What Is A Sales Funnel & What Is Its Role In Marketing
So you want to know what a sales funnel is? Well, if you’re interested in catching new leads and growing your income, then pay close attention! A sales funnel is a proven marketing process that will bring you new leads and revenue!
What Is A Sales Funnel | Marketing Basics
You know, when I was a brand-new speaker and coach, I came across the question, “What is a sales funnel?”
Let me tell you, I was just as confused as you are. I didn’t even know how to spell it right! I didn’t want to look at funnels charts because I didn’t know what they were.
But as I built my multi-million-dollar empire, I learned so much about what a sales funnel is and this sales funnel currently helps us bring in almost 11,000 leads a month, which is amazing. 10,400 last month to be exact.
Sales funnels, therefore, are your vehicle for achieving a complete lifestyle-friendly business that guarantees an unlimited income for you.
The Sales Funnel Explained: Its Role In Email Marketing
What is a sales funnel? It’s really simple when you understand it. The first objective is to get a person to give you their email address so you can begin your email marketing process and grow your mailing list.
You often hear in marketing, “I’ll give away some type of free gift. Here is the free gift.” A lot of times you’ll see a free gift come in the form of a free download, like a PDF, or a case study. A free gift may be a free e-book. You can also have free consultations, which is one of the effective methods to bring in your dream clients.
The reason we give away those free gifts to people is we want an email address.
Understanding The Influence Of The Free Gift
Speaking my truth and sharing my story gave me the ultimate freedom. pic.twitter.com/MMoBqpwc13
— Ted McGrath (@ted_mcgrath) October 23, 2017
Bringing somebody into the marketing funnel stages is them wanting to give you their email address in exchange for a free gift.
The moment I capture an email by giving a free gift, they’re now in my funnel. It’s like the email comes in, and like a funnel of water they start coming in through the top and then down into the different products and programs that we eventually want them to buy.
The top of the funnel, where the water comes in, will be the free gift, that’s where the emails come in. Then, once we get a lot of people giving us their email in exchange for the free gift, we want them to buy something, we want them to make a buying decision.
Right after they give us their email and get the free gift, we make what’s called a paid offer. Here are some ideas on how to do this. You will learn more once you join my Product to Millions program.
You’re making these offers early on because you want to have a lot of buyers on your list. These people tend to buy more later. You can bring people into all your other programs, such as your coaching programs, and you can earn money by spreading your message and making a real impact.
You may say, “Ted, this is cheap! I won’t earn a lot of money with that.” You can learn more about high-end offers here, but to be clear, you will get to high-end tiers later. But for now, low-end offers help you get buyers. No one wants to spend hundreds of dollars on someone they don’t know.
Low-tier offers also give money for paid advertising. Why? So we can go get more emails and more customers.
Defining Your End Goal
A sales funnel helps you build your mailing list, but that’s not really our end goal here, our end goal is to get people and enroll them in your coaching programs.
Look at it this way: if they’re not giving me their email and opting in for that free gift, they’re never going to see my offers, right?
I want them to bring their email address in here in exchange for the free gift and make some type of buying decision for a low-tier program. Sometimes, you’ll see people with different price points, maybe $27, $17. It doesn’t really matter what the price point is.
Now after they buy your first offer, it’s easier for you to get them through the upsell, where you can encourage them to buy higher-end offers.
Why is this important? We want them to make a deeper buying decision. Number two, when somebody spends $100, what they’re telling us is they’re a lot more serious than somebody who just gives us their email address.
The more I elevate my clients into bigger buying decisions, the more I come closer to accomplishing my end goal.
What Is A Sales Funnel? Let’s Simplify It Further
How to build profitable relationships through networking: https://t.co/uaUpjUPE4T pic.twitter.com/VmHvbdTntw
— Ted McGrath (@ted_mcgrath) October 22, 2017
A sales funnel is really simple when you think about it. It is bringing your customers deeper and deeper into your funnel until you achieve the transformation you desire for them and that they want. You want to bring them down your funnel so they can eventually make the biggest decision you want, which is to join your highest-end program.
Without this simple funnel to start with, without these simple free and paid offers, the likelihood of them going deeper into the funnel and making bigger decisions isn’t probable because they haven’t made the smaller decisions. You and I know that when somebody takes the first action, they continue to take actions.
When you think about a funnel, we bring them in and they’re broadly interested. But we’re funneling them to the first paid offer, and they’re more interested. They go to the next paid offer here, and they’re even more interested. We funnel them down and down and down to where we get them laser-focused to join our other programs to create the deepest transformation possible.
Getting the Basics of Creating A Sales Funnel
To give you a much clearer idea about the sales funnel, let’s talk about how to make it.
It’s actually a series of online pages. First, you begin with an opt-in page where you can add links that point toward the free gift.
When they add their email and get the free gift, they will see another page that offers a $37 product. There will be a page online that offers a $97 product. I will discuss this more in another post, but I just want to give you some ideas.
These are just pages that are live online, and they are the equivalent of a sales funnel. Pretty simple, right? Usually, I have three pages like this.
“Ted, you get 10,000 leads a month from these three pages?” My answer is “Yes, I do.”
Obviously, there are more techniques which you can learn when you read my blog posts and enroll in my programs, but having three pages is a good start to earning income, right?
One of these sales funnels brings in 4,000 leads. The second sales funnel, just like this, brings in another 4,000. The third sales funnel brings in a little bit under 4,000, but that’s how we get to our 10,000 leads a month.
All I want you to do is create one. That’s it. Don’t worry about the technology now, don’t worry about the sales copy, just get the concept, this is what we’re after.
So what is a sales funnel? It is your guide toward earning your income to help you sustain your business. The funnel is your vehicle to getting people to enroll in your coaching programs or sign up for your events. It is your ticket toward accomplishing your end goal. Understand it and marketing your business will be much easier.
What is a sales funnel for you? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Up Next: Understanding a Marketing Funnel | How To Create One