Leads are the lifeblood of every business. Without a steady flow of new leads, your business cannot sustain itself—let alone grow. After all, there’s only so much your existing customers can spend. To keep moving forward, you need to consistently attract fresh prospects and convert them into paying customers. This is exactly why a Lead Generation Funnel is essential. It provides a structured process to capture, nurture, and convert new leads, ensuring the long-term health and growth of your business.
When we measure the value of a customer, we look at the lifetime value (LTV) for the customer. LTV means how much, on average, a customer will spend on your business. It can be on a single purchase, a recurring purchase, or a subscription service. Knowing the LTV will help you decide how much you can spend in your lead generation funnel to acquire a new lead.
Today, we will be sharing what is a lead generation funnel and how to create one yourself from scratch without any experience.
What is A Lead?
A lead is a potential customer or prospect who has shown interest in a product or service, often requiring follow-up from sales or marketing teams.
There are many ways that you can acquire a lead. It can be through an event, advertisement, word of mouth, and others. However, the lead acquisition process is almost the same. Someone shows interest in your product and gives you their contact details for you to follow up with them.
And for the online lead generation process, it will normally start with an ad or social media post where you lead your potential customers to your landing page, where you are going to pitch them to provide you with their contact details. Usually, it will be their email address on the contact numbers.
Contact details are confidential information, and people nowadays are reluctant to provide them due to scam issues. You will need to give them a reason to provide that for you.
And we call this the lead magnet.
A lead magnet is a free, high-value offer that businesses provide to potential customers in exchange for their contact information or engagement. The idea is simple: give prospects something useful upfront, and in return, you earn the opportunity to start building a relationship with them.
Lead magnets can take many forms depending on your audience’s needs. For example, you might offer a report, step-by-step guide, training course, eBook, or cheatsheet. Essentially, any resource that provides genuine value and solves a problem for your prospects can serve as an effective lead magnet in exchange for their contact details.
What is Lead Quality?
It is also important to note that not all leads are the same. They are high and low-quality leads, and we call this lead quality.
Lead quality refers to the level of desirability and potential of a lead in terms of its likelihood to convert into a paying customer or achieve the desired action or goal for a business.
High-quality leads typically exhibit characteristics such as genuine interest, relevant demographics, and a higher probability of conversion, while low-quality leads may lack engagement or relevance to the business’s offerings.
Assessing lead quality helps businesses focus their efforts on the most promising prospects and improve overall conversion rates and marketing effectiveness.
When we are implementing the lead generation process, we can separate the leads into three main categories.
1. TOFU Lead (Top of the Funnel Lead):
A TOFU lead is someone who showed interest in what you offered in your marketing campaign. It can be a sign-up for your free lead magnet offer. These groups of people are at the top of the sales funnel, where they are aware that your business is not ready to buy from you.
You will need to make some effort to engage and nurture them for them to become your customers.
2. MOFU Lead (Mid of the Funnel Lead)
A MOFU lead has some initial engagement with your brand or business already. It can be through your regular newsletter, social media engagement, or other content.
They know who you are and what you are offering. But they are still unsure what you can offer them. People in this stage are more open to buying, but they will need more information on how to choose the best product.
3. BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel Lead)
A BOFU lead is ready to make the purchase. All you need to do is get your sales team to present your best offer and close the deal. When your potential reaches the BOFU stage, they already know your product or service and trust that you can solve their problems.
They are in the buying mode, and you need to kick them into making a decision and buy from you.
Knowing your leads and the stage they are in, you can create a better campaign for them.
What are Lead Generation Funnels?
A lead funnel or lead generation funnel is a sales process of converting a visitor into a lead. A typical lead funnel will start with a traffic source, whether social media, organic or paid ads, or email marketing. Then the prospects are taken to a squeeze page where you will sell your free offer.
A squeeze page is called that because you are trying to squeeze all the different information you can from your visitors. And then, the free offer is used to bribe your visitors to give you their contact details. And since contact details are private and confidential, you will need to give them something they want so badly that they give you their contact details.
Your lead magnet needs to be something that has high perceived value and is actionable, so that they will get results from implementing whatever is in your lead magnet. A good example would be a cheat sheet or step-by-step guide where you teach them how to achieve something.
On your landing page or squeeze page, you must have a contact form to get them to input their contact details and CTA buttons to remind them to complete the registration form.
And finally, after they submit their contact details, you can direct them to a thank-you page where you will express your gratitude for them signing up for your contact list. Then, explain also how they can claim the lead magnet.
Next, after you complete the Lead Generation Funnel, there is one more step. The onboarding email sequence is where you will build your stage and present your first offer at the end of the five-day email series.
How To Use Lead Generation Funnel in Different Businesses
Lead generation is useful for all businesses. Let’s see how it can work for your business.
Local business
If you are a local pharmacy that wants to acquire more leads and customers, you can give an ebook on a healthy diet or recipes for a healthy meal.
You can create a landing page with a registration form for them to key in their contact details to claim the ebook. Then, you can drive traffic to your landing page by targeting local users who are interested in this topic.
Once they visit your landing page and complete the signup, you can send them a welcome email along with some newsletter or free vouchers for them to buy from you.
And since you already have their contact details, you can now nurture them by sending them follow-up emails and the latest promotions, so they can visit and buy from you if they need it.
Build your lead funnel using this template
Ecommerce business
For an eCommerce business, your customers will rarely buy from you when they first visit your store. People will need to get up to 7 touches before they decide to buy from you.
Depending on what you sell on your eCommerce store, you can provide some insider guides or cheats that people will want to know about your niche. You can give them the guide in exchange for their contact details.
Or more straightforwardly, you can offer them a first-time voucher that they can use on their first purchase.
To do this, you can either build a landing page with your signup form or have a pop-up that will appear within 5 seconds of their visit or when they want to exit your page.
Then, drive traffic to your landing page. You can start with Facebook ads or TikTok ads to target your dream customer who is interested in your products.
After they sign up for your mailing list, all you need to do is nurture them and build relationships with them so they will purchase from you.
Build your lead funnel using this template
Coaching business
For a coaching business, it is a high-ticket product where you can charge them a one-off payment or a recurring payment for coaching. For the lead generation process, your lead magnet can be a two-hour webinar where you will provide tonnes of value during the webinar.
You don’t need to rush to reveal what you are going to sell during the lead generation process. The goal here is to get their contact and “sell” them the ticket for the webinar.
From the time they sign up for the webinar, you can start sending them emails to nurture them and build your reputation before the webinar starts. This is so that they will be excited to join the webinar.
The attendance rate for a free webinar is usually low, as they don’t pay for it. They won’t pay attention as it’s free. Hence, you will need to motivate them to attend.
At the end of the webinar, you need to always follow up with those who joined but did not purchase at the end of the webinar. Follow up with them and try to close the deal.
Build your lead funnel using this template.
How to Build a Lead Generation Funnel Using GetResponse in 6 Simple Steps
Now that you already know the importance of a Lead Generation Funnel, let’s see how you can start and build your lead funnel even if you have never done it before.
Thanks to funnel builder software like GetResponse and ClickFunnels, you can now build your lead funnel easily.
In this guide, we will be showing how to build a Lead Generation Funnel using GetResponse.
Step 1. Accessing the GetResponse Conversion Funnels Function
If you don’t have a GetResponse account, you can register for one with a 30-day free trial now.
Then, access the funnel creator and click on the menu icon in the top navigation bar. Next, select the GetResponse Conversion Funnel.
Step 2. Choose the Funnel Type
As we are building a lead funnel, we will choose the middle option to build a list and then the lead magnet funnel. And put in the name of your funnel. This will be the name for the email list generated from this funnel.
All the new leads you collected from this funnel will be added to this list automatically.
Step 3. Create the squeeze page
Once you have filled in the name of the funnel, you will see the funnel wizard, where all the info on your lead funnel will be available.
To build a lead funnel, you can click on the “Create a signup page” button to start creating your signup page.
To create your onboarding or welcome email, you can create your email here, too.
Step 4. Select the Right Template To Start
Now you can pick a landing page template or build a page from scratch. Most funnel builders, including GetResponse, offer a different pre-built template for you to start building your lead funnel.
These templates are being created and tested by professional funnel builders. I would highly suggest that you start with a template instead of a blank template.
When you get the template that is suitable for your branding and content, you can start to edit it. Our visitors might come in from different devices (Smartphones, tablets, Desktops). Your squeeze page needs to be able to adapt and fit into different screen sizes.
After your squeeze page, the next page you need is a Thank You Page. Your thank you page can be as simple as a short video to thank them for signing up and tell them where to claim the lead magnet. And at the same time, you can also explain to them what they can expect from the onboarding email sequence in the upcoming days.
Step 5. Create Your Onboarding Email Sequence Lead Generation Funnel
On the second part of the funnel wizard, there is a button to “Create an email”.
In this button, you will be directed to the autoresponder function. Here, you can create your welcome email content and the subject line of your email. You can create the email from scratch or use the email templates to start.
Step 6. Promote Your Squeeze Page Lead Generation Funnel
Now that you have your lead funnel and email automation set up, it’s time to send traffic to your lead funnel.
If you have the budget, you can always start with paid ads. The beauty of paid ads is that when you start paying, you will get traffic to your ad. And if set up properly, you can get a huge amount of traffic instantly.
But if you don’t, you will need to figure out how to post your link everywhere possible. It can be your social media profile, blog, or other place that is possible.
Final Thoughts – How to Create A Lead Generation Funnel that Works
If you follow every step above, by now you should already know or have created your first lead funnel. However, this is just the starting point. The actual work has just started for your lead generation.
After you start sending traffic to your squeeze page, you will need to start looking at the data for your lead funnel and optimize it to increase the conversion rate.
There are many different points in your lead funnel that you can optimize to increase your conversion rate. When your lead funnel fails, it can be that your lead magnet is not attractive enough, your sales copy is not compelling, or your funnel design is bad.
With the GetResponse Conversion Funnel, you can create your lead funnel easily, all on the same page. Not only that, but with the data available, you can analyze your data easily.
Let’s get the work started and sign up for a free account today. Leave a message to let us know. Our team will work together with you to support your first lead funnel creation.
