Understanding A Sales Funnel

By now, you must be wondering – what on earth is a Sales Funnel? In a simple term; a Sales Funnel is a marketing strategy. It plays a crucial role in helping you achieve the 7 figure (or more!) success with your digital business.

It is a series of different stages, specially designed to move your prospects from the beginning, where they gain awareness of your brand or product, to the point where they end up purchasing your product(s) as customers and repeat customers.

In short, the Sales Funnel is a highly specific, stage-by-stage marketing process, where prospects are converted into customers.

Its name is as such due to its diagram’s resemblance to a funnel. The top consists of larger numbers of prospects – potential customers, and then narrows down to smaller numbers of convinced, committed customers of your product. Like the actual household tool used to transfer liquids from one container to another while preventing spills and waste, this funnel also serves to increase the probability of you securing online sales while maximizing your resources, and reducing the chances of losing customers.

Each stage comprises of individuals (or multiple) marketing tools, such as landing pages, emails and the like, depending on what you are hoping to achieve with your sales funnel.

To be able to gain maximum benefit from using a sales funnel, understanding of its various parts and stages is important – this helps you to be able to plan and strategize accordingly.

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Sales Funnel – Your Way For Business Success

An effective Sales Funnel is the key to a successful digital business; it’s how well you plan and execute it that sets your online business apart from the rest. It is dependent on whether you understand each phase of your funnel and can successfully monetize the different stages along the line.

Not convinced? Here are 4 main reasons you need a sales funnel:

  1. If you sell only one product today, it is suicide. No successful business has ever made money by selling only one product.
  2. If you are not selling it, your customers will buy it from someone else. So, why not make that you?
  3. You stand to make more money for the same amount of effort.
  4. Your affiliates are keener to promote you, as they are able to make more commissions as well.

Therefore, you need to carefully engineer a funnel for your customers to go through. What you have to realize is different customers require different treatment and different processes.

Components Of A Sales Funnel

An ideal Sales Funnel consists of these few components:

  1. Frontend
  2. Upsell 1
  3. Upsell 2
  4. Downsell
  5. Backend

So, let us pick them one after the other.

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Frontend

The Frontend is the first stage of the Sales Funnel. This part is where you walk your prospects through your offer; at this point, no one would have bought anything from you yet.

At this stage, what you would want to do is to attract prospects. One way to do that is offering potential customers your products at low to medium price range.

At this point of the Sales Funnel, you’re not looking at making a profit yet – your focus here is to drive up traffic volume. Not only has that pricing for your offer as minimized the risks for prospects, monetary wise – making it more likely for them to make a purchase.

This product offering here would be one that is most visible, and one that prospects will buy first. It would also be the product that would be most prominently displayed on your website or landing page – again, your aim is to use this as a bait to reel visitors in.

Your offer here can come in the form of an E-book, a video or even a software product. Whatever the product, it should, most importantly, provide value. Good value creates happy customers, which in turn make them more likely to stick around.

Here’s an example. Your frontend product can come in the form of software to assist Internet marketers to create and edit their bonus pages without the need of complex knowledge of coding and design. This product solves a problem (the complexity of creating bonus pages), and provides value. Its low price point makes it a low-risk buy for prospects, and when they find out just how useful the product is, they’d be more likely to look forward to other products you have for sale.

Upsells

The second stage of the funnel is your Upsells.

Here, I recommend having at least 2 upsells as part of your Sales Funnel. You don’t need to limit yourself to just one additional offer.

In fact, you’d be surprised – some of your clients are more than willing to invest in different offers and products.

This stage is where the clients are given the opportunity to upgrade their frontend offer. Here, you sell a pricier, upgraded version of your previous offer that the customer already owns, or provide clients with the opportunity to add extra features or to get adds ons for their existing product, which will even be more helpful to their needs.

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The key here is to increase value, and making the upsell essential and natural.

Here’s how you do this. When the visitors have filled in the second step of the Frontend and click the submit button, you then direct them to a special One Time Offer or OTO – also known as the Upsell. This is where you promote your upgrade or add ons.

Let’s take the same example of the same bonus page software I mentioned earlier. Here, as the upsell, you offer the deluxe, more advanced version of the same software product where there is an upgrade in value – the product’s

library is tripled as compared to the frontend offer. To reflect the increased value the product offers, the price is adjusted to be a little pricier than the original product, which is $48.86.

The next important aspect is how you structure your OTO. Obtaining the second ‘Yes’ from your clients is 80% dependent on your offer structure and 20% script.

Here’s a couple of tips on how you should structure your Upsell offer:

 Don’t sell more of the same offer.

This is one of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make when it comes to upsells. They try to sell more of what the customers just bought at the frontend. For instance, as mentioned above if you have already provided a book on dating tips your next offer should not be of the same thing.

 Don’t sell a totally random product.

The next major mistake that is done is selling random, unrelated products. When there is no logical connection between your frontend and your upsells, you will automatically kill conversions.

 Focus on the next thing.

This is one of the smartest ways to do upsells. For instance, if your client has already purchased the dating tips book, you know that his or her end goal is to find a partner. Think of what your audience will be interested to know more of next in that context. You can offer them an upsell on how to dress to impress on their first date, or even on personality and character building to attract their other half. Those types of upsells will convert well, as they are related to the end goal of the audience.

Again, it is worth remembering that not all will purchase your upsells – there are people out there who are content with just one product.

Downsell

So, we know that not all customers will buy into your upsell offer. Some are bound to decline the offer, no matter how good the upsell may seem.

And here, is where the downsell offer comes in.

The downsell is where you offer the person who rejected your offer an alternative product, at a much lower price.

The benefit here is that although the customer has declined your original upsell offer, at least they still bought something else – which meant that you still earn something from your sales efforts, as opposed to nothing without the downsell. Plus, if the customer ends up liking your downsell product, you may have just earned yourself another very likely repeat buyer.

However, you also do not want to risk seeming too desperate or annoying with your downsell. And you also do not want to encourage bad buying behavior – people who think that they can get a better deal by declining your initial, more pricey offer.

There is a simple, foolproof method in executing this stage of the Sales Funnel. All you have to do is just remove the bonuses from your offer and lower the price of the product. That’s it!

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For instance, if your original offer is $97, you can lower the price by $30, remove the bonuses and then make the same offer.

An example would be offering less advanced training videos at a lower price online, as opposed to the original training video offer that is bundled with other bonus videos.

Backend

The final phase of the Sales Funnel is called the Backend funnel.

Here is the stage where you bring out your highest valued (and usually, priciest) offer – often with more/deeper information, or more access to you.

This is where you gain maximum profit, as it is where you can charge at a premium rate. Due to its value and pricing nature, Backend products are usually offered a few days after the other funnel stages.

The Backend offer is usually targeted towards a small, very responsive group of customers. These small groups are customers who have travelled from the frontend stage, managed to harness significant value from the products they have either gotten for free or bought from you, and are convinced enough, so much so that they look forward to buy more from you.

Some examples of backend offers are exclusive offers like private coaching or training programs. These trainings are usually referred to as “High-Ticket.”

The main idea of a sales funnel is to filter prospects and find your hyper-responsive buyers. Therefore, you do not have as many people reaching your backend as they do in the frontend. It is common that only 1%-2% of the overall prospects entering your frontend funnel make it to the backend. But hey, they are spending big bucks; so, that is completely fine.

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