How to Boost Your Lead Generation Process Using The Right Funnels in 2024

Planning marketing campaigns can get quite challenging, especially for start-ups, that have just launched their products or services.

Most startups rely heavily on paid promotions and affiliate marketing. Though it is great for instant sales, but for how long?

Paid Ads can only get you so much direct conversion. After a while, you will see your conversion will slow down. And then what?

This is why you should rather plan ahead for the future. The key to success is to sustain to a level where a certain chunk of sales can be expected without much effort.

And the best way to achieve this trait is by devising a lead generation process that will get you qualified leads on a regular basis.

In this article, you will learn how you can plan the right lead generation funnel for your business, that will help you capture leads to run successful sales campaigns.

So let’s begin.

Planning The Right Lead Generation Process

Once you have launched your product/service, while you perform all other activities such as driving traffic (paid or not), increasing organic growth, or social media marketing, you must plan a steady lead generation funnel that can help you generate quality leads.

The first step to this is to plan a lead generation process that works.

A lead generation process involves using various lead generation funnels at different stages of the whole marketing funnel.

Your lead generation process will depend largely on the type of product you sell and the purchase habits of your target audience.

For example, if you are a realtor and sell properties online, but do not have a blog section, then there is no point in using a blog subscription optin funnel. Rather, you can use a quick quiz funnel to make potential buyers sign up to know about suitable listings.

Now, you can plan lead generation funnels for 2 scenarios:

1. Generate Leads From Traffic You Bring In To Your Website
2. Run special lead funnel campaigns to generate leads

You may get traffic to different types of content on your website. And depending on the Awareness stage you target with the content, you can devise a lead funnel.

Capture Leads On The Landing Page

A landing page can be your website’s home page or a sales page for your product/service.

You can collect leads on this page in the following ways.

Let’s get deeper to understand how these work.

i. Using A Simple Optin Form

Simply give an optin form, asking users to sign up to get notified on future updates and discounts.

Use this if you want to run a nurturing email campaign so that your audience remembers you when you run any promotional campaigns in the future.

ii. Offer A Free Trial or Demo

If its a software, then people love trials. You can ask the user to provide his/her email and name to get access to a free trial or product demo.

A trial or demo is a great way to convince buyers to purchase your product, but the lead generation part is more useful for the ones who don’t.

You can run email campaigns to get feedback on why they did not purchase, and later, when you meet their requirements, you can reach back asking them to come back and take a second look.

At the same time, for the ones who did not give feedback, you can still email them promotional offers such as discounts and coupons in the future to try and convert them.

iii. Offer A Free Resource

Give the visitor something free right on the product sales page. Visitors can opt in to get the free resource and then continue browsing to learn more about your product.

This is actually a special tactic you should incorporate, called the “Trust Factor” Lead Funnel. This tactic works really well for professional coaches, consultants, and counselors.

iv. One-time Coupon Offer

You can offer newcomers to claim a one-time coupon on their first visit to your site. They simply need to register to get it.

This is a good way to have users sign up for your eCommerce site.

v. Product Offer Optin Funnel (for eCommerce)

In this tactic, what you do is, you set up a promotional campaign where you offer a set of random products at discount for a limited time, from time to time. And then ask your buyers to optin to be notified each time this offer is refreshed with new products. Learn more about it here.

This tactic is great because the people who sign up here love discounts. So you can also get instant exposure from these leads when you run discount campaigns other than the one they signed up for.

Capture Leads On Blogs & Articles

Here are a few ways to capture leads from your blogs & articles.

Now let’s look into these in detail.

i. Optin For Helpful Content

This is rather simple. When you write useful content, people would surely want to read more from you.

So on your blog pages, keep an optin form so that readers can subscribe and get future emails on your new content.

These leads are again useful to run nurturing or branding campaigns.

ii. Get Emails To Get Full Content

Sometimes, you can write a statistical article that is really helpful, but you do not provide full access. Rather, ask them to inquire about it by providing their email.

Let me explain.

Articles related to statistics are always in high demand, and people are often ready to pay for them.

But, if you normally do not create statistical articles, then charging people for one or two articles doesn’t make sense. But you can still make the most out of it.

Prepare an article and mark it as private. And then prepare a shorter version of this article on your site and halfway through, state that the rest can be claimed via email.

People who sign up here are probably marketers or data analysts. And they will love statistics on similar topics in the future as well.

So use this tactic only when you plan on writing a few statistical contents in the next few months. Case studies will also work for this tactic.

Generate Qualified Leads Using Special Lead funnel Campaigns

In the previous section, you saw how you can convert your regular traffic into leads.

But there are better ways to collect leads. You can be creative and run special lead generation funnels just to collect quality leads.

Let us look at a few ways you can get leads that are more qualified.

i. A Qualified Lead With Meaningful Questions

Rather than relying on your website’s landing, you can devise a special landing page to collect qualified leads using a Quiz or Survey.

Now, even if the buyer doesn’t end up taking your service, you still have the lead. Plus, the survey helps to make the lead more qualified with extra details.

So in the future, you can run dedicated sales funnel campaigns to convert these leads with special offers, and a well-planned funnel journey.

ii. Host A Webinar For Lead Generation

Free webinars are difficult to plan, but if you can host value-added webinars, they can lead to generating leads with the highest conversion potential.

How it works is that you plan a free webinar and create a dedicated funnel (with a Landing And A Thank You Page), for people to sign up for it.

Whoever is signing up is surely interested in the topic you are hosting the webinar on.

Next, you host a value-added session for free, and then make a pitch for your core product or service while on the session.

Now, whoever attends the webinar for real is more potential, but you still have the leads of the ones who were absent. You can later follow up with them with a recorded version of your webinar and pitch your offer there.

More importantly, for the people who attended the webinar, you may run dedicated email campaigns to convert them in the long run. Since they took the time to attend your webinar, it means there is a high chance they need your service.

So you can run a nurturing email campaign, followed by a sales campaign to these leads.

But that’s not all. In the future, if you run any other campaigns, maybe hosting a bootcamp, or running a webinar series (paid or free), you have all these leads at your disposal to get instant exposure and land a few signups. Learn how to create a webinar funnel in WordPress.

iii. Offer A Free Course (For Course Creators)

If you create premium courses in a certain field, you can rather create a two-step funnel just to have people provide their emails and names to get a free course.

Assuming your course is helpful, you can then run nurturing email campaigns, or devise sales funnels for your relevant premium courses and email them to try and get more conversions.

Normally, people tend to offer a few lessons from a course for free as a way to attract them to purchase it. But having a dedicated funnel to offer a complete course for free can help establish authority as you are providing value with no strings attached.

So when you email them later with links to your premium course funnels, many will enter your funnel with a positive mindset.

iv. Use A Squeeze Page Funnel

A squeeze page funnel is when you offer a lead magnet with the goal to collect targeted leads for your next sales funnel campaign on your core offer.

The idea is that the free resource you provide has some reference to your main product or is somewhat relevant. Whoever takes this free offer is likely to accept your core product/service as well, if the right offer is made.

So you can create a squeeze page dedicated to this free resource, followed by a thank you page. And then you market this funnel using paid Ads to generate quality leads.

Later, when you have the sales funnel ready for your core offer, you may first reach out to these leads and expect to get a few purchases right away. Learn more about the Squeeze Page funnel here.

v. Run A Contest And Collect Leads

This is a rather unique idea where you can host a special contest to allow users to get a coupon.

The concept here is, that you can devise a landing page where you ask visitors to take part in the contest. It may be a spin the wheel, a Q & A session, or simply a quiz. And make it that one has to sign up to take part.

Upon successful participation, they will be sent their reward via email.

Once you have this page ready, you can actively market it throughout your website, Ads, social media, or current mailing list.

And in no time you will start getting leads. However, the challenge here is to try and make this contest meaningful for you.

Normally, offering a coupon on your product/service already makes it potential. But you can take a step further by using questions that only your target audience will know the answers to.

There could be many other ways to collect leads depending on your niche. The main reason to run special lead generation funnels is to get leads that have a better chance of conversion.

Why Is It Crucial To Collect Qualified Leads

Most people think lead generation is a tactic to generate sales. Technically this is true, but not entirely correct.

You see, you can generate sales even without collecting leads. But what a proper lead generation process does is it ensures you do not fall short of your sales targets anytime soon.

For example, let’s say you make $20,000 a month as revenue on a regular basis from all the marketing efforts you make without lead generation. But what will happen if there is a sudden global crisis and people aren’t naturally looking to take your service?

At this point, you can run discount campaigns on your qualified leads, who are more likely to convert.

So rather than being 100% dependent on your generic marketing efforts, you have a way to get more sales even when all else fails.

Another reason is that you have a second chance to convert people who did not take your offer in the first place.

Remember, every marketing activity needs to have a goal or multiple goals.

And when you run lead generation campaigns, a potential goal is to make sure you convert as many potential clients as possible – seemingly the ones who did visit your site/offer page, i.e. they have interest in what you offer but did not take the offer for various reasons.

So, it’s safe to say, when you plan sales funnels and marketing campaigns for your product/service, make sure to also plan lead generation funnels to have a chunk of qualified potential clients that will help you sustain in the long run.

Final Thoughts

It is inevitable that if you want to sustain your business in the long run, then having a well-planned lead generation process is a must.

Now, the lead generation funnel ideas you got here, it’s not necessary that you have to use all of them. Choose the ones that you think will work best with your potential clients. You may test each of them for a brief period to find out which one delivers the best results for you.