Keith Perhac – Building Your First Effective Marketing Funnel – MicroConf 2017

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@harisenbon79
Run a marketing agency – DelphiNet
- Horrible naming choice
- Founder of SegMetrics
- Co-founder of Summit Evergreen
I design strategies that turn visitors into customers
- Help companies build email funnels
  - Landing page
  - To email address
  - To (eventually) customer
- 13 years in Japan
- Now in Portland
People I work with
- Mixergy
- I Will Teach
- Toyota
- Mainly infoproduct people – personality-based brands
Important - when I get excited, I talk REALLY fast
- Marketing excites me more than pretty much anything else
- My team often have to record me and listen at half speed
DevelopYourMarketing.com/microconf-2017
Building your first effective marketing funnel (for SaaS and products)
- End goal: get visitors on your list; turn visitors into customers
- Why are email funnels important? Isn’t email dead?
  - Email marketing – one of the most important funnels in any company
  - Emails give you personality
    - You can only have so much personality in a web site
    - Personality goes a long way
    - In large corporations – often a human face, a personality, for customers to connect to
      - People trust people more than companies
      - Hearing from people is more compelling than hearing from companies
        
        Companies don’t give a crap about you. People do.
        
        Email addresses in my Gmail Promotions tab
        
        I don’t even use SamCart
        
        But I know who Brian is, because I get emails from Brian at SamCart
      - When I first met Lars Lofgren, I felt like I knew him
        
        Because I was getting emails from him for 8 months from KISSmetrics
        
        If he asked me for a favor, sure. If Macy’s asked me, nope.
        
        “You’re the guy from KISSmetrics. I read your stuff. That’s awesome”
  - Brennan Dunn got me to respond to a canned email, because I thought it was real
    - Another friend emailed me 3 times asking for a response because I thought it was canned. OOPS!
- The key is having GOOD CONTENT
- “That slide”: Mario + your product → better Mario
  - But really it should be Luigi, wanting to be Mario
- We all have people we look up to
  - Mine: Stan Lee, Dave Spector, Ramit Sethi
  - Who does your audience look up to?
    - Ideally, you
    - You are the expert: now prove it
- We teach people value through a NURTURE SEQUENCE
  - Goal: put people in a specific frame of mind
  - What’s in a nurture sequence?
    - 1. Prime the pump
        
        Talk about the issues that your product solves. This does not have to be direct – as long as the person is thinking about the problem, it’s a win
        
        Example: Salary Negotiation… “what would it mean if you had an extra $5k?”, not ramming the “YOU NEED MONEY!” thing down their throat
    - 1. Show the pain
        
        Of the problem your product solves. Mention all the ways it makes life horrible
    - 1. The dream
        
        Paint a picture of how much better life is AFTER the problem is fixed
    - 1. Reveal the solution
        
        Your product, and how it helps
  - What does a nurture sequence look like? 3 main types
    - Hero’s journey
      - Connects with readers on an emotional level
      - Star Wars / LOTR built around this
      - Someone is called to action. Has a problem.
        
        Walks through their pain; their success
      - Usually the hero is you who runs the product
        
        Or can be someone else the customer can see themselves as
      - Gains trust through shared experience
      - Key points
        
        Show your own situation and pain
        
        How you’re like them
        
        End of your rope “I didn’t know what to do. I thought about throwing in the towel”
        
        Did A, B, C, conquered the pain
        
        I wish I had these things back then
        
        Provide educational content here
        
        Don’t sell until the end.
        
        Use scarcity
        
        For SaaS, this could be an hour consultation if you sign up now
      - Nurture: 16 days
        
        2 heros, interleaved (Tim and Mary)
        
        Customer stories along the way too
        
        Don’t even mention a product in the nurture. 100% emotional and educational
      - Sell: 3 days
        
        4 emails. This is the offer. This is when it ends
        
        Still educational, too
    - Educational + pain/dream
      - Not a narrative like the hero’s journey
      - Works well for SaaS
      - Uses education of the problem-space to teach readers, and gain trust as an expert
      - Key points:
        
        Educate on topics that fit your audience
        
        Show yourself as the expert
        
        Put links to your product in all emails
        
        Don’t overwhelm off the bat
        
        Target content is key for getting through inbox noise
        
        Most educational content is crap. People just putting out generic emails because they know they “should”
        
        “5 quick year-end tax savings” vs “5 quick year-end tax savings for freelance developers”
        
        Feels like it’s for me
    - Weekly Newsletter
      - I don’t recommend it
        
        But it’s better to have something than nothing
  - Example: SegMetrics
    - 7 day mix of both emotional and educational
      - Day 1: all the data you need (5 minute guide to the data you should be looking at as a marketing) and how to get it with your CRM
      - Day 2: we lied! It’s even easier – show that SegMetrics does what took them 1.5hours yesterday, in 5 mins
      - Day 3: “why we built SegMetrics”
        
        More emotional / hero
      - Day 4: “How EOFire used our reporting”
        
        Customer success story
      - Day 5: “Tip #2: stop leaving money on the table”
      - Day 6: “Let’s hop on a call”
  - How do you know what to write? How we start a new funnel…
    - Thanks to Jordan Gal for letting us use this real example from CartHook
      - Hero, or educational?
        
        Is this a product that we can have a “face” for? Does it make sense to use a hero journey?
        
        Here we’ll choose educational
      - Customer exploration
        
        Who is the target audience?
        
        Where do they live?
        
        What is their financial situation?
        
        We had 2 groups. The retailers, and the marketing mavens
      - Identify drivers
        
        What problems are they trying to solve?
        
        Why do they hurt so much?
        
        They’re very particular about their customer experience
      - Brainstorm headlines
        
        No bad ideas now. Write out 10 or more. Then order them from best to worst
      - Get multiple eyes on it
        
        People in the company
        
        Friends
        
        Do other people like the same 3 or 4 that we do?
      - Build the flow
        
        Like we already talked about. The email sequence
  - Getting people on your list
    - What do you offer people?
    - Best opt-in magnets – get people started quick, or answer the question “do you have a problem?”
    - Opt-in pages that are for commonly searched terms can get a lot of organic traffic
    - Opt-in page examples
      - WPEngine – WordPress speed test
        
        Put in your email address, get the results, and a 28 day nurture sequence (educational)
      - SegMetrics: “Take the business health test”
      - “The Anxiety Test”
      - Boldheart – The Boldheart Business Assessment
      - Hubspot Website Grader – How Strong is Your Web Site?
Recap – What should you be doing next?
- Understand who your audience is. Sub-niches are more powerful than broad strokes
  - You can always move to the next sub-niche next. Start narrow
- Find an emotional hook for your product. People connect with people, not companies
- Create a landing page that solves a problem, or answers a question – instantly
  - A quiz
  - Or a checklist if you don’t have time to build a quiz
  - Anything that makes people succeed faster
- Write 8 emails that lead people through a nurture sequence, to get them in the right frame of mind for purchasing
Q&A
- “How have you seen on page conversion rates change over the past 4 years? It seems it used to be 15%, now I keep hearing 1%”
  - I think they’re talking about different things
    - Blog post to newsletter opt-in I’ve seen pretty steady at 1-2%
  - I haven’t seen a change. Top pages with a clear CTA at 10-20%, quizzes and assessments ~60%. Webinars 20-30%
  - Depends on the traffic you’re getting
- “For 2-sided marketplace apps, would it be proper to create 2 separate email sequences, one for each”
  - Yes. 2 different lists at that point
    - (Or segment them within a single CRM/ESP)
  - It’s all about segmentation. Understanding where people are coming in, how you can connect with them
- “What are you looking at to determine 1 per day, 1 per week, 28 days, etc”
  - It’s all off the cuff. Every audience is different
  - Generally start 1 email per 2 days. 1 per day in the selling part of the sequence.
  - Start with best guess. Watch the open/click rates. Where’s it falling down?
    - If numbers are dropping off, try sending sooner, to stay top of mind
  - The way each audience interacts is different. Don’t take any marketer’s suggestion as gospel. The advice is just a jump-off point to start iterating from
- “That looks awesome, but I’m not there yet – I don’t have something to sell at the back end”
  - I would start off with a newsletter to be honest.
  - Start with a landing page, opt-in for a checklist or similar
  - “What is the #1 thing you would tell someone at this conference if they asked about [your field]?”
    - Put that in an asset
  - Email opt-in for “my newsletter” – almost always a bad conversion rate
  - Email addresses are valuable to their owners. You need to convince people to part with theirs

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