A Quick Guide To Sales Funnels

Do you have your own website and want to make money with it? Do you have a product that you want to sell? Then you need to set up a sales funnel.

And this is even more important if you plan on selling a ‘big ticket’ item with a high asking price. Read on and let’s break down precisely what a sales funnel is and why it’s such a valuable tool…

A sales funnel is by far the most effective way to get any product – digital or otherwise – to sell. This way, you are attracting the right kinds of visitors, building their trust and engagement with their brand and then selling to them right at the point when they’re most likely to buy.

As a result, your audience is much more receptive and far more accepting of your marketing messages – which makes all the difference to your conversion rates.

This is the big mistake that so many internet marketers make; they don’t realize that it’s ineffective to simply try and sell something ‘cold’ to strangers in the street.

We can illustrate this point by imagining a watch salesman. Imagine that someone came up to you in the street and offered you a $5,000 watch. Would you buy it? Heck no! And here’s why:

• For starters, you know nothing about this guy, he may well be selling counterfeit goods
• You probably aren’t in the market for a watch and have no interest in buying one right now
• You know nothing about the watch itself. You aren’t wed to it in anyway and you probably think there are nicer and more functional watches out there. Why would you buy the first watch you saw with no background information?
• People don’t tend to spend that kind of money on a whim – they probably have their cashflow tied up in other things

Now try to understand that if you have a sales page that is trying to sell a make money ebook, you’re probably doing the exact same thing. It probably looks every bit as shady, and your visitors are just as likely to say ‘thanks but no thanks’.

Think about it: these people know nothing about you. They probably stumbled upon your website by accident, and they have no reason to believe you aren’t just going to collect their money and then run off into the sunset.

They also probably aren’t in the market to make a big purchase right now. And they probably have no particular interest in making money online/getting fitter – beyond the basic interest that everyone has in these topics.

And if that’s all that you’re offering on your site, then the vast majority of people who land on your page are simply going to leave and never come back. Hence, low conversion rates and very low profits.

So what do you do instead? Well, this is where the sales funnel comes in…

What Exactly Is A Sales Funnel?

With a sales funnel, you are recognizing that you can’t just ‘go in for the kill’ as soon as someone lands on your site. Instead, your interest is going to be retaining them as customers and engaging with them in a meaningful way.

One way you might do this is by getting them to buy something much more inexpensive first – like a short ebook, or in the case of the watch salesman, perhaps a watch strap.

The idea of this is that it’s much easier to sell something small but when you do, you are demonstrating the kind of value you’re capable of delivering and you’re building engagement with the brand. You’ll also be collecting the details of that customer, such that you can market to them further in future.

Your hope then, is that your new customer is going to say ‘that was such a great watch strap, I wonder if they have any good watches?’. Or that they’ll read your free ebook and see mention of your ‘VIP Ultimate Course’ and be interested.

Now they have overcome the trust issue, they know who you are, they know what you represent, and they know that you make good products. So selling something a little more expensive is just a matter of getting them to take that leap.

A sales funnel can be thought of almost as a slide. It can be a series of purchases of increasing value, that inexorably build up momentum and take your visitor closer and closer to the final ‘big’ item.

But that’s not the only thing a sales funnel can be. At the same time, you may wish to include other free stages in your funnel. For example, this might mean that you have a blog, or a mailing list, or a free report. These items work even better because they allow you to capture the people who aren’t yet ready to spend any money with you.

Think of this like the free coffee or the free cake you get outside of Starbucks. You’re just walking past, you’re in a hurry and you’re not ready to buy anything at this point. But then you see a nice snack and it’s completely free, so you think why not? And perhaps while you’re there, you take a flier or a money-off voucher so that you can use those things later on.

For an internet marketer, this is basically what we mean when we talk about content marketing. The objective of content marketing is to get people to become interested in the content you’re sharing, to the point that they will regularly keep checking back of their own volition.

Then maybe they decide they like what you’re offering so much, that they want to subscribe and start hearing more.

Then, once they’re on your mailing list, you might offer them a free seminar. At each stage of the way, they’re becoming more engaged and more interested in your brand – more willing to be marketed to more in the future.

Finally, you then start to offer something a little bigger for a little cash. This might mean an ebook or it might mean a short course. Perhaps it’s an item of clothing! Either way, it’s a small purchase that you need to make as appealing as possible and that will benefit from the fact that your audience now knows you and knows you’re capable of delivering good value.

This is where the concept of the ‘free line’ comes in. The ‘free line’ is the point at which your offerings stop being free and start being charged.

Where you place this free line is in many ways going to define your sales funnel and have perhaps the biggest impact on how successful that funnel is. Some experts on the matter go as far as to suggest that the businesses with the most on offer for free will be the ones that are ultimately the most successful.

How To Optimize Your Sales Funnel

The best sales funnels will use the strategies that we just outlined in the previous chapter but will normally organize this into five separate steps (called ‘touches’). Research suggests that to make a sales costs five touches on average and thus, this should be what you aim for.

From the very first ‘touch’ you should be sowing the seeds of your big sale. And one way you can do this is by focussing on the ‘AIDA’ structure. AIDA stands for:

Awareness

Interest

Desire

Action

These are the stages that you need to guide a new visitor through whenever you try and sell a product, and ideally, they should be in this order! Notice how we once again have five steps – which perfectly fits with our five touches.

So to sell a product, you first simply mention it while providing value and not trying to sell. In your second interaction – perhaps a newsletter – you give a little more information but keep it coy. This should hopefully be enough to pique just a little interest.

Finally, in your follow up email or on your sales page, you are going to try and trigger ‘action’. This last action step is where you start to really sell and it’s where you’re going to ram home the idea and make sure that people really want what you’re offering.

This is where you need to understand the basics of persuasive writing and sales and there are a few things to consider here.

How To Sell

The first challenge?

Getting people to actually stop and listen to what you’re saying. These days, we are all constantly in a rush and we all constantly have a million things we need to be doing. This means that we really don’t have time to spend hours reading long passages of text about why X product is so amazing.

So how do you get your visitors to stick around and actually listen to you? One good suggestion is to use a ‘narrative’ structure. This means you’re going to frame your sales pitch like a story and start off by telling your visitors how your product changed your life.

This works well because we are naturally inclined to listen to stories, and we find it very difficult to stop reading them halfway through. That’s why you’ll often stay up all night watching bad quality TV, even though you’re not really enjoying it!

The next tip is to break your text up into lots of sections and to include long detailed headings. Ideally, your sales pitch should be designed such that someone just skimming straight through it would be able to get all the information they need reading the headlines alone.

Using bold or underlined text can help here too, as it allows readers to pick out the key details in any given sentence.

Then, once you’ve done all this, you need to encourage rapid action. You do this by introducing ‘urgency’ and ‘scarcity’ to increase the illusion that the deal is limited time only and that your audience needs to act NOW.

There’s much more to a successful sales funnel than just this and over time, you’ll learn that there’s much more you can do here. The more you tweak and perfect the funnel and the more you understand the psychology that drives sales, the better you’ll be able to increase your conversion rates and drive more traffic to your site.

Then there’s the matter of marketing and finding targeted customers, and the matter of actually building all of these stages using the best available tools.

If you want to learn more about sales funnels and how you can optimise them to convert better, then check out the featured resource below for a free detailed report; download, read it and take action 😊