The “Invisible” Email Marketing Funnel: How To Sell Without Selling
Are you struggling with the sales side of being a creator and wish you could be successful without feeling like a salesman?
Social media creators are unique in the world of business because while they promote products like any other business does, they also have a special bond with the following they build.
This can make it awkward when that creator finally has something they want to sell but are afraid of scaring off the authentic audience they’ve built.
In this post, we cover a more subtle sales tactic you can implement through your email list.
What is an invisible marketing funnel?
An invisible marketing funnel is a sales funnel that centers around trust and authenticity.
By creating value for your niche and growing a loyal audience, you’re able to find success with any product you promote. You’ve earned it, and your audience thinks so, too.
That’s why they’re willing to take you at your word and are eager to support you in any way they can.
An invisible marketing funnel allows you to turn all of this into a strategy you can follow whenever you need to promote something new.
It essentially allows you to sell without selling. In other words, your business is able to thrive without using aggressive sales tactics.
This is why it’s called an “invisible” marketing funnel. Your sales are the result of the genuine value you provide your niche, so you don’t need to market yourself or your products directly to your audience.
How does an invisible marketing funnel work?
These are the stages of an invisible marketing funnel:
- Initial visit and engagement – The period at which your visitor lands on your website and engages with your content in one way or another.
- Value discovery – The stage at which your visitor realizes the value your content provides for your niche. They may also discover a free trial or low-cost sample you offer during this stage.
- Independent email opt-ins – Your visitor subscribes to your email list through subtly-placed email opt-in forms, such as a free trial you offer.
- Personalized experience – You kick the value you provide for your niche up a few notches by offering your new subscriber a personalized marketing experience.
- Trust – You provide more and more resources to your community, so much so that your audience trusts your brand wholeheartedly.
- Outcome – By creating engaging content for topics your target audience is highly interested in, not overwhelming them with marketing message after marketing message, and being willing to hand over your product for trial sessions, you build a relationship with your audience that centers around trust. Purchasing your product is simply the next obvious step.
You can use this funnel with social media marketing as well, but it’s likely much more effective to use your email list for campaigns like these, especially since it’s probably linked to your SaaS product or online store.
How does this differ from a regular sales funnel?
In a regular sales funnel, you skip the trust building part, and try to get your subscriber to go from visitor to customer in as few emails as possible.
Sure, you can spend your time nurturing your subscribers for a bit before you ask them to buy, but for the most part, a regular sales funnel is centered around using smart and aggressive marketing tactics to get subscribers to buy.
In a regular sales funnel, loyalty comes after the customer makes a purchase.
In an invisible funnel, purchases are the result of the loyalty your followers feel toward you.
What are the benefits of using an invisible marketing funnel?
The biggest benefit of using an invisible marketing funnel is the way it allows you to focus more on creating valuable content and products for your niche and less on coming up with smart sales tactics to use.
This shortens the sales process.
You don’t need to overwhelm your subscriber with marketing content nor do you need to constantly prove to them why your products are worth checking out.
By creating valuable content for topics that are related to your products, you’re able to foster a community that’s willing to pay you directly for any products you promote without the need for you to prove your worth.
Your customers also get a break from the sleazy marketing tactics your competitors use.
More and more customers are also becoming aware of sales funnels and other marketing tactics. This means you’re better off focusing more on growing your audience and less on tactics that are meant to earn you more sales.
Plus, because consumers are so aware of these marketing tactics, they’re able to use them to their advantage.
For example, a consumer may place a few items in your store in their shopping carts, fill out your checkout form halfway, then leave without paying.
Why? Because they know they’ll receive an abandoned cart email from you that contains a discount.
An invisible marketing funnel is a lot more subtle than that, allowing you to build a marketing strategy that’s centered around trust between you and your audience as well as the value you provide to them.
How to set up an invisible marketing funnel
1. Define the goal of your funnel
What do you want to accomplish by the time your lead gets to the end of your funnel?
Do you want them to make at least one purchase? Purchase a particular product? Become a subscriber to your membership site or SaaS product? Sign up for your email list?
Choose a goal for your funnel before you design it. This will help ensure that every step you plan for it and all of the content you plan for it is built with the intention of reaching that goal.
2. Attract your target audience to your website
Because your opt-in forms and your product likely exist on your website, you want to attract your target audience to your website.
Basically, what you want them to do is get into the habit of visiting your website on a regular basis due to the value it provides for your niche.
This will lead them to the next logical step in their journey: purchasing your product to get even more value out of your brand.
And it all starts with attracting your audience to your website from wherever they may be on the web.
They’re likely on Google or a social media platform.
This gives you a few different ways to guide those users to your website without using ads or spammy marketing tactics.
For Google, work on your blog content, and try to acquire high-quality backlinks to increase your domain authority.
Stick to covering topics that relate to your end goal. This is key to reaching that end goal. After all, if you want to increase sales for Product A, how can you be sure they’d buy it if you attract them by covering Topic B or even C?
In short, come up with high-quality blog post ideas that relate to your end goal, and write them with purpose.
SEO is a lot more complex than this, but it gives you a decent starting point to work with.
Cover the same topics on social media, but optimize them for each social media platform.
This will involve breaking blog posts down into multiple posts, covering them with carousel posts, and using a combination of long and short-form videos.
Unfortunately, getting a social media audience onto your website isn’t easy.
Promote your blog in every post you publish at minimum.
Just avoid gatekeeping content. Again, social media users do not want to leave the platform they’re on to find out exactly how much of each ingredient they’re supposed to use in a recipe or what measurements they need for whatever you’re teaching them to build.
Just let them know you have more content on your website.
If you’re having trouble getting your social media audience on your website, tackle Step 4 before moving onto Step 3.
3. Increase engagement on your website overall
If you want your audience to move on from consuming free content and products on your website to purchasing them, you need to increase the amount they engage with your website overall.
Curiosity will get the better of them in time as will their trust in you, leading them to take the plunge and make a purchase.
And it all starts with small tweaks you make to your website to increase engagement on it.
Again, this starts with covering topics that relate to your end goal, but more critically, it means covering topics you know your audience cares about.
You should also operate your blog in a way that encourages your readers to return.
This means covering every topic related to your niche, organizing your content into different categories, simplifying site navigation so readers can find what they’re looking for easily, staying on top of broken links and images, updating old content regularly, and improving the performance of your website.
If you don’t have the budget for a content creation team, consider posting less frequently so you can publish higher-quality posts that earn you clicks.
Also, try using more compelling headlines, mentioning popular content creators in your niche on your blog, covering trending topics, publishing different types of content and opening up your comment section.
4. Create an offer that extends value to your audience
This is where your email list comes into play.
A typical sales funnel involves offering free content to attract an audience, nurturing them with free content via email, then presenting a product to them that will help them much more efficiently than your content does.
An invisible email marketing funnel works in a similar way, only you offer a free version of your product to help market it better without over marketing it to try and prove its worth.
So, think back to that original goal you have in mind, and come up with a way to offer your audience a condensed version.
This could be a free trial, a free course, a sample, a discount or anything else you feel your audience would value.
This is why we recommend tackling this step first if you’re a social media creator first and foremost. It gives you something tangible to offer potential customers.
You can distribute this offer through your email list, giving your audience their first opportunity to join.
5. Add subtle email opt-in forms to your site
Again, the point of an invisible email marketing funnel is to build trust with your audience by presenting them with more value than marketing messages.
This means you should avoid using welcome mat opt-in forms or pop-up forms that block the content area.
Place your opt-in forms in subtle areas instead, and make sure your value proposition is marketed on them.
Place forms inline with your content, have them trigger by clicking relevant anchor text, and insert them in your footer and sidebar.
You can also use a simple “Subscribe” button in your primary navigation menu. Some consumers may find your content valuable enough to subscribe.
Note: Some email marketing services like MailerLite will allow you to deploy opt-in forms easily. Alternatively, you could opt for a more powerful solution such as ConvertBox instead.
6. Extend value to your audience through your email List
Once again, an invisible marketing funnel uses fewer marketing messages to emphasize value.
That means you should stick to providing your lead with value even after they subscribe.
Send emails that cover a small topic from top to bottom, as if you were transcribing a tiktok. Consider creating different email series for the different groups within your audience as well.
This is called segmentation, and so long as your email marketing app offers it natively, it’s a simple way to segment your audience into different interest groups.
7. Continue offering value on all channels
The next phase is slow, but it’s the most effective way to build trust with your audience.
By releasing high-quality, valuable content on every platform you have a presence on, you earn respect within your niche and start to become an authoritative figure within it.
Soon, members of your target audience will visit your website and social media profiles as sources of information for your niche.
8. Wait
At this point, you’ve done all you can without sending actual marketing messages to your subscriber.
All you have to do now is wait and see if you offer enough value and have built enough trust for them to make that transition from subscriber to customer.
Use website analytics apps and heatmap software to optimize your website as much as you can.
Final thoughts
If you’ve ever signed up to an email list and immediately been dropped into an unending “pitch fest” sales sequence that doesn’t end until you unsubscribe, you know the score.
The sleezy sales tactics that some competitors use may provide more sales up front, but there is a long-term cost to that approach.
The invisible sales funnel is perfect for anyone that wants to sell without burning bridges with potential customers.
By doing this, you’ll be more likely to create life-long customers instead of forcing them away with a none-stop pitch fest.