Welcome to part two of marketing funnels are silly.

What you've missed so far:

• ​a fun pithy intro​
• ​a deep dive into the difference between company- and customer-centered strategies and decisions​

And now... we’re talking about funnel tunnel vision!

Part two: funnel vision

The main concept of a marketing funnel is that a customer moves down a rung step by step.

And most importantly, once they move down a step, they never (or rarely) engage with the stuff above anymore.

That’s… not how humans work?

We are chaotic chaos machines.

We do what we want and no marketing funnel will stop us!

Marketing funnels simplify the complexity of humanity so much that you inadvertently delete important pathways for customers to travel down.

Which means you lose customers.

And you potentially frustrate the hell outta your current ones.

Example time!

One of our clients launched their entire business based on the marketing funnel concept.

They had freebies → tools → low-priced one-off courses → a full-blown membership.

Funnel perfection.

Chef’s kiss.

It… worked?

There were some customers that followed the prescribed flow.

Yet there were way more customers who just wanted the one-off courses and didn’t want to get pitched the membership.

They were happy taking the courses when they were made available.

• it worked better for their budget
• they felt in control of what they were paying for
• they couldn’t commit their time to a full membership

This all meant that these customers were getting very annoyed at constantly getting pitched the full membership.

They didn’t want it!

With marketing funnel tunnel vision, a company would miss this customer type completely.

They might not ever notice these customers because they wouldn’t even be tracking for it.

The only numbers that truly matter for the funnel is the conversion rate from course to membership.

Yummy yummy recurring revenue.

But!

Did you notice something?

Those customers who were buying individual courses: they were buying regularly.

That is recurring revenue of a different sort.

What if the company rewarded these customers for their loyalty?

What would happen if they spun up a new offer like a class pass - one payment, 3 courses of your choosing, all at a reduced rate.

The dance studio I go to offers class passes.

Most yoga studios do.

Sure, they also offer memberships.

But both pathways - passes or memberships - end up in the revenue bucket.

I know this because I am that person that buys classes passes because I’m never quite sure if I’ll be able to make the most out of a membership.

As soon as my passes run out, I buy the next batch.

We can all learn from our local dance and yoga studios.

At Strange Birds, we noticed a customer type that we had ignored because of our own marketing funnel vision.

We were so focused on getting clients into our subscription service that we ignored the recurring ask for one-off projects.

We didn’t want to discrete projects anymore!

The subscription model was a way better way to work for everyone!

Why couldn’t these folks understand how much better it is???

And yet, it wasn’t a better way.

It was simply what we wanted.

So we went back to the drawing board, added one-off projects back into our ways of working, and now here we are with clients we absolutely adore and zero regrets.

Your action item for this week:

Take a look at your offers.

Now, take a hard look at your feedback and requests.

What customer requests have you been ignoring because it doesn’t fit perfectly into whatever offer/product system you’ve created?

What would happen if you created a new offer - or pathway - for those customers?

Would it break everything?

If no, why not try it out on a small scale and see what happens?

Your homework forever more: notice when you’ve got funnel tunnel vision.

Listen to your customers!

And then go make informed decisions about how to implement that feedback in a way that honors your business, bottom-line revenue, and team.

Next week we're talking about how HUMANS ARE CHAOS MACHINES.

Cheers,

Anna (they/them)

🏳️‍⚧️✊🏳️‍🌈✊🇵🇸

Marketing funnels are silly, the series

• LAST WEEK WEEK: What it means to have company vs customer-focused marketing strategies
• THIS WEEK: How to get out of marketing tunnel vision
• NEXT WEEK: Why the chaotic nature of being a human makes everything really hard
• Creating a system that works for you

What I'm reading

​Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie​

I am trying to get into this one. It's good! But it feels hard to sink my teeth into this world. But it's super interesting too. Gonna keep reading it.

A podcast about rethinking how business works - and who it should work for. We’re Janel and Anna, small business owners learning in public as we turn our company into a worker-owned co-op.

​Go have a listen!