In this blog post, you are going to learn about the three types of sales funnels that I’ve used to generate multiple millions of dollars online.
At the end, you will also learn my number one tip for making everything work together seamlessly in your respective company or business.
Let’s dive into it.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is just a series of pages in order. It isn’t anything special!
You can learn more about sales funnel philosophy here but, it is important to understand that they are not marketing rocket science. It's really just content that increases awareness.
The reason why people would use a sales funnel is to guide their visitors through a series of pages where people will be likely to take action and turn into a lead or a paying customer.
Making sure that any funnel you create is built in the the right way and arranged so that they will work together, will inspire your prospect to take action!
How to Create a Sales Funnel That Makes MONEY
Here are the five key components necessary to create a sales funnel that makes money.
They are
- Traffic
- Opt in / Email List
- Relationship / Trust
- Solve A Problem
- Sales page
Sales Funnel Traffic
There are may different places you can get traffic from. You don't need to pay for marketing, but if you do, learning Facebook advertising is the way to go!
Organic marketing is the most effective, dependable types of traffic that you can get.
People finding you when they are looking for your product or service, the problems you solve, and the solutions you provide.
But in order to make it work, you have to be a consistent content creator.
Maximizing Sales Funnel Conversions With Your Email List
When building out your sales funnel stages in your sales process, lots of your content will be designed to drive prospects to sign up for a lead magnet.
Your aim is to build a list full of prospect who want to learn more about your product or service ... but also making sure each stage of your sales funnel will help you utilize the email list you already have to make sales and convert leads.
Build a Relationship with Your Audience
Building a relationship and trust with your audience is the one thing you need to focus on first, before trying to sell them anything. Not doing this will make your conversions suffer.
Unless people trust you, they are not going to opt-in to your email list or buy your products, which renders your sales process & marketing worthless.
Here's how to build this trust...
- Create awesome, compelling marketing and content on your website and online through blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, social media posts, etc that increase their interest in you.
- Craft dynamic sales pages that will help prospects to understand how you can help them
- Produce sales copy that will outline the benefits of what you have to offer
- Show your lead/prospect how you can actually help them with their unique problem via storytelling
Solve The Problems Of Your Prospects
If your sales funnel doesn't solve your customer problems, it's simply not going to work.
People will buy your product or service, only if it solves a problem in their life. If you don't have awareness & interest in your prospects problems you are going to have problems and your marketing won't work!
When you have this level of awareness & interest, decision making regarding your product and whether or not your prospect should buy it becomes easier.
You don't need a fancy sales team when you got this in place. A Sales team won't generate you half as good results as you will get by nailing your lead/prospects problems and solving it effectively.
3 Multi-Million Dollar Sale Funnels
At the core base of its design, a successful landing page is a single-button page on your website that is crafted to generate one specific response from visitors.
Many people believe that purchasing a drag and drop sales funnel is the answer.... it most definitely isn’t!
The key to a multi-million dollar sale funnel is in its design.
Here’s a visual explanation of these three sales funnels.
Let me explain the 3 sales funnels...
1. Cold Traffic Sales Funnel Template
The cold traffic funnel works by taking people who have seen your products and services before, helping them become aware of your company and turn into buyers...
Money made with this funnel does not go back into your pocket. Cashflow generated will be reinvest into:
- SEO team
- Pinterest marketing,
- Facebook ads, etc.
This is called a self-liquidating offer.
Multiple Traffic Sources (Sales Funnel Stage 1)
I use multiple different types of traffic sources for this funnel, including:
- Blog traffic, which goes through a popup with a ribbon. I have a lot of blog posts bringing organic traffic onto my site, where popups and ribbons attempt to start a prospect down the funnel
- Pinterest traffic
- YouTube traffic
- Instagram Stories
- Facebook organic
- Facebook Pay-Per-Click
Landing Page - (Sales Funnel Stage 2)
Eventually, all of these traffic sources lead viewers to a landing page.
This is just a simple opt-in page.
This page basically just offers visitors something free (a lead magnet) in exchange for their email.
Of all the sales funnel stages, this one is often made way too complex.
Here's an ultra quick checklist:
- Keep everything above the fold
- Have a compelling headline
- 3 bullet points that tell the benefits
- An Image of your product
- and call to action button...
That’s it! Keep it simple.
Email List/ Follow Up Sequence (Sales Funnel Stage 3)
After the opt-in page, two things happen.
First, people are added to my email list.
After opting-in to my list,
- people will get a follow up sequence…
- then they move on to a ‘broadcast list’...
The broadcast list is where we continue to build the relationship and eventually marketing my product or service.
This is how we continually work toward giving them value while they move through our sales funnel
At the moment, my follow up sequence is somewhere around 7 or 8 emails.
After the opt-in, people see what is called an OTO page.
One Time Offer (OTO) - Stage 4
OTO stands for ‘One Time Offer.’
This is a page that shows our first product that is for sale.
I have tested a huge range of price-points here, from $7 all the way up to $97.
In our business, we are running a $27 special on a product that originally retailed at about $77.
In other words, offer customers a massive discount
Now, after the OTO, after the customer has filled in their credit card info, we take them to another page where they are offered an upsell.
This is what we call our ‘One Click Upsell.’ This needs to be an actual one-click upsell, where they are not required to re-enter their credit card information a second time.
At present our business runs a $97 product as the upsell, though it is discounted down from about $297.
The idea here is that, if people are interested in buying the first product, you can offer them an upsell that provides even more value for the money than the first offer, at an extremely discounted price.
This makes customers think “Why wouldn’t I buy that? That is such a great deal!”
2. Membership Sales Funnel
This second example is one that customers see after they have made a purchase or been added to my email list.
Our membership program funnel has two different entrance points.
- Opt in list
- Social media ads
The first one is email. My email list is converting really, really well right now when we send them to our monthly access page… though I do still occasionally send them to my $1 trial page as well.
The second traffic source that I use is Facebook Ads. And there are two ways that I use Facebook Ads to bring traffic into this funnel.
In some cases, I am actually retargeting members of our list, as well as customers who have already purchased something, with ads taking them directly to our monthly membership page.
The next group of people we are targeting with Facebook ads is the group that clicks through the monthly access page to go to the checkout, but never buys anything.
This group is actually retargeted with ads that are trying to send them to our $1 trial page.
Membership Program - Recurring Revenue
If you can offer some kind of product, training, or service that will compel your audience to sign up for a membership, then you’ve got it made. That’s recurring revenue and that's pure gold.
The Monthly Access Stage
The monthly access entry point leads prospects to monthly membership programs ranging in price from $37 a month to $97 a month.
But we are also offering a $1 trial that allows potential customer to try out the membership program for 7 days.
So, a prospect can either choose to sign up for the monthly, or take the $1 trial...
Which signs them up for the monthly as well, unless they opt-out of it.
You could offer a free trial, it works for some people. However I do not offer a free trial personally.
Not every prospect is directed to both. Usually, we choose which one they are seeing, based on how they are entering the funnel.
But the point is that this gives us two different methods for pitching the monthly access membership to potential customers.
Also, both of these entrance points lead toward an annual membership upsell.
The Annual Access Savings Stage
Our Annual Access Upsell allows customers to save about 50% by pre-paying for an entire year of access.
It basically the sales process works like this... They click to sign up for the Monthly Access and fill out their credit card info. But then, they are taken to a screen that says ‘Hey, wait… do you want to save even more money by signing up for a year?’
The idea here is to make them aware of how much money they will save doing it this way, and may jump on the offer.
But of course, the membership needs to be good
You would be surprised by how many people don’t put enough care and effort into that part!
3. Simple Offer Sales Funnel
This is absolutely the simplest funnel that we run. But… it is the most worthy of noting, and that is why I am going to talk about it for you that made it this far in the post.
It is, quite simply, an offer/sales page.
That’s it!
No fancy series of stages...
- The company sends a sales offer to our email list
- or we post a coupon code on social media.
This is because the awareness is already there!
We have made more money with standard, basic sales pages that only sell one thing, than we have with any other type of sales funnel.
Your sales funnel stages don't need to be complicated. Sometimes, the simplest ones can generate the biggest return from your marketing.
As for traffic…
I usually send members of my opt in list to this sort of sales funnel.
I also use retargeting Facebook ads to either target:
- Those who were somewhat interested before
- Or those who are interested in similar products online.
This was the first funnel design that we used. We ran marketing to this for about 3 years before I added a one-click upsell page at the end, and an opt-in page at the beginning. That is when it turned into the ‘Cold Traffic Funnel’ that we now use at the front-end of our funnel structure.
Nowadays, this is the type of funnel I use when I am offering new products to our email list.
But still… a simple, single-page sales/offer, when well-written with decent copywriting, is a super-compelling sales piece!
We’ve sold hundreds of different types of products with this type of funnel.
Start fast with a simple sales page and grow from there!
Boss It Up with a One-Click Upsell On Your Sales Funnel
This last page, the offer/sales page, could probably be improved with a one-click upsell. We aren’t currently doing this at the moment, but it could absolutely be something to look into for the bottom of the funnel.
With that being said, it is really important to understand how the stages work together to create a click-trail.
Let’s talk about that...
Cold Traffic Funnel
Your cold traffic funnel may require some tweaking and adjustment to get right. But that is to be expected. It takes time to dial this in, including the marketing.
But the point is that IT WORKS. A sales funnel don’t need to be super complicated to get the job done. I have proven this in my own business.
As for how this funnel works together with the others… this is literally my cold traffic funnel. I am basically targeting potential new customers with this funnel, and bringing them in from places like:
- Pinterest,
- YouTube,
- Blog SEO traffic,
- etc.
Membership Program
Membership programs take some adjusting to get right. They need to be worth the money to your audience. If you can figure this out, they are the gold-standard for paid content… because of the recurring income.
This provides security to really grow your business.
Once a lead opts-in to your email list through the cold-traffic funnel, they will likely have interest in getting more involved… which is why we use this as funnel number 2, to peak there interest, get them to sign up and bring them into our ‘inner fold’ to help them even more and increase their interest for our products.
As you can see, each funnel has a specific purpose
I’ve figured this out over years of testing, and it actually works.
And then, we have our sales pages, which basically allow us to release and sell products to our customers… usually through our email list.
Each sales funnel works together creating a machine to target and retarget as necessary, to bring the most value to our customers and also to give us the best chance of generating new customers who could find help and value in our products and services.
One-Click Upsell On Your Sales Funnel in Action:
A one-click upsell is really awesome, because it offers the customer an even larger value for even less money. This is helping them a lot, but it is also helping you to sell a product, membership, or service that is worth more.
But remember…
it is all about helping people, and that is the thing you need to keep in mind.
Again that's:
- Help your cold audience
- Help your leads
- Provide value to current people who made a purchase
- Help and provide value to everyone each step of the way!
If they are clicking on your offer, why would you upsell to them? What could you be offering in addition to your main offer that would actually be even more beneficial to them?
These are the types of questions you want to ask before creating your sales process and each stage of your sales pipeline.
How to Keep Your Income Flowing Through Your Sales Funnel
Here are 4 of the most important tips that I could give anyone looking to use a sales funnel wisely to grow their online digital marketing business…
- Reinvest profits in your Facebook ads
- Keep your marketing campaigns growing
- Keep building and growing an engaged list
- Focus on helping your customers… always
The questions remain:
- How do you build an engaged list?
- And how do you keep them engaged & become aware of your products?
By continuously offering valuable content for them, for free.
Sales Funnel Conclusion
The big goal of my #1 funnel (the cold traffic funnel) is just to build the mailing list.
Sure, there is a chance that those people will buy something later on. But I want an engaged email list more than anything else.
Why? Because it allows me to help them more, and that's the key to success.
Remember how I told you that I was going to show you the number one BIGGEST piece of advice that has allowed me to earn 6-figure-money online with my own sales funnels?
Well, here it is.
Value
You want to deliver value. That’s what it is all about.
When you know how to give the most value, you win!
Please leave a comment and let me know if this post has helped you.
Let me know in the comments, and do not hesitate to ask any questions!
See you next time!