Discover the journey from lead to customer. Learn what a sales funnel is and how it works to successfully sell to your audience.
IE 366: What is a Sales Funnel and How Does It Work
What is a sales funnel?
All a sales funnel is, is giving people an opportunity to come into your world and have an idea of what it is that you offer, and then be able to offer them multiple products that you potentially offer.
Now, the thing that I need you to understand about a sales funnel is that you can’t simply mention it once and be done.
There are specific pieces of that sales funnel in order to make this work.
Why is a sales funnel important?
Why exactly is a sales funnel important is because when we’re looking at getting something in front of someone, a product or service that you offer or even an affiliate product or something that’s sponsored, it’s important to have a sales funnel in order to do these things because mentioning something once is not enough.
We know that it takes six to eight times for someone to hear something before they’re going to take any action.
With that in mind, we have to make sure that we have a sales funnel in place that is continually going to get it back in front of them.
And a sales funnel does not have to be software that you pay more money for.
It can simply be the emails that you are providing them with that is going to move them along to see that you can fully solve the problem that they have.
That is why a sales funnel is important.
It shows them that you are the perfect person to help them with the issue that they have because you have a product or service that you offer that is going to do that.
What are the different stages of a sales funnel?
The sales funnel is going to start at the top with an opt in or lead magnet where you’re going to offer them something for free in exchange for their email.
I often recommend that you offer a guide or if you’re a food blogger, it can be an ebook of recipes, but in that ebook of recipes, you have to be able to make yourself unique in that you’re showing them how to do something specific within that cookbook.
The next stage from the opt in is then going to be offering them a tripwire product.
We want that product to be below $25 and I would recommend that if you have an ebook that you make so that it’s 50 percent off, offered for a limited time, say 48 hours.
Now within that sales funnel, in order to get them to see the tripwire, you cannot simply send one email about it.
You have to send multiple promotional emails that consist of:
- An email that makes sure that you’re hitting on the pain points that is solved by that tripwire product
- A question and answer email that answers the questions that they may have about that product. For example, How do I download it? What are the results I can expect to see? How quickly can I see results?
- Your third email can be your testimonial email, where again you hit on a pain point and then you show how someone in your audience had their problems solved with your product for that specific pain point.
- And then your final email is going to be a last chance email, which tells them this is the last chance in order to get this at 50% off for that 48 hours that you allowed for it.
Now, at this point in your sales funnel, we have gone from opt in to tripwire, but we have used a sales sequence in order to do this.
You can continue down your funnel or if you don’t have any other products or services you don’t have to continue the funnel.
You can think about how you can potentially continue that funnel with maybe creating another product down the road once you have a better understanding of your audience so that you can really make sure that you are getting something in front of them.
How does a sales funnel work?
In order to understand how a sales funnel works, we have to look at the numbers or data.
in a previous episode, we talked about the 7 essential email marketing statistics that you need to be taking a look at to truly understand if your emails are effective.
If you are only getting one subscriber per day, and you are looking to see if that is going to convert, you have to have enough people going through it in order to see those numbers.
In order to see that they are actually taking action from it, you need to have a decent amount of people subscribing and going through that funnel in order to determine if it’s working.
Within the sales funnel we’re looking to see that they are opening the emails because open rate is going to come into play with this.
If you have 100 people that have downloaded your opt in within that first week and you are looking to see how it is working, you’re going to look to see what your open rate looks like because if you have 100 people and you have a 40 percent open rate then only 40 people have opened your email.
Now, from the open, you then are going to look at your click rate to see how many people are taking action on those emails in which you are offering the tripwire.
That click rate tells us how many people actually went to that tripwire sales page. So if out of the 40 that opened you have a click rate of 5% then only 2 people clicked through to the sales page.
Now, from that sales page, we are then going to be able to look at how many people bought it and that is our conversion rate. An above average conversion rate on a sales page is 10%, which means that out of those 2 people who made it to the sales, no one bought.
These are all the numbers that we have to take into consideration.
And if these numbers have you thinking, what’s an average?
What are we looking at for each of these?
Each of these has its own average of what you can expect to see and what you should be seeing so that you know what to tweak.
I go into great detail about this in the Insiders Group by breaking down numbers so that we can really make sure that we understand what our expectations should be when we are trying to launch a new product as well as are we pushing out a product through a sales funnel that is actually converting.
If you are someone who has listened to this episode and said, I really want to deep dive on the numbers, I want to understand if I have my ROI with a sales funnel. Then I would highly recommend that you join the insiders group.
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