How Email Marketing Can Maximize Recurring Revenue

Part 2: Foster Engagement Beyond the Landing Page

In Part 1 of this series on marketing and sales funnels, I opened the discussion by asking why most startup marketing fails. There are a lot of answers to that question, probably a separate answer for each individual and unique startup. But that diversity is also the root of the problem.

Many startup leaders lean too heavily on a tactical marketing approach. They run ads, send emails, shoot videos and write blogs without a coherent strategy for how to handle prospects that don’t buy right away.

Startup marketing is a marathon and startup sales is a slog. Both require a strategically built customer funnel to educate, encourage and engage the customer on several different levels.

Now that we’ve covered the theory, the first touch and the landing page, let’s talk about what to do with the prospect when they show up at your website and give you their email address.

Conversion, Trial, and Education

Obtaining a prospect’s email address and opt-in is your first conversion. It marks the transaction of the prospect giving you something, their email address and attention, in return for something else, which we’ll discuss in a minute.

You might be able to convert the customer to a purchase directly from your landing page. The odds here are a little bit better because the prospect has already signaled intent — they clicked on your ad or email link or blog link or whatever they did that got them to your landing page.

Those odds still aren’t great. A lot of prospects will still fall out of the funnel once they reach the landing page. That is, unless you can push them down to the next level.

That next level used to be a phone call from a human sales rep. The success rate for that is low, and the cost to have humans do all that unsatisfying work is high. Sales calls are also neither automatable nor scalable.

A free trial or free tier is a great way to capture a prospect, but it still requires a commitment from the customer, it’s costly for the company, and sometimes it’s more difficult to convert a free customer to a paid…