Marketing Minutes: Funnels Are Just Old School Long Sales Letters
Wilson Cole
For this podcast Wilson Cole, President of Adams, Evens, & Ross (AER) and Ally Cole, brand manager for ELOC Global, talk about new versions of marketing tools that have been around for decades but were recently upgraded by technology and given new names.
Some examples of these new versions of marketing tools include sales funnels and lead magnets. As Wilson explains, the old versions of these tools were known as sales emails, which were super long and went through the details of the AER collections process and the perks of going through it. 
Before that there were sales letters, which basically did the same thing as sales emails but were in paper form and mailed/given in person to prospective clients. Modern day sales funnels are more effective than tools of the past because of the research into human behavior that has been utilized in the marketing industry when creating tools like sales funnels. For example, research found that giving potential clients bite-sized pieces of information was better than trying to sell them immediately with a huge sales letter/email. These bite-sized pieces of information are spread across various landing pages within a sales funnel. The technology of sales funnels can help identify the type of person visiting your website: is it a brand new person? A returning client who just needs to be reminded of your services? Another type of person? Knowing who you are talking to is a big part of knowing how you can help them. Wilson's suggestion for improving your sales funnel is to improve the copy writing of the funnel by pulling copy writing from an old sales letter (that was successful) and placing it within the funnel.
Another overall goal of sales funnels is to help make it faster/easier for potential clients to find the information they're looking for on your website. The faster/easier they can find that information, the greater the chances of landing a sale compared to all visitors hitting the same landing page and having to go searching throughout your website for what they're looking for, potentially giving up in the process because it's taking too long/too difficult to navigate. Wilson confirms that he is sold on the idea of sales funnels and that after AER started using them, AER quickly saw a jump in growth. If you have any follow up questions about sales funnels for Ally, you can email her at ally@elocglobal.com.
