Category: Marketing

As an online marketer, you understand marketing’s importance: Without marketing, your business would eventually fail due to the absence of new customers.

Successful online marketers know something amateurs don’t.

A strategically planned and meticulously designed sales funnel can bring in boatloads of money – even for average products.

But the best product in the world is dead in the water with no sales funnel.

If you haven’t already put time and effort into this mission, now is the time to start; and one easy way to start is the utilization of a sales funnel.

Below, I’m going to show you how to leverage sales funnels to create hundreds of thousands of revenue per month.

What exactly is a sales funnel and why you need one?

A sales funnel refers to the online buying process a business leads prospects through, leading to a purchase of your product or service.  Anyone out there on the web who is not your client is a prospect.  

There are four stages of a sales funnel.

Phase 1: Awareness

Prospects are introduced to you.  You’ve identified a particular problem or frustration and you’re providing your solutions by way of content, products, and/or service.  Once you’ve identified a particular problem or frustration, the process of awareness comes through visibility in places like Facebook (social media), ads, google searches.  To get people to the awareness stage you must generate and drive traffic to this first stage of your funnel.

Phase 2: Interest

After you’ve created quality information in the awareness stage, you’ll find those who are even more interested and then they become prospects that are active and engaged.  They return and voluntarily choose you to continue to learn from. 

Phase 3: Decision

During this phase, active prospects are deciding whether or not to take advantage of your solution (your product or service).

The active prospect is paying close attention to the details of your solution (what you’re offering: programs, bonuses, refund policies, guarantees, etc…). Also during this phase, the sales offer is being presented to active prospects.

Phase 4: Action

This is the active prospects’ final stage and is either becoming a customer or client of yours (or not).  This is when contracts are signed and terms and conditions are agreed upon.  Money is exchanged and you have a new customer or client.

The mechanics of a great sales funnel

Create a great landing page

Your website’s landing page is the first impression potential customers will instantly have of your business. A good landing page will also encourage visitors to sign up for some sort of list, or subscribe to the website. This gives you that all-important contact information, which becomes your first line of communication.

Present a front-end offer

The next step is to present potential customers with the opportunity to buy a product or procure your service. When constructing your main front-end products and associated upsell offers, you should be building your funnel with the intention of solving your prospect’s problems.

Give an upsell offer on the back end

Offer your customers who just bought or are about to buy a product or service the opportunity to upsize, or upgrade that service. For example, create an offer that will deliver even more benefits to the customer they upgrade. This strategy is called an upsell.

Consider this the McDonald’s combo, and if you wish to Super Size your meal. You are offering your customers more substance if they choose to upgrade, which will give them more value. Of course, that also means you make more money because an upsell typically involves a larger or more expensive item or service.

Offer a downsize option

In the same way that you encouraged customers to upgrade services in the upsell step, this element of the funnel calls for you to offer a downgrade option to certain customers.

A downsize option doesn’t represent a failure and should not be looked upon as the loss of a sale. Instead, consider this a way to keep a customer unable to buy from you due to budget constraints. Keep in mind that those constraints may change. Be considerate and offer cheaper options for these individuals to keep them as potential customers.

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The steps listed here are geared to a business with an online presence. Of course, this might not describe your particular business. However, every business can benefit from the sales funnel model.

Your potential customer’s category, which represents the greatest amount of people, goes on top of the funnel; and the smallest category, established customers, goes on the bottom. The categories in between may be altered to meet your specific business’s needs and sales goals.

Nate Leung