Written by Sagar Rawat on May. 7th 2021
If you’ve been venturing a bit in the online marketing world, I’m sure you’ve heard the term “marketing funnel” before. To be frank, it was never something that appealed to me. It always seemed like just a way to optimise how many people are giving you money, which doesn’t seem very caring.
The upside-down funnel, or how to love your customers
In case you’re not familiar with the idea of the traditional marketing funnel, it works like this: you get lots of visitors to your site—they’re in the top of the funnel. As they get closer to paying you money (the tiny bottom of the funnel), more and more of these visitors drop out of your funnel. Your customers are the few who are left at the bottom.
Some of them become leads, and then after you do something (the usual recommendation is to bombard the leads with marketing automation) they relent and pay you money, thus becoming a “customer.”
What I love about this approach is that it’s all about loving the customers you have, rather than chasing down people you don’t even know yet.
When you start a business, you don’t have a budget for marketing. You probably don’t have the time or talent for it, either. The only thing you’ve got is your passion… Take that passion and point it at your customers.
3 powerful examples of putting the upside-down funnel to work
1. Make your customers feel part of the club
Make your customers feel like they are part of something. Not just once, but repeatedly.
when you have dedicated place for the people who love what you do you can provide them with more value addition tip and productivity hacks . In return they gonna know , like and trust you.
If you see the evolution of mankind. we have always been part of a tribe based on similarities we have. Olden times it was called physical tribe , these days they can be seen as digital tribes. We aways choose to be in a group of people who are like us. Make your Facebook group or a membership community. People seems to love that.
2. Make providing more, free value for existing customers your priority
This part of loving your customers certainly hits home for me, since it relates to what I do every day. Content marketing is a great example of providing value for your existing customers beyond the product or service they purchase from you.
In fact, the cool thing about sharing content like we do at Buffer is that we get to share it with so many more people than just our existing users.
Empower them. When I say “empower them” I mean empower them for free, with “no strings attached.” Because when companies make people sign up and register to download their content, we all know they’re about to feed us into the automation meat grinder.
The softer approach may cost us in terms of subscriber numbers, but it’s proven to be a better way to establish trust over time.
And after all, if people are handing over their email address when they don’t really want to, those are just vanity metrics anyway, right? What a waste of our time. Better to spend our time surprising our existing customers with more and more great value and building trust with them over time.
The bottom line: Give your customers more than what they pay for, even if they haven’t paid for anything yet. Surprise them by giving them more all the time. And don’t ask for anything in return. If you’re really generous towards your customers, they’ll return the favor without you needing to ask for it.
3. Make your customers feel important
The open is all about establishing rapport.
This is where you learn some details about their lives, make them feel comfortable and put them at ease.
Being part of a club is a great feeling. We all like to belong. But being an important part of that club is even more exciting.
This is why we see customers wearing branded shirts or bragging about who they know at X company.
If your company is the kind of cool club everyone wants to be in (see #1), it’ll seem even better to be more than “just a member.”
A great way to do this is to highlight your customers’ achievements or success stories in using your product. IdeaPaint showcases examples of customers using the product on their Facebook Page:
The bottom line: Make your customers feel important by showcasing their successes and rewarding their efforts. Acknowledge their input and they’ll be more likely to care about seeing you succeed.
There are so many different ways to love your existing customers. What other great examples have you seen?
Sagar Rawat
Sagar Rawat helps people start and grow successful digital course creation businesses. He is an expert at helping people get clients using online organic and paid advertising methods and making things super easy to understand.
If you're interested in starting your own digital course creation business or scaling up and getting clients then definitely reach out and request a free strategy session today.
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