Your Funnel Is a Series of Rope Bridges

For a lot of marketing and sales communication, it's useful to think of the funnel as a series of rope bridges. A rope bridge will get you to the next place you're going, but it won't bear much weight. Put too much on it and it breaks, and the person falls and makes no further progress.

Take email. It starts with the from name. You're looking at your inbox, and it's from somebody. It's better for it to say Julia at Acme Corp than Acme Corp Marketing Team. Then the subject line. Then the body. Then the thing you want them to do: click, call, whatever.

The subject line should never lie, but its job is to get the email opened. When you email coworkers, the subject line explains what the email is about so they can jump right in. That's not marketing and sales email. Here the subject can allude to what's inside, it can tease, it can be interesting in its own right, but it doesn't explain or educate. If they think they already know what's in the email, they won't open it, and you broke the bridge.

The body's job is to get someone to take the call to action. The call to action's job is to take them to the easiest, lowest-friction, most persuasive next thing: a web page, a calendar, whatever.

Whether it's email, web pages, voicemails or cold calls, consider the whole thing a series of rope bridges, and make sure you're not putting too much weight on any one of them. Break one and you never reach the ultimate call to action.