A New Approach To The Marketing Funnel

So, this week I was very pleased to participate as a speaker in a Webinar for Information Management and Syncsort. The topic was bringing Web Analytics Clickstream data into a Data Warehouse.   Oh, stop yawning already…. It was actually really interesting – and some really valuable things came out of it.

In doing my homework for the presentation, one of the conclusions I came to was just how valuable it is to develop a much tighter process for processing all the data we’re generating in our online efforts.  If you think you’re neck deep in reports with Google Analytics – just think of all the report combinations you could come up with if you wanted to start measuring Analytics combined with CRM, combined with Product Usage data.

Having a cool way to marry up these different types of data that we have in our business to create better marketing insight is just starting to really come to reality.   Think of it this way – if you could marry your Web Analytics Data more completely to your CRM and Product data, you can answer questions such as “what tactics are attracting the customers who squawk the loudest?” Or, you could ask “are the new marketing programs attracting customers who buy the most expensive products… Or are they the ones who are prone to return things?”

Now, the audience for this Webinar was business intelligence analysts that work for very large companies and need to normalize (literally) terabytes of data in order to draw insight from analytics.  For example, comScore is one of the customers mentioned in their case study.

But this is valuable for us no matter what size we are.  Sometimes we think we’re doing this instinctively – but we don’t spend very much time building a process around it.

What’s This New Marketing Funnel?

The idea is that a new marketing funnel goes way beyond the traditional Click, Conversion, Close cycle – and instead goes below ground and tracks conversions from Customer to Satisfaction, to Retention to Upsell to
Evangelism (thanks Guy Kawasaki).

I’m Definitely Not The First

Let me say at the outset that this idea feeds on many previous to it. Many folks have talked about “The New Marketing Funnel” – and how retention and customer satisfaction are a big piece of that. There’s Adam Cohen at A Thousand Cuts – who talked about a similar concept last year – and also these guys. And, of course, Lisa Bradner over at Forrester was on this a couple of years ago – showing off a couple of new “marketing funnels”. Ultimately, there’s been some good thinking here and is why I didn’t entitle this THE New Marketing Funnel – but rather a new approach to the marketing funnel.  So, what’s new?  Why? 

I Disagree With The Shape Of The Others

So, the challenge I have with all of these types of funnels is that they continue to use the funnel shape. Basically it implies that we start with a wide berth of visitors, and continually narrows down into smaller and smaller numbers until we spit out just a couple of “advocates” at the very bottom.

Instead, my own experience indicates that – when we’re successful – the smallest (by numbers) is actually the middle of the funnel – the number of customers we’re in the process of closing at any one time. Think about it. Do you have more customers who are in the contracting or “buy” state than you do actual customers?  Probably not.

Also, this funnel tends to imply the level of effort we’re paying to these audiences. It’s no surprise that, as marketers, we pay A LOT of attention to the top of the funnel. And, as those who have gone before me appropriately note – we need to spend A LOT more of our attention to our advocates, our evangelists. So, this is the key. Our goal should be to build our bottom level evangelists to AT LEAST as big a group as we have visitors to our front door.

And, to do that, just like we practice in lead nurturing to widen the middle of the funnel, we should develop conversion metrics around moving our customers from one stage to the next. What’s our conversion rate from moving a Satisfied customer to the Upsell stage. What’s our conversion rate from moving someone from Upsell into Evangelist.  Can we improve these with Social Media?  With Content Marketing Programs? Now we have a business case for each.

The key is that if we employ the right processes to be able to measure all the way back up from Evangelist to Visitor – then we really have something special. Now, I realize that the more stages an organization has, the more external influences there are that change this. But imagine having the ability to say something like – 15% of our evangelists come from Social Media. Or, 22% of our Upsell customers come from our PPC campaigns. Or, 10% of the people who bought our most expensive package were referred by this site. It really starts to put a new spin on where you want to spend your time at the top of the funnel.

But maybe more importantly it really guides us to start putting more effort into building our community – and spending just as much dollars, effort and time into fostering that evangelist community.

By the way, if you’re interested in that Webinar I mentioned earlier, you can find the talk archived here (Registration Required). And, I’ve uploaded my slides (with my speakingnotes) here.

Most importantly… what do you think?