You’ve got a solid idea for your offer, now it’s time to build that funnel and start selling it, right?! 

Well, not quite yet. 

Before you run full-speed-ahead to build out your funnel, what will actually be in better service to your potential clients and customers (and to your business since this will help you with your sales in the long run) is to begin the process of filling your funnel. 

Yes, even before it (or your offer) is officially built. 

Tune in to Episode 5 of Compel & Convert (Season 1) as I talk all about how to kick start your marketing efforts utilizing the entry phase of your funnel – the lead magnet – so that you can grow your audience, create deeper connections and start forging relationships with your audience so that when it comes time to sell, you’ve got engaged folks ready to fork over more than just their email address. 

In this episode, you’ll learn: 

• Why you’ll want to start your audience-building efforts before you begin your digital product funnel build-out
• The steps to take if you’re starting your audience-building efforts from scratch 
• The steps to take if you’ve already got a preliminary audience available to pre-market toward
• How to craft a lead magnet that kicks off an aligned journey to your offer 
• Plus tips on pre-marketing, pre-selling, and beta testing your offer 

Read the Transcript for Season 1, Episode 5 – Growing Your Email List to Fill Your Funnel

Welcome to episode five of season one of the Compel and Convert podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about filling your funnel. So you might be kind of wondering if you’ve been listening to the series and you’ve been doing so in order. Like, I suggest this kind of feels like putting the cart before the horse or maybe like a chicken and egg scenario where you’re like, what do you mean fill your funnel? I haven’t built it yet.

Well, this is where we’re going to kind of do some things simultaneously. So filling your funnel is essentially just audience building. So ensuring that you are going to have people to actually sell to. Now, this is basically just the process of drumming up attention and directing traffic toward your business and more specifically, the beginning part of your funnel, even if the whole thing is not built out yet and depending on where you currently are in your business. 

So, for example, if you’re starting a list from scratch, or do you have a preexisting list and the specifics around what you’re offering, you may want to do a little prework on filling your funnel with leads before you actually have the funnel built and not only the funnel, but maybe even the offer itself.

And I’ll get to that at the end. So to give this episode some clear direction, we’re going to split ourselves into two camps here. You’re either somebody who already has a pool of people to market towards. So you have a social media following built up a bit. You have an email list filled with people who are your ideal people that you’re going to be selling your digital product offer to.

The other camp is you haven’t even broken ground like you maybe have started posting on social, maybe you have a few followers, few subscribers, but you have not done like a full push on building up your audience so that you have people directly to sell to who are like your ideal audience. So I just want to kind of caveat this by saying if you’re someone who maybe is going from a brick and mortar space and you’re now starting an online revenue stream, but the people that you’re going to be selling to are different. 

Maybe you’re going to be focusing more on teaching professionals on technique, or you’re going to just be expanding your market share and you want to position yourself as more of an expert. Maybe it’s a separate brand from your current brick and mortar location, something to that effect. You will want to have like a fresh email list.

You might have some people who exist on both, but you don’t want to unless there’s a very clear overlap between the people that you already have on an email list, potentially from a pre existing business. If that does describe you that you do want to still be building this list up with more people who would be a fit for your digital product specifically. 

So let’s start with the camp of you’re starting from zero and maybe not at a literal zero, although it could be a little literal zero. We all start from there at some point. But if you even just have like a handful of email subscribers and maybe 100 or so followers on Instagram, that’s not a big enough pool to really sell to yet.

I mean, you can, but it’s nice to have ideally at least 1000 people like either on an email list or between an email list and social media following that you can begin selling to. Just know that obviously the way sales work, the more people that you have to put your offer out in front of the higher number of sales you’re going to get. 

So you just have to kind of gauge where you are and realize that, okay, I have this idea for a digital product and I want to build out a funnel for it, but maybe I need to do more of an active audience building period first. That way I can ensure that by the time I’m getting around to the funnel, I actually am making it worth my time and my energy and also ensuring that you are building out a product that is going to sell. And again, I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

So we’ll talk about at the end. So first let’s talk about you haven’t broken ground. You either have zero or very few people in that lead pool. The first thing that you want to do is to create some sort of a lead magnet. A lead magnet is exactly what it sounds like.

It’s going to attract leads onto your email list. And the reason I keep mentioning email list versus social media followers. Having social media followers is great. I mean, these are people who have opted into wanting to see your content, but you do not have an ownership over those social media followers and you are kind of at the mercy of an algorithm to even get in front of them. 

Versus if you can get someone onto your email list, you actually have their information where you can send them an email every week or whatever your posting schedule is that you have a more direct access point where you’re guaranteed to at least land in their inbox.

You’re not guaranteed that they’ll open your email. That’s a whole nother battle. But there’s definitely more guaranteed visibility when someone is on your email list. And they’ve also indicated that they are a little bit more committed to hearing from you than someone who’s giving you a follow on social media. So creating a lead magnet is the thing that is going to incentivize someone to give over their email address.

Now you might be wondering, what am I going to incentivize people with? You want to have a lead magnet that is somehow related to what you want to offer. So if you’ve already gotten clear on what it is that you want to offer. You need to take something from that. What is maybe the most beginner step that someone would need to take or beginner piece of information that someone would need to know in order to then start that journey toward your offer.

So I’m going to use an example like I’ve used in previous episodes this season, because honestly, I really just want someone to create this. I’ve been looking for it, honestly. And there’s a couple of options out there, but they are not well, to be honest, they lack something like a lead magnet. So something that I am actively looking to purchase is I want some sort of a workshop on Gua Sha, and it’s because I know there are a million YouTube videos out there and things like that. But I really want to learn from an expert.

And as we all know, like people on social media, beauty, influencers, there’s a lot of content to sift through on YouTube or Instagram and places like that. So for me, I would rather have the experience of a workshop that I know is run by an expert. And I have the opportunity to potentially get feedback, ask direct questions, and to have maybe a little bit more insight into what it is I need to be doing versus more generalized information that gets posted on places like YouTube or on social media. 

Everything that we see on these platforms, while they are good for attracting our audience, at the end of the day, you have to generalize your information a little bit on platforms like that because you can’t get super nuanced with each and every person’s individual situation. But when someone is paying for a seat in a workshop or let’s say a 30 day class where they have access to you via Voxer to ask personalized questions for 30 days, like that is another level of access.

And that’s what grants the ability to say, yes, I’m going to charge for this because there’s an added level of value here. Okay. So in this example, I’m searching for a Gua Sha type of workshop or digital course, something right. Taught by an expert, the lead magnet. That might be nice for someone to share if they are planning to create this type of digital product would be what type of stone or what shape is going to be most beneficial based on your goals?

Because I will say and I’m just using my own example here because it’s very much and of course, I can kind of analyze it from the top down view, but from a consumer standpoint, this is what people are doing. I was even on Amazon the other night because I’m having a lot of trouble finding GuaSha stones in my area. And I’m also very limited as to what I can have shipped to my area. 

So forgive me for shopping on Amazon for this because I would much rather shop from an individual creator, but I’m looking through these different stones and I’m like, I don’t know what these different shapes mean. Like, why would I want to choose this type of shape versus this other type of shaped stone?

And this one has little teeth looking pieces on it and these ones don’t. What’s the difference? How does that help? It would be so helpful if I saw some sort of a lead magnet that was like, hey, are you wondering what’s the best Guasha stone tool for your goals or what you’re looking to achieve through this technique? Here’s my five page freebie where I’m going to outline the top shapes of stones and tell you the pros, the cons, why you might want one over the other, different, maybe even like the material of the stone Jade versus Obsidian or something like that.

These are all things that while I could Google all these things, I understand that this information is probably already out there and it’s Googleable. If I had an expert saying to me, hey, I just put it together on a really quick multi five page guide with all the information you need. Here’s why I’m credible to give you this information. 

I would sure like in a second hand over my email address to be able to get that information that saves me so much time jumping down rabbit holes on Google or YouTube, trying to find that information and then not being quite sure if that’s even like credible information. So this is where you want to take what is the most beginner step that your ideal client needs to wrap their head around or get a quick win in in order to propel them closer toward your offer.

Okay, so once you create this kind of lead magnet, you are then able to drive people to sign up for that lead magnet. You can start creating content surrounding the lead magnet so you could do live streams, you could do quick social media posts and then say hey. And if you want to learn more, or if you’re wondering what’s the right stone for your goals, click here and get my latest freebie. 

So the other thing that I want to mention is make sure that you are also creating an email nurture sequence on the back of that freebie so that you are kind of cultivating that new relationship. It’s not that thing of like, oh hey, here’s your freebie and then you just disappear.

You want to have a little bit of a kind of a welcome or a nurture sequence on the back end, anywhere from like five to seven emails. That just gives people more insight as to who you are, how you’re there to serve and help them, maybe some more value around the lead magnet content. So do you have a bonus resource you could give them? Or did you record a really helpful video that coincides with that PDF freebie? It doesn’t have to be a PDF freebie.

You could do a number of different types of optins, but this is just to get your wheels turning on. You want the email nurture sequence to nurture the new relationship, and you just need to kind of cement it a little bit over the course of a week. Then from there, you need to just be consistent in emailing. So once you have made the decision that, yes, I am building this digital platform. I have this online business component or revenue stream.

You need to be consistent with staying in touch with your people. Just like in any other business, like a Brick and Mortar business. It’s important that you’re not just showing up in people’s inboxes or in their social media feeds. When you have something to sell them, you need to be maintaining and cultivating that relationship over time. It’s just like if you were growing a garden, you wouldn’t expect to just plant seeds and take care of them for a few days and then come back a couple of months later and hope that they sprouted fruit or veggies.

You would want to be tending to that on a consistent, pretty frequent basis to ensure that you’re actually bringing that seed to full fruition. Right. So this is where you build out kind of that intro part of your funnel. So going back to I think it was episode two where I talk about like, the five key components of your funnel or actually, no, I’m sorry, episode four, where I talk about the top three types of funnels, you can build one of them is that like lead magnet funnel. So that’s the intro part.

And then from there, as you’re doing that audience building, you can be then doing the simultaneous digital product funnel building that you are then going to sell to the people that you’re currently adding to your audience or to your email list. Now this is where we kind of segue into the other camp. If you’re listening and you’re like, well, I already have a lead magnet. Great. That means that you have an active, hopefully an active list of people who you could get in contact with and say, hey, I have something coming.

It’s something hopefully that you have built your audience and service. You obviously want to build an audience that is inclined to buy what you are offering. Right? You want to make sure that those two things align. This is where if you do have a pool of people who are on your email list, you have a social following.

You’ve been creating content. This is where you might want to tee up that you have something coming that you know that they’re going to love, that you’re creating, and you want to create a waitlist style landing page. So do some kind of excitement type of marketing where it’s like, hey, something’s coming. If you want to be the first to know about it, get on the waitlist. This is where you are essentially building that secondary hot lead group, because if you already have people on your email list, they’re technically warm leads, but by gauging interest within that pool of already warm leads.

And then you have people saying, oh yes, I do want to hear about this thing that you’re going to be launching in a month or a couple of months. They then become a hot lead because they have expressed personalized interest. Now, the other thing that you can do if you already have a pool of warm leads, like an email list, is continue that growth with a fresh lead magnet. So it is inevitable that your audience growth will continue. It will have ebbs and flows.

And during times where it’s ebbing, maybe you’ve taken a little bit of a hiatus from creating content, or maybe you’ve been creating content consistently, but you need like something new and exciting. You need some sort of a quote unquote event to get people to influx into your list. This is where you may want to create a fresh lead magnet so you can see that these really segue into each other. Essentially, the camp of people who have a list to market to are just a little bit further along than the people who don’t have a list to market to. So you are not at any one great advantage or disadvantage over the other.

You’re just at different parts of the journey. Okay, the key here for both, no matter which group you fall into, is to get visible and maintain a level of visibility that is consistent so that you are continually driving people who are coming across your social media, your website, or any other part of your online presence. Maybe you have a blog or a podcast and collecting their information so that you can stay in touch with them and eventually sell to them. 

Now, something I want to address quickly before wrapping this episode up that I mentioned at the beginning is that it’s good to do all this prework of filling your funnel with leads before you actually have the main funnel built. But not only just the funnel, but the offer itself.

So this is where something called pre selling comes into play. And honestly, I think preselling is a great thing to do, especially if you’re starting from zero. But if you have a pool of people and you don’t have a well, let me caveat to say this, because I’ve been in both camps. I have pre sold things and I have not pre sold things. I have created digital products that I wish I would have pre sold because had I pre sold it.

And pre selling just means that you incentivize someone to make a purchase before the product is actually ready, and then they get a better than anybody else deal on it. So, for instance, let’s say you were launching a workshop and you told people, hey, if you want to be one of the early bird tickets. I’m allowing 20 people to purchase over the next week to get an early bird ticket and you’ll get it before anybody else. Right? If you have enough people purchase during your pre-sell or early bird or whatever it is, and you have yet to create the product, it essentially is giving you buy in.

So you’ve had enough people raise their hand or actually put in their credit card and say, yes, I am committed to purchasing this thing. Here’s my credit card information that validates the idea. Now, the reason I say I wish I had done this with some things. I’ve created things in the past that I did not pre sell. And then when I was like, all right, it’s here time to buy.

No one bought. So it’s like I had invested all this time and energy, not really monetary resources because they were resources I already had on hand. But it was a lot of time and energy into something that if I had just tried to presell it and no one had bought it during the presale period, I would have gone, okay, clearly my people aren’t that interested in it. Right? Because if no one buys, then you don’t have to deliver it.

No one knows the difference if no one buys it. Now, I have also been on the flip side of that where I created a product a couple of years ago. And this is actually after I had done the instance I just mentioned, which is I created a whole product and then no one bought. I saw an opportunity and I was like, I don’t have time to do the pre sell because I know I need to just get this thing created because of the way that the offer was structured. I needed to get it out there.

So I was like, I’m just going to create it. And if it doesn’t sell, then I really have learned my lesson. Like two fails. Okay. That really cements the lesson.

But I was like, this is something that I feel like people have been asking me for that people have really indicated interest in that have verbalized and vocalized that this is something they would purchase. I’m pretty confident that I can just create this and it will sell. And it did. So this is where you kind of just need to read the room and you need to know your audience. If you don’t have any audience currently and you are just in that stage of building an email list, trying to build a social media following, trying to build this engaged audience, I 100% think if time is on your side, pre selling works really well because it gets you that one confidence boost.

But it also validates the offer so that you know that you’re not creating something that’s going to not bring in any revenue for you when you could be spending your time and energy elsewhere. So on the flip side, if you have an audience, you have an engaged audience. You are in regular communication with them. You’re putting out content consistently, and you can see that your audience has a really big need for something or they’ve even directly asked you. That’s where I would say you would probably be okay to not pre sell.

But if you have the time, it still doesn’t hurt because pre selling. And keep in mind, preselling really only applies to like brand new products that you’re trying to sell because obviously if it’s not a new product that you’re trying to sell, then you already have it on hand. So you can just sell it. But if you have this idea for this new offer, something new you’re trying to create and you do have that audience and you’re going, hey, let me put together like a little presentation on this or maybe even a Google Doc with basic information that you send just your most engaged people. So maybe your email list or even just the people who are like super active on your email list and say, hey, this is something that I’m thinking of creating and selling.

Would you be into this? And if you are and you want to get in on it, here’s what I’m willing to sell it to you at for right now, and it’ll be ready in 30 days. That right there will validate your offer. Again, if you do not have the offer in existence already, pre selling validates it gets that initial income through the door. And that’s a great way to essentially get that beta group in.

Now, I know that there are lots of people out there who have done that. They’ve done the beta round where they essentially said, hey, I’m going to do this thing. You get your initial buy in now, you’ve got this kind of product that’s sitting there that you need to build a funnel around. This is where I would go back to that kind of beginning part of the loop, which is you clearly already have a pool of people who I’m assuming really liked your product because you got feedback from them, hopefully. And you have people you validated the offer because you’ve already sold it.

And now it’s time to create that lead magnet based on what you know is going to be most in service to the people who will eventually purchase your offer or your product. Get that new influx of fresh leads, continue building up those warm audience members onto your email list, and then simultaneously building out the digital product funnel because you now have the asset and it’s just a matter of building the sales engine around it. 

So I know we hopped around a bit in this episode and that it was a little more loosey goosey than some of the other ones where it’s like five key components to a sales funnel. Ten offer ideas like this is a little bit more of an amorphous concept in terms of do you have the offer already built? Do you have an audience or not?

Look at where you’re at in your journey. Look at where your audience is at in their journey and create the thing that both you and they need. Do you need their attention and their email address? Great. Then create the lead magnet that they want so that they give you their email address.

You might be listening to this episode and I’m just kind of putting myself in the shoes of somebody who was in this space a few years ago. You might be listening to this episode and you’re like, well man, I want to get this digital product out like now or yesterday. Really? You get really excited about your idea or you’re like, oh, if I could just get this thing launched, I know it’s going to be great. I have no doubt that it’s going to be great.

If you have an idea in your head that you know you are so well equipped to execute on and you know it will be helpful for your people, I have no doubt that you can make it successful. However, you don’t want to rush the process so much that you then are kind of killing your confidence by not giving yourself enough of a time window to build up that initial ground swell of interest. 

So that when you are launching the product, whether it be the first time through a pre sell or a beta or for the first time through a bigger funnel or an official funnel versus like a pre sale, you want to have that buzz in that group of people who are there that you’ve been in contact with, who you have the best chance of selling to. Because if you can get those sales going, that’s what creates the snowball where as you continue to grow, that asset just becomes more and more valuable. Because the more people who experience it and who know how great it is, the more feedback you get that you can feature in your funnel for testimonials and client results and case studies.

And you can also tweak your product to be in better service. Like if you see and get feedback where, hey, this is something that people really struggled with. You can make your product even better. So give yourself the best chance of success by not rushing the process. And part of that is by doing the audience building phase the right way and giving yourself enough time to do it and not just trying to like build a funnel and hope that that’s going to be the key and the answer to everything.

Because while the funnel is an incredible tool to leverage, it’s fantastic to have funnels working in your business, you still have to have an audience that you are sending through the funnel. So give yourself that time window, build it in, and you can do things kind of simultaneously and let me know if you have any questions. I know this was a little bit more of a little bit of a roundabout episode and next week I’m going to be diving into back into the specifics of funnel the funnel itself. 

So I’m going to be talking about funnel copywriting and funnel the copy that you need to have on your funnel and then I’ll be getting into design and tech so trust and believe we’re going to get back to the actual funnel itself but I’d be doing you a great disservice if I didn’t focus on filling the funnel at this halfway stage through the season because this is really what’s going to help you see your funnel have success once it’s built. So let me know if you have any questions.

You can reach out to me on Instagram @StudioClary, send me a DM there or you can get in touch with me via my website and I would love to chat with you. All right. 

Have a good rest of your day!