities include a) get to know you better (effective with cold prospects who may eventually do business with you), b) send a warmer prospect to a survey so you can learn how to engage better and/or develop solutions to the problems you identify or, c) click a button that leads to sales copy (hot lead).

I’ll grant you that there are other options but every step within a funnel is just a means to get closer to the buy button. When you’re crystal clear on what they should do immediately after reading your newsletter, you’ll be able to adjust the design of the newsletter.

I’ve written for a few over the years, each of which was a mechanism for driving traffic to websites. The most effective one had 6-8 “articles” that were formatted like this:

– one or two sentence teaser
– two to three bullet points to create curiosity
– text link to the proper content on the website

The website always did the selling – sometimes soft and subtle, sometimes as direct as a red buy button – but that newsletter drove very consistent and profitable traffic for years.