*Please note, In this article and others I use the US $ more than the UK £ due to the internet being global and the $ is more recognised as the currency of the internet.*
A sales funnel is a system of generating leads while at the same time generating sales.
With a sales funnel you filter people through a process by offering up a free product, moving on to a low cost product all the way through to a larger more expensive product.
This larger expensive product can either be part of the initial web page funnel, or as part of a longer funnel using an email follow-up sequence or just later as part of a larger plan.
But there will be a plan involved when developing a funnel.
You shouldn’t build a funnel or a landing page without a long term plan and strategy.
The idea is to build an email list and at the same time warming them up to the forthcoming products. A person who buys a cheap item is more likely to buy an expensive item than someone who has never bought anything from you before.
The free product should filter in a large amount of people but a relatively lower amount of people will buy the more expensive products which you offer.
For example, let’s say that you had 1000 people sign up for your free product, as they go through the funnel 200 people buy the second $19.99 product making you £3,998 to help pay towards the advertising costs.
As these people go along the funnel, 10 out of that 200 buy the more advanced expensive product at $1,999 making you a nice $19,990.
But it doesn’t end there.
A sales funnel is live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until you decide to take it down. Meaning that your sales funnel is drawing in new people each and every day… as long as people know it’s there.
Setting up a series of Facebook ads and sponsored posts can have a nice steady stream of people going to your sales funnel 24-7.
Your starting product could be a free consultation, a free video or a free eBook, and you’re more expensive follow up product could be a full training course or even a day’s workshop with you for somewhere around $999 up to $1,999… or possibly more.
So how do you get people to see your funnel?
There are many ways of driving people to it.
There is one way where you create free traffic… but you have to pay for it.
I know, I know, I know… I said it was free traffic, and it is. Some of you may have already spotted that I mentioned it earlier.
Let me explain…
To generate free traffic by spending money (I know that makes no sense but bear with me) is that you create what is known as a break-even offer. More often referred to as the BOP.
This break even offer is usually the second follow-up product offered as soon as a person has signed up for the free product. You could use it as the first offer, but then you risk getting less sign ups to your email list and that should always be a priority.
Start free first, get people to sign up for your free lead magnet then offer them the BOP once they have entered their details and clicked the ‘Send Me My Free’ Product button.
Your break-even-offer should cost somewhere between $9.99 and $49.
This second product will be open and visible as soon as your potential client/customer has signed up for the first free product.
They will instantly be taken to a second page as part of the process and they will be offered the second product which is a more advanced version with more detailed information regarding the topic of the free product that they signed up for.
For example; if your first free product was a short ebook informing people how good SEO can generate free sales on their website, the second product would give them clear step by step instructions on how to do 5 Easy SEO Hacks You Can Do For Free Right Now Which Will Get You Paying Customers By The End Of The Day.
Something like that.
Not wanting to miss out on free paying customers by not doing 5 easy to do SEO hacks, some of the people who signed up for the free SEO report would happily pay somewhere between $9.99 and $49 for the second more detailed guide.
So lets say 1000 people sign up for the free offer, and then 100 people signed up for the second offer, the money that you generated from that sale will actually pay for the advertising that you are running on Facebook sending people to your sales funnel.
Thereabouts, you may make a profit or you may make a loss, but you should at least nearly break even. Meaning that you get your advertising costs back and have built an email list of interested, potential customers for free.
Possibly the best places to advertise your product is on Facebook. You will pay Facebook to get your advert or your sponsored Facebook post out in front of as many people as you can.
The people you will be placing your advert or sponsored post in front of, will be a highly targeted audience found using Facebook’s dedicated advertising dashboard using their huge vault of audience data.
Facebook collects a lot of information about their users including their job positions, their likes and interests. They will know what Facebook pages they have liked and who they are following. This is great news for you.
You can build an audience of people who are interested in the topic which you and your funnel is focused on. You then only spend money on showing your adverts to those people and not to people who couldn’t give two monkeys about you or your product.
The audiences inside Facebook can be highly targeted.
So to recap, the idea with the funnel is that you drive hundreds or thousands of people through your Facebook advert to your free offer. A large number should sign up for the free lead magnet then a smaller amount of people will sign up to your break even offer paying somewhere between $9.99 and $49 which pays for your advertising fees.
Your funnel can either move people onto another webpage and a larger offer or you wait a short while and use a series of emails known as a follow-up sequence to warm them up to a much more expensive product.
This email follow-up sequence will be written so that it keeps people interested in you and keep the information alive in their minds. You will write about the product or products which they have just downloaded and ask how they are getting on.
Your email sequence should be informative and useful, you can send them to recordings of videos where you once again showcase your expertise. All of this is to show the people on your email list that you are ‘da man’ or ‘da woman’.
Emails are sent every day for 5 to 7 days or even as long as you want to send them. Many successful online marketers swear by the ‘daily email’. Mike Shreeve says that sending an email every day can double a company’s annual sales.
Email is very powerful, it is still the most important and best converting method of selling to a business’s fans and followers.
The larger more expensive products that you will be telling your email list about will be a more in-depth training course, one where the focus is no longer on information but now about the successful implementation of the information.
The product could be a series of online video tutorials or possibly a day with you studying everything that that they need to know about that specific topic.
As another example; if your first free offer was a short report about Facebook advertising you would only talk about the theory or the idea behind it.
Your follow-up break-even offer could be a series of successful converting Facebook advert templates and a guide showing how the buyer can use those templates to create adverts which would get them customers or clients and ultimately make them money.
The larger final product in the funnel would be a complete online training course on Facebook advertising or a day’s workshop where you show them live how to run and create campaigns on Facebook that generate a lot of sales .
Understanding the diminishing numbers and the increasing revenue factor…
You must understand that with a sales funnel, the amount of people going through it to the end will diminish. The amount of people buying the more expensive final product will be substantially a lot less than those who signed up for the free report. It’s a given.
You’re free product may attract 7000 people but you should accept that less than 10% may purchase the more expensive product. The percentage could be very small indeed for numerous reasons.
But that is fine, because with your final product being somewhere around $999, you only need to sell a few to basically generate nice large chunk of money.
Now imagine that you built an email list of 5000 people and just 100 of those people bought your product at $999.
That would mean that you have made just shy of $100,000.
Once you have your email list – which is constantly having new names added to it – you can keep reminding them of your products and develop new products to sell to them.
I have recently bought 3 products from one guy since joining his mailing list. All 3 products are different but at the same all loosely connected to the same topic. I still get emails about previous products that I didn’t buy, I still consider buying them and may do one day.
Using well written sales copy, designed to create an emotional response in people can and will increase your sales. A good sales letter or email sequence can increase the sales rate by a couple of percent.
That may not sound a lot but if 2% of 1000 people bought a $1000 product you would make $20,000, a 2% increase to 4% sales rate would mean an extra 20 sales putting a further $20,000 into the pot giving you a total of $40,000.
Just a small percent increase in sales can mean big bucks.
That 2% increase need not cost you any money because it came from changing sentences or improving your sales copy, landing pages and emails.
Your products need to be good, you cannot go promoting any old rubbish but a really well written piece of sales copy and series of emails will make your great product fly.
So, do you have a funnel?
If you haven’t, isn’t it about time that you considered setting one up?
I can help you with that. If you would like to know more, please schedule a 30 minute chat with me here: Book A Call.