The Only Four Elements Every Marketing Funnel Actually Needs

I’ve audited hundreds of marketing funnels over the last two decades. The pattern is always the same. Too many steps. Too many tools. Too much complexity. And the people running them can’t tell you which parts are actually working.

The biggest proponent of this kind of thinking is the teaching and content coming from so called funnel “experts” that either have no experience on getting people real results (they may know how to build inside a system they are an affiliate, but what results have they got for clients?) and the experienced business owners still trying to sell access to training that has become ineffective and out of date.

Let me simplify it for you and share the only FOUR things you should focus on in order to get your funnel up and running, generating you revenue fast. I say fast because if you can implement less, easier, then you’ll get to market faster.

This framework is taken from my book Simplify The Funnel® and I call it the Minimum Viable Funnel™

Element 1 - One Traffic Source That You Understand

Not five platforms. Not a presence on every social network. One traffic source that you understand well enough to predict results.

For some people that’s YouTube. For others it’s LinkedIn. Or email. Or a podcast. The platform matters less than your depth of understanding.

When you spread yourself across six platforms, you’re mediocre on all of them. When you focus on one, you can actually learn what works and do more of it.

What I am not saying is that you should only show up on one platform, it’s about where your focus for growth is.

Take the content you are creating and publish on other platforms to maintain a presence, but when you try and make all of them work at the same time, you’ll burn out.

Multiple analytics dashboards, different algorithms and very different user behaviour will lead you down a path of exhaustion and you’ll stop posting.

Get one platform working for you, systematise it and then move onto a focus on the next one.

Element 2 - One Lead Capture Mechanism

A single, clear way for someone to say “I’m interested.” That could be a free resource. An email signup, a booking page or a waitlist.

The key word is “one.” Not three different opt-in pages competing with each other.

One offer. One page. One action for the visitor to take.

And let me into a secret here... Free won’t build your business. What I mean by this is that freebies attract freebie hunters.

Have free opt-ins and resources available, but my focus on driving traffic would be to a low cost product or offer, like a paid challenge or a mini-course to create a list of buyers not freebie hunters.

This one tactic may grow an email list slower, which is a contrarian view and goes against the ideas suggested by many online marketers, but in my experience a list of freebie hunters just bloats your list and gives you a false sense of having an audience that is interested in what you have.

Customers, even those that give you $1 for something, have crossed a threshold of trust with you. They will trust you again if you delivered a result for them in some way.

In my own business, moving in this direction helped me to gain customers from ads run to a cold audience and social media posts within 24 hours of publishing, rather than free lead magnet style opt-ins that saw an average of 89 days between opt-in and purchase.

Element 3 - One Nurture Sequence

After someone raises their hand, you need to build even more trust. The offer they just accessed from you should deliver a result for them, but after this, the communication that follows is crucial. A nurture sequence does this.

It could be 3 emails. It could be a series of content pieces. It could be a short video course.

Deliver with the offer they have just got access to, help them to dig deep into it and maybe show how to get even more value from what they have just received from you and then invite them to the next step.

The mistake most people make is building a 12-email sequence that takes six weeks. By email 7, nobody’s reading. Keep it short. Keep it valuable. Move people toward another decision.

Element 4 - One Conversion Mechanism

How do your people buy? A sales page. A call. A checkout link. One clear path from “I’m interested” to “I’m in” is all you need.

Make it as human as possible in terms of the connection with you. Add videos to sales pages, invite people into a chat and don’t just leave a bot to talk with them. Even get people on calls. You’ll thank me when you start to inject the human back into the funnel, more so in this part of your funnel.

These four parts are the structure of Minimum Viable Funnel™ - four elements, no more, no less.

Everything Else Is Noise

Tripwires. Downsells. Upsell chains. Webinar replay pages with fake countdown timers. None of it is necessary to build a profitable business. You may want to add some of these elements once you get clarity on your AUDIENCE, your MESSAGE, and your OFFER.

All of these extra bells and whistles add complexity that makes the system harder to manage and harder to fix when something breaks.

Start with four elements. Get those working. Only then consider adding anything else.

I teach this framework in depth at Simplify Summit on 24th-25th April in London. Two days of implementation, not theory. You’ll leave with your Minimum Viable Funnel mapped out and ready to build.

All the details are available at www.simplifysummits.com