What Is A Pipeline Builder

What Is A Pipeline Builder

TLDR: A pipeline builder is a marketing tool used to move customers through a marketing funnel with the intention of fostering historical loyalty rather than generating more leads. Pipelines track a client from being a new lead to a booked service and all the way through remarketing.

What Is A Pipeline & How Can It Benefit Your Marketing Strategies

There are numerous marketing strategies that one can employ for acquiring leads, such as inbound and outbound marketing or content marketing. However, it is often more valuable to focus on fostering client loyalty rather than just generating more leads. This can be achieved by utilizing a marketing pipeline. 

Protip: A pipeline is great not only for building brand recognition but establishing yourself as an authority in whatever industry your business operates in. 

Marketing strategies that use a pipeline to cash in on the value of having a returning customer who prefers your brand over others and therefore has more compound potential the longer you can keep them invested in your brand. 

While there are several choices for building a pipeline, CHIIRP offers an all-in-one solution for automating your funnel and maximizing potential return business. In order to understand how to build your pipeline let’s take a closer look at the stages of the funnel, you will be taking your customers through. 

Using A Pipeline To Manage Your Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is a common way to separate and organize your client acquisition process, from start to finish. It utilizes top, middle, and bottom sections that bring leads through the following process.

Top – Generating Leads: The beginning part of the funnel is purely intended to expand the reach of your marketing. From fielding customer information to building brand awareness, this is where you throw at as much of a net as possible in order to generate leads. 

Middle – Nurturing Prospects: From here you begin to nurture the relationship with the customer and encourage them to buy or receive your service. 

Bottom – Converting Leads To Customers: This is when a customer actually purchases or schedules service with you and moves on from being just a lead. 

While most businesses see this as the end of the process and continue to pump efforts into the top of the funnel the real value lies in the middle and bottom portions. Pipeline marketing specifically utilizes the potential of keeping past customers moving through the middle and bottom portions of the funnel to keep making a purchase. 

Setting Goals For Your Pipeline Builder

Before you build a pipeline it is important to identify what your goals are. If, for example, you wanted to send a text blast to previous customers for a monthly special, what metrics are you trying to hit? 

Let’s look at some of the metrics you can track!

  • Opportunities by source: which sources have led to the most recurring sales?
  • Revenue by source: how much money do you derive from specific channels(SMS, email, ads, etc.)
  • Return on Investment: how much money in sales has your marketing efforts actually gotten you? 
  • Campaign success: which marketing campaign usually nets you the most success?

Keeping track of your metrics is key to making sure your pipeline is actually helping your marketing efforts grow in value!

How To Build A Pipeline

Once you have a platform and a goal, the next step is actually building a pipeline. It is always best to break down the stages of your pipeline to match how the stages of your service or product are broken down. Here is an example of a pipeline flow that could be applied to most service-based marketing funnels.

  1. New Leads
  2. Lead Contacted
  3. Service Booked
  4. Service Completed
  5. Review Requested
  6. Ready For Remarketing

Protip: You can use a pipeline to note when a client is ready for a review request as well as ready to remarket to. 

If you use automation, like what is offered through CHIIRP, you can completely automate a lot of the pipeline progression. When someone fills out a form, makes a phone call, or replies to a message you sent them, the pipeline will create an opportunity. You can then create further workflows to carry the same opportunity through the pipeline and even send out the review request after the job or service has been rendered. 

Maintaining a streamlined pipeline using an online builder makes pushing customers through the marketing funnel much easier. This can generate much more revenue than focusing on making new leads as well as building customer loyalty through your brand!

Key Takeaways

While getting new leads is an important part of marketing, having return customers who prioritize your brand over others intrinsically has more value to your business. You can fine-tune your efforts to remarket to past customers by utilizing a pipeline and automated workflows. While pipelines are an amazing tool it is still important to set goals and measure the correct metrics, but having a solid platform to build your pipeline can have all of these tools integrated.