Digital Sales Funnel 2.0 – How Lead Generation helped Digital Marketers to regain Trust

Year 2007 was the mazor turning point for the Digital marketers.

As an increasing number of people set up digital ads on Google AdWords, the ads became more intense, and scammers swooped in to prey on online users.

online marketplace had become saturated with high-pressure ads and scams, people lost trust in digital ads and made fewer purchases.

As a result, advertising costs climbed so high that advertising online no longer makes financial sence.

Marketers’ creativity, inspiring them to dig deeper into discovering the next BIG thing – online lead campaigns.

A lead campaign invites people to leave personal details like their email address or phone number in return for a valuable gift which is given to them FREE of charge.

These gifts are usually digital goods such as ebooks, webinars, reports, discount coupons but can also be physical goods like hard copies of books and product samples.

So, instead of driving everyone straight to the sales page, marketers started to collect leads first and use them to build relationships with users via the sending of emails. This caused a funnel to evolve:

Digital sales funnel

A Generic Model of Digital Sales Funnel 2.0 - traffic from multiple platforms, Lead Pages did relationship building via content, emails and conversations.

With this new element came new metrics and Lead Acquisition Cost or Cost Per Lead (CPL) swiftly became the holy grail of digital marketing.

New skills needed to execute funnel 2.0:

1. Lead Generation

The key to business growth was stable and controlled lead acquisition which was best achieved via evergreen funnel models that relied on different “evergreen” lead magnets such as ebooks, special reports, checklists, etc.

The size of your lead base was usually proportional to the size and revenue of your business.

To maximize sales, marketers used real-time lead campaigns like webinars, and launch sequences. These campaigns were often directed at acquired leads in need of reactivation, offering them a new chance for meaningful engagement.

2. Marketing Automation

With the rise of a variety of systems came the challenge of selecting the right software to automate your lead acquisition and lead nurturing processes.

Automation sped up the process of building pages for lead acquisition and made it easier to run campaigns smoothly.

3. Website UX and UI

Around 2010, ugly pages that relied heavily on text gave way to visually appealing pages with elegant elements, resulting in a > 20% improvement in page conversions.

4. Online traffic acquisition became more complex, with an increasing number of channels coming in to play, many of which functioned in a different way from Google AdWords.