Flywheel vs Growth Funnel: Which Is Better?

Digital agencies are shaking up their vocabularies. Now, “the funnel” is a thing of the past. In its place, an older model for describing the customer journey has reemerged: the flywheel.

While the funnel only flows down, the flywheel continues to spin once it gains momentum.

Not unlike the funnel, the flywheel is customer-centric. However, the flywheel’s retention-centric strategy is more concerned with retaining customers than it is with converting them.

Explore how businesses like yours can harness the power of the flywheel model to unlock peak customer retention and, as a result, business growth.

The Flywheel: A Brief Introduction

While you can learn more about the flywheel in our in-depth guide, here’s a basic overview.

An engineering flywheel is a mechanism that, once it has gained momentum, continues to spin even without continuous energy input.

In business, the flywheel is a visual model teams can use to represent the customer journey (an alternative to the funnel model). It’s made up of two main rings.

On the outside ring, you have:

• Strangers: Members of your target demographic
• Prospect: People who have started the customer journey
• Customers: People who have purchased your product or service
• Promoters: Past customers who spread the word about your product to strangers

On the inside ring, you have:

• Attract: Turning a stranger into a prospect
• Engage: Turning a prospect into a customer
• Delight: Turning a customer into a promoter

A Retention-Focused Approach

The flywheel model is entirely focused on the needs of the customer, or perhaps more precisely, the people. They’re the entire focus of the outermost ring, whether they’re strangers to your brand or long-time, repeat customers.

But the inside ring is also all about people: attracting them, engaging with them, and delighting them.

Basically, everything hinges on the customer and not on the sales pitch, the marketing campaign, the customer experience, or even the product or service itself. Why?

Remember what we said about the real-life flywheel? It keeps moving once it gains just a little bit of momentum. Well, in this model, the source of that momentum is customer retention.

While every spoke in the flywheel is important, retention is what keeps the momentum alive. Turning customers into promoters (in other words, harnessing the power of word of mouth from loyal customers) is a critical part of this model.

The Start of the Flywheel Momentum

Before a business can retain customers, it has to attract them.

Turning strangers into prospects is the sole focus of your marketing department (or a marketing partner, like a paid social agency). In fact, all three spokes of the inner circle correlate to a specific team:

• The marketing team attracts strangers
• The sales team engages prospects
• The customer experience (CX) team delights customers

Let’s Start your Flywheel

While each of these departments interacts with a different category on the outermost circle, they should all be united in one goal: turning customers into promoters. Even at the start, when the marketing team is attracting strangers to your brand, they’re showcasing a product or service that those strangers will eventually want to promote.

They may even lean on promoters to do so via customer reviews or user-generated content (like unboxing videos), for example. Ultimately, promoters (i.e., retained customers) keep the wheel spinning.

The Spin of the Growth Funnel

Let’s back up: Turning strangers into promoters isn’t instantaneous. After exiting the stranger phase, prospects engage with:

• Sales

  Once marketing serves up prospects, sales can take over. Their role in getting the prospect one step closer to becoming a promoter? Turning them into a customer. By emphasizing the unique value propositions of your product or service, sharing educational content, or providing incentives to buy, sales converts tire-kickers into buyers. This is engagement at its core.

• CX

  Once your sales team has engaged a prospect effectively, it’s time for the CX team to delight them—ideally, enough to turn a one-time customer into a long-time brand loyalist. Refining the product or service, providing exceptional customer support, or engaging with customer feedback are all tactics CX teams use to lay the groundwork for customer retention. Delight turns a customer into a promoter.

Promoters play two key roles that keep the flywheel spinning:

• They promote

  They spread the good word about your product and service to strangers, keeping the wheel spinning.

• They stick around

  They make repeat purchases, offer feedback that helps CX improve the product, and get invested in the success of the brand.

Both of these lead to company growth, which is the center of the flywheel and the ultimate aspiration of every brand.

A Customized Approach to the Flywheel

When brands ditch the funnel for the flywheel, they can recognize just how critical the customer is to brand growth. The flywheel shifts a company’s focus from conversion to retention and, thus, loyalty and word-of-mouth promotion.

While retention provides the momentum to keep the flywheel spinning, marketing is still a critical piece of the model. Your brand needs a marketing approach that harnesses the power of promoters and attracts strangers with promoter potential.

That’s where we come in. In addition to being a full-service digital marketing firm, dblspc is an evolved agency taking your brand to the next level. Beyond this core offering, dblspc is uniquely positioned to elevate your brand within the burgeoning realm of digital AI. We leverage cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies to deliver unparalleled insights, optimize campaigns, and create highly personalized brand experiences. This dual focus ensures that our clients not only achieve their immediate marketing objectives but are also strategically prepared for the future of digital engagement and innovation.

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