Sales Funnels Tutorial
Author: Pouya Eti
Using the right sales funnel for your business is very important and in this page we learn all types of sales funnels.
Sales Funnels
What is a funnel?
Hey there! We’re here to talk about the sales funnels. What is a funnel?
In English, this term is very similar to the word crater or filler: a cylinder with one narrow side and one broad side.
The term “sales funnel” in marketing is a designed system by which you direct a lot of traffic into the wide side and get converted final customers from the narrow side.
For example, if you direct 10.000 potential customers into a sales funnel, you may get 50 final customers from the other side.
The results depend on the type of business, your product, the funnel, etc.
There are different funnels with different goals: funnels that capture only emails, phone numbers, sales funnels that are meant to sell the product, etc. We are going to talk about the types of funnels of each category in the following lessons.
It is important to know that before designing a sales funnel, we need to specify our goal. What is the primary goal of the funnel? Depending on the type or price of the product you need to use different funnels.
A funnel blueprint can be the following: you design a funnel for social media platforms through ads, where you aim to get your potential customers’ emails. Then you direct those emails into another funnel, from which you already get your final customers who make a purchase of your product or service and bring revenue to your business.
So in one business process, you can use different funnels, which will help get to your final goal.
Besides designing a sales funnel, we need to focus on its quality. The quality of a funnel can be evaluated through its conversion rate. “Conversion rate” is the percentage of the initial number of potential customers driven to the funnel and final customers who had made a purchase. Usually, a good conversion rate is between 5-10%.
This is the main definition of sales funnels. In the next lesson, we will discuss the different categories of sales funnels; we will discuss ways to create efficient sales funnels to grow your business.
Funnel Types
In this part, we are going to take a look at different categories of funnels.
Each category that we discuss has different sub-categories, and along our course, we will go deeper into exploring each of them. Before studying each category, we need to evoke notions of cold, warm, and hot traffic.
“Traffic” is the people whom we direct into our funnels, expecting them to become actual customers.
The traffic that we direct to our funnels can be cold, warm, and hot.
Cold traffic – are the users who don’t know us, our company, neither our product. They have no information about our business.
Warm traffic – are the people who have some information about you. They have heard about you, they know your business and know your product.
Hot traffic – people who know you well have clear information about your product and are very interested in buying it.
Lead Funnel
The specificity of this is a funnel capturing information – phone numbers, emails, and other types of auxiliary information. As this funnel is not meant for sales, the conversion rate should be higher than sales funnels’.
Inside the lead funnel, we have two sub-categories
- Squeeze page funnel
- Application funnel
Whenever we use lead funnels, we can expect to have a 20-50% conversion rate. When you drive cold traffic of 50K users into the lead funnel, by the end you get 20K emails or phone numbers. These are the people who saw your product, subscribed to your email list, and are in touch with you. So you converted these people from cold traffic to warm traffic. Then you need to put these people to other funnels to convert them from warm to hot traffic. To do this, you need to put them in sales and event funnels. Let’s talk about them.
The sales funnel
This type aims to sell a product. We use this funnel to direct traffic from a source to make final sales and get revenue. This category has three types of sub-categories.
- Tripwire funnel
- Sales letter funnel
- PLF (Product launch funnel)
Because we are making sales through this funnel, the conversion rate will be lower. 5-15% conversion rate for these types of funnels is a good result.
We will have a separate lecture for each of the types of a sales funnel.
Event funnels
- Webinars
- Auto webinars
Why do we need these three types of funnels? How and where can we use them? Keep up to get more information about each one of them in the next lectures.
Squeeze Page Funnels
Welcome to our next class. In this lecture, we will talk about the first sub-category of lead funnels – The squeeze page funnel.
Usually, squeeze page funnel is aimed to capture leads – emails, phone numbers, other contact information.
We see this type of funnel numerous times daily in almost any website we navigate. Usually, we see it in the following structure: separate landing page, which shows us the company/product/service name, short descriptional information, and a subscribe button.
Another squeeze page funnel example is a pop-up on any website, with an offer and subscribe button.
A key factor in this type of funnel is the reward. You have to offer competitive compensation/reward for people in return for providing you with their email address.
My personal example: on my website, I have a note “If you want to learn how to increase the engagement to your Instagram posts, write your email, and you will get a link to my video lesson for FREE.”
I promise a reward to my users for providing me the information I want to get.
A good reward option is a discount. This is an excellent compensation, especially if your users are interested in your product or service.
Besides being advantageous and motivational for the potential clients, the reward must also be clearly mentioned in the description or title. The user must clearly see what will he/she get if they leave their email address.
As I said earlier, the squeeze funnel consists of several important contributes.
First, let’s talk about the title. In this part, you have to hook your potential clients. The title must be engaging; it must provoke curiosity and push your visitors to action. For example, “7 ways to get…” “How to increase your FB post engagement for 20%”, “Key secrets of millionaires,” “10 habits all successful people have”, etc. They provoke interest, don’t they?
The example of my IG squeeze funnel is best. Why? I know that the people, who subscribe to get this lecture, are interested in Instagram. So if I have an Instagram marketing course, I can easily make them warm instead of cold lead by directing them to purchase my webinar.
Button. Most people use “sign up” or “subscribe” buttons, but users usually do not act well on these notions unless they are 100% sure of your product. Instead, it would be best to write it more extraordinarily and interestingly, for example, “Get your 20% discount coupon“. This is the part where you use your creativity to be more efficient.
Instead of writing “sign up to get 50%” you can write a title “Instead of a 15% discount, get your 50% discount from your first order by subscribing to our newsletter. Now go ahead and boldly click the button, “Claim it now.” Do you see the difference? This is a more creative way to ask your website visitors to leave their emails for you.
Another important moment you need to consider: we mentioned before that the lead we are collecting with squeeze page funnels is not only the email but also the phone number of your users. Indeed, it depends on the type of your business and its geography. Still, if you are operating locally, your chances are higher if you do SMS marketing than email marketing because people tend to check their phones more frequently than their emails.
Once again, practice is the most effective way to get better in what you learn, so before heading to the next lecture, take your time and navigate through different websites to check out for successful and unsuccessful squeeze funnel examples.
Application Funnel
If you have ever purchased an expensive product or service, mostly over 500-1000 USD, you have probably gone through the application funnel.
Basically, the client goes through a process of filling in a form with a lot of information about himself, which ends with “We will contact you soon” note.
The advantage is that you obtain relevant, in-depth information about your potential customers, so you can tailor an appropriate sales strategy as they get closer to the end of the funnel.
This is especially true to the products, the price-point of which grows higher. When you launch high-end products, you need to adapt your strategy for each client to make sales. Why? Because it is much harder to get cold traffic to buy a product that costs $9,000 than for a product that costs $15.
But some products are simply more tailored to specific people than they are to others. That is why you use the application form to collect all the necessary information about your potential clients, filter them to sort quality clients, and then make a call to convince them to purchase.
Depending on your business, you can research more to find suitable application funnel types to understand which information is most convenient and applicable for your business.
Trip Wire Funnel
This funnel is meant to make sales of low-cost products around 10$.
Let’s look at how it usually looks like.
First of all, you need to have a landing page for your product, where you direct the traffic, which, by the way, should be warm. Usually, on one column, you write the product description and contact information. On the other one, you direct the users’ steps towards the purchase page: the user writes his/her contact information, credit card details, meets shipping information, etc.
The goal is to bring warm traffic to the landing page, pass it through the tripwire funnel with the highest possible conversion rate.
For example, if you bing traffic of 100 users, the conversion rate is 15%, which means that 15 people will buy the product, and you will get 150$ revenue. As you have only 1 type of product of 10$, your average cart value (ACV) is 10$ – not more, not less. How can we increase that?
One of the common ways to increase ACV is the order bump, also known as OTO (one time offer). It is an additional product available only for this time only for this extra-low price that the buyer can add to his/her cart by simply ticking a box.
Another way to increase the ACV is called “upsells“. Whenever your client makes a purchase, instead of directing them to the “thank you” page, you direct them to another product page with information and pricing, offering to buy another product for 67$, for example. If two, three, or four people from 15 clients agree to buy the upsells page offer, you will have your average cart value increased. You can have one, two, or more upsell pages, but I usually stick to two: I definitely don’t want to annoy my clients.
You have met the traditional upsell strategy in Mc. Donalds. When you order a burger for 4$, they offer you a Cola for 3$, another cheese or barbecue sauce for 3$, ice-cream or dessert for 5$, etc.
So if you want to make more money out of your sales, you need to use these upsell and order bump strategies. Usually, Amazon uses this strategy: you choose a product to buy, they offer additional products that other users generally buy along with it as a package. It helps to increase the ACV.
Sales Letter Funnel
Welcome to the next sub-category of sales funnels, which is called “Sales letter funnel”. It is more or less close to the tripwire funnel that we discussed in the previous lecture.
In the tripwire funnel, we had a simple form and information about the product. That was all.
The sales letter funnel usually works best for products that worth about 10-100$. Not in all cases, of course: it depends on your niche, on business, on type of product, as well, but mainly for the mentioned cost products.
Usually, it operates the following way: you got the landing page or website, there you have a descriptional or advertising video, you have more information about the product, some features and images of the product, a “claim your coupon” or another innovative button, some testimonials, customers review videos, etc. You can put advantages of your product and disadvantages of other products on the market, including weight, measurements, shipping details and dates, and any additional useful information. Every single information here is helpful for users to make a purchase decision.
The rest is the same: you direct them to upsell, purchase and thank you page.
Again, I remind you about the importance of practice. If you want to be successful in this part, look at successful brands‘ and their product pages (I, personally, mainly use Amazon product pages as a guideline). Take your time to investigate the way they use the sales letter funnel. Learn the type of information they put on their products’ description pages; explore and research successful businesses and their strategies, and you will get a lot of useful skills for your own business.
Let’s move on to the next funnel!
Product Lunch Funnel
This is the last sub-category of the sales funnels called the product launch funnel (PLF). Naturally, you use this funnel right before the launch of your product, and, usually, you perform the PLF through email marketing.
So you have the sorted and filtered email list of your potential customer. What next? Every day you send them an email with new information about the product.
The structure is approximately the following:
Day 1 – video about your product
Day 2 – Video # 2 about your product (you can tell the story of the creation of your product, add emotional notes, speak about the idea and process of its design and realization, etc.)
Day 3 – product launch day – with another video of the product, direct your traffic towards the purchase page (credit card details, shipping information, check-out). -> Upsell 1 -> Upsell 2 -> …
So mainly, you send your potential customers daily videos to build the story around the product and then directing them to the last phase – the purchase. Try to make your story more emotional; usually, people react better on emotions, the struggle and victory, love and pain, and the sensitive story behind the product they are about to buy.
This is the main structure of this sub-category; we will not go very deep into details of this funnel, so let’s go ahead and explore the next funnels category – The Event Funnels.
Webinar Funnel
Welcome to the next part, where we start talking about the Event funnels.
There are two types of event funnels- webinars and auto webinars. We are going to talk about them in separate lectures.
The Webinar Funnels:
First of all, you need to know that it’s useful to drive warm traffic to webinar funnels. Via different channels, you lead them to a landing page where they can reserve a seat in your FREE online webinar named “How to….” The information needs to be helpful, so your potential customers will be interested in subscribing and participating in the webinar. So along with useful and actual information, you need to offer them some rewards.
Remember, the higher the reward, the more people will sign up for your webinar and the higher conversion rate you will get.
On the webinar day, you send several emails before the beginning, reminding them about the webinar’s start time, encouraging them not to miss it. This is because usually, only 15% of the subscribers show up to the webinar, so you remind and motivate them to show up.
At the beginning of the webinar, you present yourself, talk about the webinar’s main subject, give the educational part of it, and finally come to the sales part. It would be best if you warned them from the beginning not to leave the webinar and stay until the end because you have something valuable for them that you will present in the last part. For example, you can motivate them to stay until the end by informing them that you will randomly give away three free spots to the full course or similar rewards at the end of your meeting.
Important:
during your webinar, you need to warm up your audience to purchase by talking about the importance and the value of your product, its advantages, etc. After that comes the sales process: you direct them to your landing page or website to purchase your product. Don’t forget the essential parts in the sales phase – the upsell. Always have a package of useful connected products to offer along to your clients.
This much about the webinar funnels and let us go on to the next one to talk about the auto-webinars.
Auto Webinar Funnel
Let’s talk about the next sub-category of sales funnels – auto webinar.
The main process is very similar to the webinar funnel: you drive the traffic, capture their e-mails, do the webinar, make sales at the end, etc.
I know a lady, who makes two million dollar sales per year with only 1 type of product. The main resource of her traffic is Pinterest: she has many posts at Pinterest and drives the traffic to different landing pages. On the landing pages, she describes the problem and offers to subscribe to participate in a webinar, which will help to solve that problem.
She has an interesting option while subscribing for a webinar: she offers different time the webinar will go, and the user could choose a convenient time option for himself. Depending on the time you chose, you start getting many e-mails that thank you for subscribing, provide additional text information about the issue, reminding you about the start time of the webinar, etc. All this process is automated.
The webinar’s main video is pre-recorded, and it usually speaks about one small part of a whole issue. You can then offer to purchase the entire course to your audience as your main product. You should use good sales techniques to sell more on sight: for example, a significant discount for the first 15-30 buyers or a big discount if they purchase the course 30 minutes after the webinar.
The best thing about this funnel is that it is entirely automated: you do it once, and it goes for the rest of its lifetime. You record the webinar once, you put the funnels and the advertisement once, you set the e-mails, and the automated process keeps repeating with every single client.
Winning Offer
Welcome to the next lecture, where we are going to talk about the winning offer.
Today’s competition for any product and in any market is rather challenging; it takes one to have an excellent offer with high value to capture more clients and have a more successful business. This lecture will give you some essential tips on preparing a winning offer, making a better product placement, and making your business more successful.
What is a winning offer? A “winning offer” is an offer that convinces the buyer to choose your product over its competitors in the market.
When you have a product to offer to your customers, you usually have two ways to make it better: lower the price or increase its value.
Example: I had to buy a camera couple of years ago, and I was looking through the offers. I saw a camera for $500 without any accessories, and I also saw another offer of the same camera for $519, coming with lens cleaning tissue, case, stand, and other small accessories. In fact, I needed all these accessories for my camera, so I thought that buying them all would cost more than $19, so the second offer seemed more valuable to me.
Remember, the buyer always seeks to get more value for less money.
So you need to either offer more value for the same price or propose a lower price for the same value.
Offer more value for the same price: think about how you can make your product more valuable. What can you add to its value that your competitors don’t? Maybe you can do free shipping; Or perhaps you can do fast shipping? Perhaps you can add accessories to your product or add some gift cards to it?
In my case, I make high-quality, informative courses, which include all the categories of online marketing. What additional values can I give?
-Main product
-live call
-PDF format of the text lectures.
Those elements are added value to my product. This way, I can design a more valuable and better-looking and winning offer to compete with my competitors’ products.
Again, please, go deep in this lecture and research your competitor’s products and offers; try to understand them and think of how to improve your offer to make it more compatible.
Reverse Engineer
Welcome to the next lecture. Here, we are talking about designing a better “hook, story and offer” strategy and better connecting it to the funnel you have. We are talking about “reverse engineer.“
Some companies have a product but have a hard time coming up with a good offer, relating story, and a hook. They need to do reverse engineering, which means starting from the other side – offer, instead of the hook.
Instead of first thinking about a hook that captures attention for the story that brings you to the offer, we do vice versa. We prepare a winning offer; then, we think of how we can relate to the engaging story.
For example, before becoming an author of marketing courses, I established business of online games. At first, I didn’t have any sales at all, and I knew I was missing something important in my business process. That was why I stood on the path of marketing; I wanted to understand what I was doing wrong. When I learned about marketing and sales techniques, I had better results for my next online games product. My sales got better and better with each product as I learned more and more about marketing strategies. That made me good at it, and I got the idea of teaching other people about what I learned.
Do you see where the story comes from? I have a product, and I think about how I got here and why I got this product. You need to do the same.
Even if you are an affiliate and you don’t own your business or your products, there is always a story behind it. All you need to do is relate it to the product you have and think of a good hook to capture your potential customers’ attention to your story.