Funnel is one of those words that sounds more complicated than it is. All it really means is the path a stranger walks to become a customer, and the few steps along the way where you either keep them or lose them. Once you can see those steps, marketing stops feeling like guesswork.
A marketing funnel is the path someone takes from first hearing about you to booking a call or buying. It's called a funnel because fewer people move to each step, so a crowd of visitors becomes a handful of leads and then a customer or two. Naming the steps shows you exactly where you're losing people.
Who this is for: Coaches, consultants and founders selling services or programmes.
When someone says funnel, picture the shape. Wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. A lot of people find you, fewer give you their attention, fewer still put their hand up, and a small number become customers. The funnel is just a way of drawing that journey so you can see it. It isn't a tool you buy or a page you build, though those things live inside it. It's the path itself.
I find it helps to think about one person rather than a crowd. Someone reads a post you wrote, likes the way you think, and clicks through to your site. They read a bit, decide you might be able to help, and leave you their email in return for something useful. Over the next week or two they hear from you a few times, and one of those emails nudges them to book a call. That whole trip, from a stranger scrolling past to a name in your calendar, is the funnel.
People reach for the word because business gets confusing when you look at it all at once. You've got a website, a mailing list, some ads maybe, a calendar, a few social accounts, and it's hard to say how any of it connects. The funnel is just the story that ties them together in the order a real person meets them. Once you have that order in your head, every piece has an obvious job, and the ones that don't have a job stop feeling so urgent.
The reason it's worth drawing is that most businesses can't tell you where people fall away. They know visitors come and calls sometimes get booked, but the middle is a fog. When you name the steps, the fog clears, and you can look at each one and ask a simple question: are people moving to the next step, or stopping here?
Almost every funnel, whatever the industry, has the same handful of steps underneath the jargon. Here they are without the fancy names:
You'll see these dressed up in all sorts of language, and marketers love giving each stage a grand name. I'd rather keep them plain, because the plain version is what your reader is actually living through. Nobody wakes up thinking they're at the top of someone's funnel. They just saw a post they liked and wondered if you were any good.
The step that gets missed most often is the second one, giving you a way to reach them. Without it, everyone who isn't ready to buy on the day they find you is gone for good, and that's the vast majority of people. The second step almost always happens on a page, so if you want the longer version with examples, I wrote a whole piece on what makes a landing page actually convert.
The narrowing is normal. Not everyone who finds you is the right fit, and not everyone who's a fit is ready today. A funnel that started with a thousand visitors and ended with ten customers hasn't failed. That might be a healthy month. The point isn't to stop the narrowing, it's to notice where it's sharper than it should be.
Here's what I mean. If a hundred people land on your opt-in page and only two leave their email, that step is leaking badly, and no amount of traffic will fix it. You'd just be pouring more people into a bucket with a hole in it. But if forty of those hundred opt in and then nobody ever books a call, the leak is further down, in the follow-up. Same funnel, completely different problem, completely different fix.
It also helps to know that the narrowing does a useful job. Each step is quietly sorting people, letting the ones you can genuinely help move closer and letting the rest drift away without any hard feelings. A funnel that didn't narrow at all would just hand you a calendar full of calls with people who were never going to buy, which is its own kind of expensive.
This is why I never trust a single number like sales are down. Sales sit at the very bottom, and by the time a problem shows up there, it could have started three steps earlier. If you want to get good at this, get comfortable looking at each step on its own rather than staring at the final total.
Let me walk one through, so it stops being abstract. Say you're a business coach. You write a post about the one thing that keeps small service businesses stuck under a certain income. A hundred people read it, and twenty click through to your site because it struck a nerve. That's the finding-you step, and already you can see it narrowing: a hundred readers, twenty visitors.
On your site those twenty land on a page offering a short guide, the five questions to ask before you raise your prices. Eight of them want it enough to leave their email. Over the next fortnight those eight get a handful of emails from you, useful ones, and in the last email you offer a free call to look at their pricing together. Two book. One of those two, after the call, becomes a client.
A hundred readers, one client. Written down like that it can feel discouraging, but look at what it actually gives you. You now have eight people on a list you can help again next month, and you can see precisely which step to improve. If you want twice as many clients, you don't need a new website, you need to lift one of those steps, and now you know exactly which numbers to watch to get there.
You can do the first version of this on paper, and I'd encourage you to before you spend money on anything. Draw four boxes. In the first, write how people currently find you. In the second, what you offer in exchange for their email, if anything. In the third, what they hear from you afterwards. In the fourth, the thing you actually want them to do.
Most people find the gap the moment they draw it. The second box is empty, so every visitor who isn't ready to buy today is lost forever. Or the third box is empty, so people opt in and then never hear from you again. Seeing the blank box is usually more useful than any clever tactic, because it tells you the single most valuable thing to build next instead of leaving you to guess.
Don't worry about making it neat or complete. The version scribbled on the back of an envelope is worth more than a tidy diagram you never finish, because the point is to see your own business the way a stranger moves through it. Most people have never once looked at it from that side of the glass.
Once you can see your own funnel, the next question is where it's leaking, and that deserves its own look. I've written about how to find the leak when the numbers aren't adding up. And if you'd rather have someone map it with you and tell you straight where the money is going, that's the kind of thing we do at Unbury. A quick audit will show you the leaks before you change a thing.
No. Your website is one place a funnel can happen, but the funnel is the journey across everything, your posts, your emails and your calls. A site with no way to capture an email and no follow-up isn't really a funnel yet, just a brochure.
Not to start. You need somewhere to send traffic, a way to collect emails and a way to follow up. Plenty of people run a working funnel with a simple page and one email tool. Software makes it smoother, it doesn't make the funnel.
As few as it takes to get someone comfortably from stranger to customer. For most coaches and consultants that's find you, capture the email, warm up over a few emails, book a call. If you're adding stages for the sake of it, you're usually adding places to leak.
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