You already know how the traditional marketing funnel works:

Top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel.

Awareness, consideration, decision.

Cold lead, warm lead, hot lead.

Nice and neat.

Top to bottom.

One direction.

It's a great model that still works, but I don't think it's the best model anymore.

The traditional funnel assumes your subscribers move through your world in a straight line. That they find you on socials, sign up for your lead magnet, get your emails, and then buy.

But that's not what they're doing.

Here's what your subscribers are actually doing:

They sign up for your lead magnet. They read your welcome sequence (assuming you have one!). They get your newsletter for a few weeks. Then they find your podcast and start bingeing. They find your Instagram and hit "follow", but probably just lurk for a while. They stay in your orbit for a few weeks or months, digesting your content on each of these platforms before one day, they decide to click the buy button at the bottom of an email you sent on a random Tuesday.

That's not a funnel. That's a zigzag.

Subscriber behaviour is zigzag, not linear – but most people are still building as if it were.

Grace Andrews (who used to work at Diary of a CEO) talks about us needing to build a Brand World instead of a funnel now.

The idea being that your Brand World is made up of repeatable touchpoints that consistently reinforce the same story, the same messaging, the same feeling across every platform.

Every platform you're on isn't a separate funnel... Grace says it's a door into the same world. Your podcast is a door. Your Instagram is a door. Your guest appearance on someone else's show is a door. Your newsletter is a door.

Your subscribers walk in and out of those doors constantly. They don't pick one door and stay inside. They open three, four, eleven of them before they ever buy.

Daniel Priestley calls this the 7-11-4 rule in his book Oversubscribed. Before someone buys from you, he says, they need to have consumed 7 hours of your content, across 11 individual interactions, on 4 different platforms.

7 hours.

11 interactions.

4 platforms (of your choice, and IRL counts too).

Which brings me to the part most people get wrong — the last point of contact problem.

When a sale comes in, we credit the conversion to whatever someone experienced right before they clicked. That last point of contact might be an Instagram post. A podcast episode. A YouTube video. An email.

Whatever it was, that's what we decide has secured the conversion. But the last point of contact is never the whole story.

It might be the last thing they interacted with, sure. But it's probably not the first – maybe not even the tenth. It might be interaction number eleven in a two-month conversation that started in a completely different medium/platform — and we're handing one medium all the credit, as if it did the job on its own.

That's why I don't ever take full credit for client results.

My emails were one of the doors they walked through, and they did their job very well — in conjunction with the already existing podcast that nurtures, the Instagram that entertains, the YouTube channel that educates, and whatever other content subscribers had been swimming around in for weeks before the click.

So what do you do with this information?

You stop building your business like it's a funnel and start building it like a world.

You make sure every door – every platform, every piece of content, every email – points to a consistent message.

You stop obsessing over "where the sale came from" and start paying attention to the compounding effect of showing up across multiple places, saying the same thing in different ways.

And here's the thing – I'm not saying your emails can't sell on their own. They absolutely can. I know newsletter-only businesses that are doing really well. Email is THE most powerful marketing tool we have.

But email is strongest when it works alongside other mediums.

When your newsletter is one door of many that all open into the same world. When your podcast is reinforcing what your emails are saying, and your Instagram is reinforcing what your podcast is saying, and your guest appearances are reinforcing all of it.

Your newsletter is a door. A really important door. Maybe even the most important one.

But it doesn't have to be the only door. It works better when there are others, too.

Eman :)

PS. If you want to build a newsletter that's one strong door into a bigger world, my course, Subscriber-Led Sales, can help.

​Join the waitlist here. Waitlisters get first access when the doors next open.

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