How to Build a Lead Generation Funnel with Interact

For the first couple years in my business, my lead funnels looked like a patchwork project where I pieced together bits and pieces of advice from big online gurus on how I should be attracting leads and adding more emails to my email list. I didn’t feel well connected to the message in any of the funnels I made, and they were largely ineffective.

I knew I should be growing an email list, but my business still felt like it was in the “baby stage”, and I wasn’t sure how to get readers who stumbled on my website to actually stick around and want more from me – aka… actually give me their email address in exchange for hearing more from me!

I found Interact through another entrepreneur friend and started playing around with it.

I was instantly impressed.

The templates for the quizzes were fun and engaging, great lead magnets, so I built one of my own and gave it a whirl.

It went “okay”. My email list went from 16 members to 30. So…. not a total flop, right?

I have to laugh about it, because honestly, I had no idea what I was doing at the time, and although Interact’s quiz building software was absolutely amazing, I first needed to understand the step by step of how to create content my audience ACTUALLY WANTED.

So fast forward another year, and I’ve tried a lot of things and worked hard to figure this out! And I’m ready to share with you how I use Interact now to enjoy a consistent stream of leads coming to my website through my Interact quiz lead generation funnel.

Start building your lead-generating quiz now.

First, what is a lead generation funnel!?

I tend to differentiate sales funnels and lead funnels.

When I create a lead funnel, the only expectation I have is to grow my email list. I’ll then want to take that “warm list” later and create a sales generating funnel that converts that warm list into buying clients and customers.

So how do you even acquire a “warm lead” list you can work with? How do you build out your funnel?

Why I chose Interact to build out my main lead funnel

I believe it’s important to experiment with lead funnels that work best in your industry. And the great thing about Interact, is that they have so many quiz templates, you can easily find one for your industry, and if it’s not just right, it’s easy to build a quiz from scratch!

I chose Interact for my funnel for me and my website for a few main reasons:

I wanted to save time. My time is precious to me, and I know it is for you too! and Interact makes it so easy, it’s possible to build your funnel in less than a day. (Sometimes in under an hour!)
I wanted my leads/audience to have fun when moving through the funnel and barely know they were even IN my funnel! A good, pleasant, appealing website experience is important to your audience, no matter who you are or what industry you’re in.
Interact is visually appealing and user-friendly. Okay… so having resources and softwares that are visually appealing is one of the most important things to me. I will decide to work with an online tool simply if I enjoy the experience I have working with it and if it looks pleasant. So this was a big one for me, and Interact fit the bill.

So I got to work planning out my funnel! Most of my quizes I end up building from scratch because I want them to be totally unique to me, but if you’re just starting out creating your very first quiz, I’d recommend starting with a template because it’s possible to start and finish it in under a couple hours!

Once I created my main quiz for my website inside Interact and set up my funnel, it has been working in the background for me with minimal effort. It’s sort of like magic.

I want to be totally transparent with you and break down my process of how I built it so you can understand my thought process behind this specific funnel.

Planning my Funnel

In order to ensure a successful funnel, you need to know what your audience wants from you. You need to truly know what you’re offering is of value to them, that it serves them and solves a problem for them. You’ll see in my outline below, that this is precisely why I begin planning my funnel with some basic research and a quick glance at my analytics.

Here are the steps I use whenever planning a lead generation funnel for my own website or for a client’s website.

Research. Know what content performs best for your website or blog. Note down which blogs posts have been read the most, have the highest number of clicks, or have received the most comments. Note the topic – have you written on this topic before? Did all the posts on this topic perform well for you? There you go – you now have a better idea for what kinds of content your audience wants most from you! Your highest performing posts tell you a lot. For me, all my highest performing blog posts to date had been on the topic of creating better content for Instagram, and blog posts where I shared free templates with my audience. (I mean, what’s not to love, right!?)
Prepare some high-value information to share with your audience based on your highest performing pieces of content that is slightly more special and “exclusive” than a free-for-all-to-read blog post, but doesn’t take you too much time to type out. For me, I knew my audience would absolutely LOVE more content templates they could use for instagram, and tips for what kind of content to create. And by using Interact, I could give my audience an incredibly customized experience. When you get started walking through the process of building your lead funnel with Interact, you’ll see that this is the content that is written out either on it’s own webpage, or inside the emails you’ll send to your brand new leads after they take the quiz! That’s when you deliver this high-value content with them!
Create your fun, engaging quiz using Interact’s easy quiz builder or by choosing a grab n’ go template! I chose to ask my audience questions within my quiz that would let me know a bit more about their business and how they like to post content to social media, so I’d know better what types of content prompts to send them (and how to tally up their quiz results!)
Interact will walk you through hooking up your email service (such as Mailchimp) to the quiz, so the next step is to make sure your high value content you’re providing your audience with is ready to go in your email system so it automatically gets sent to your new leads immediately after they complete your quiz and submit their email address to get your offer. This is often called “the Nurture Sequence” – an email drip sequence that “drips” the emails out to your audience over a period of a few days or few weeks and helps develop a good relationship with your brand new list members.
Launch Your Funnel! This is my favorite part. Because you can build an amazing lead generation funnel, but if no one knows it exists, how will they ever hear about the great work you and your business can do for them? Launching a lead funnel is pretty simple, but you can go as big or as small with it as you want, depending upon your goals. Here are just a few ways you can promote your funnel to the world:
1. Online Communities such as facebook groups (check the rules first to see if you can!)
2. Across all your social media platforms, consistently share over a short period of time (or if it’s an evergreen funnel, like mine, mention it a couple times per month as you go along!)
3. Add the page you’ve embedded your quiz on as a menu option on your website!
4. Add a button to take your quiz directly under your header on your website homepage where it’s nice and visible! (or in an announcement bar up top)
5. Share about your valuable resources you’re giving away for anyone who signs on (aka, your funnel!!) when you guest blog post, are a guest on a podcast, or at a networking event
6. Create a couple pin graphics specifically for your quiz and share them to pinterest periodically. (this is my favorite – and my largest traffic driver to my evergreen quiz!)
Keep in touch with your audience, offering them high-value tips and info through email such as via a weekly “e-newsletter” or email, and keep those leads “warm” – because the last step is launching your core product or service to your email list. This is powerful because your email list already knows exactly who you are, they’ve spent time reading your emails, taking your fun Interact quiz, and by now, they’ve received quite a bit of high value information from you that’s been quite helpful for them in their life, through your email sequences. So now that you’re ready to “make the sale”, your leads will be that much more likely to purchase from you because you’ve been keeping in touch with them on a consistent basis.

I like to always know that I have served my audience well before I begin to sell to them. And that’s what I’d hope you’d take away most from this post, is to create a lead funnel that truly speaks to your audience and customizes an experience they’ll enjoy and receive value from. Interact helps me do this easily.

How My Funnel Drives Leads to my List on Auto-pilot

My main lead funnel continues to bring in new leads every single week to my email list (on autopilot!) because I took that initial time to set it up inside Interact, and took time to write out a thoughtful, valuable email nurture sequence to nurture those new leads into relationship with my business by providing them with content they were excited to receive.

I love that my funnel continues to weekly add to the list of audience members that my business gets to serve, and I barely have to think about it.

This has freed up time for me to work on my core offer and focus on my work with clients.

“But Susan, I don’t have a core offer to sell to my audience yet… do I still need to worry about having an email list?”

Yes, my friend. It’s never too early to start building your email list by using a lead funnel. And Interact is making it easy for you and for us, and we can have our funnels up and running in no time.

At the time I built my funnel, I didn’t have a clear vision of what I would sell to my audience. But 6 months later, I did. And by the time I was ready and had a clear offer (aka service) to launch to my list, my list had already been growing (because of my funnel!) for those six months beforehand.

I can’t encourage you enough to start your lead generation funnel today, so that even if you don’t have an offer to sell to your audience right away – simply continue to email them tips, tricks, and weekly (or hey, even monthly!) advice or inspiration. That will help you keep that list nice and “warm” so that when you’re ready (and they’re ready, because now they have gotten to know you!) you can MAKE THAT SALE.

Preview my Funnel and Start Building Yours (Step By Step!)

I go into depth in this post here about how I initially built my lead favorite lead funnel on Interact. This is the funnel that continues to perform well for me.

This post also offers step by step clear instructions (with photos, for us visual learners!) so you can clearly see how I built the funnel I refer to in this post!