The key to success with funnels is moving away from products and into offers. Once you have created offers, you can choose how to sell them. As a rule of thumb, the higher the cost of your offer, the more time you need to take to sell it, and the more suitable it becomes to use what we refer to as presentation funnels. More on that later…
Earlier, or lower down, the Value Ladder is where you should find the lower-priced items, which will always be above the free items you use to build your list and generate leads to upsell. These are known as the unboxing funnels, as illustrated above. So, instead of selling the entire package, in my case, this might represent £500 plus. We unbox them into parts and sell each part on a separate page inside the funnel, as illustrated below:
An example of this is one of our standard offers includes the 7C’s book, the success framework and thirty days Elite membership for £30.00, where the entire product that these elements are part of is closer to £30o before it is unboxed. So I could’ve put together a presentation funnel for the full price, but for those that do not need, want, or feel more comfortable with a cut-down version, I unbox the product and offer the Book, the Framework and a free trial membership for £30.00. So by unboxing the product and designing a new offer, I can attract a lot more people into becoming a customer and then direct them at a slower pace into the higher value products and offers higher up the Value Ladder.
All of these funnels will be explained in greater detail as we progress through the program; for now, I want to give you a taste of the types of funnels you may want to consider using.
Free Plus shipping Funnels
The funnel we refer to as the free plus shipping funnel is another star that can work well. To illustrate the reason for considering this funnel type, I want to share with you the results achieved by one of the best funnel users and what they achieved for the free plus shipping model compared to the traditional web model.
The old way, or should I call it the tradition way, is people find your product and a percentage will sign up. But the majority will not, for various reasons related to the psychology of sales, which we are all susceptible to as humans. So let us say 100 people visit your site metrics show us that when it comes to cold and warm customers, about 1% will sign up, so 1 in 100. If your product has a sale cost of £300, then your gross income from the one hundred is £300.
The alternative is if the same 100 people show up, but this time they go to a free plus packaging and postage offer, statistically, 8% will immediately sign up for the offer, so that is 8 people. as per our strategy, the funnel for the offer includes an upsell, and we know that statistically 25% of the 8 will go ahead and purchase, so that is 2 people, increasing your gross revenue to £600. You can double your sales by simply including an offer with something you are willing to give away at a minimal cost. Of course, these figures can certainly be improved with the right offer and content in the right places.
Order FormBump
After the first few pioneers started using the free plus shipping mechanism, it wasn’t long before the upsell was introduced. When this became fashionable, many marketers went over the top, and many customers were not best pleased. Rather than selling more, the opposite started to happen, and customers became irritated by the multiple upsells that could be found in every funnel. This also had the effect of limiting the number of people that would progress up the Value Ladder.
After research and multiple testing, it was discovered that the maximum upsell should be no more than two per funnel in the unboxing funnel, and those numbers appeared to work the best. Moreover, it was discovered that any more than two started to impact the customer’s lifetime value, and we all want to avoid that! On the other side of the coin, less than two, which also reduced the funnels’ ability to make good money.
Later some of the industry greats in this subject started to shout about the order form bump and how perfect that was for these unboxing funnels. This is nothing more than a small check box on the order form after the customer has completed the credit card details but before they have clicked the submit button. The checkbox offers a lower ticket product. Maybe the best way to look at this is to imagine the checkout at the supermarket and all the low-value last-minute impulse purchases you can make before you pay.
The latest research figures suggest that the Order form Bump can increase sales at the checkout by up to 33% without decreasing the customer’s lifetime value.
Book Funnels
Don’t let the fact that this is called the book funnel mislead you into thinking that if you don’t have a book, this has no use. That could not be further from the truth. These funnels are perfect for selling other information items such as Videos, CDs, DVDs, and MP3s. These are great mechanisms for creating leads, building your sales, and taking people into and up your Value Ladder.
The Sales Page
There are two popular styles for the book funnel. The first one we will look at is the free-plus postage version. We use the very successful and predictable Hook at the top; on the left, we tell them a story and make the offer, and on the right is the order form. In terms of the story, this can be a video, which I have to say seems to work the best.
The first step on the order form should be where the customer fills in the details of where they want the product to be shipped. The second step is filling in the payment card details. On the first page, you must mention that Postage and Packaging need to be paid for to ensure there is no confusion and that way, you will find that more will be happy to complete these card payment details. If you do not m, make this clear, you will also run the risk of upsetting the customer, and then you will never be able to get them to travel higher up your Valuer Ladder’. Finally, I would always end the page by ensuring the product’s scarcity was explained, and the urgency of deciding to buy now as the offer will change and/or disappear. This will hopefully push them over the edge to complete the purchase.
I suggest you use the two-stage order form at the top of the page for offers that use the free plus postage and packaging format. There is some psychology behind this. People, in general, are happy to complete the first part because they do not see you asking for payment card details. Once they get to that part of the order, they continue to complete the information because they are committed to the process.
If you are selling something that requires you to spend a little more time on to build up the customer’s understanding of the value, I do this before I display the price because that is how I was taught to do that myself. An example might be if I were selling something worth £20 to £30 I would probably put the order form at the bottom of the page because I don’t want the price to push them away before I have been given a chance to illustrate the significant value.
Order Form Bump
The best advice I can give you about the order form bump is to make sure you keep this as simple as possible and make it something that does not require much explanation. That is because you only have a short time slot to inspire the customer to add this to the order at the very last minute. So if we look at the book as being the main subject, good bumps will include the following:
- A copy of the audiobook (Would you like to add…).
- An earlier or associated book (A copy of Sales Alchemy, the ultimate sales book).
- Special support with book material (Would you like to add this bespoke support package).
- Framework templates in support of the book (Would you like to add our success templates).
If you have to explain more than just a few words as described on the bullet list above, the conversion will likely not be that high. The order form bump is in the sales flow after the customer has put their payment card details into the form but before they click the submit button.
The Upsell Page(s)
When someone has made a purchase, that is one of the best times to immediately upsell (would you like a large fries with that?) with a special one-time offer, often referred to as OTO. The key to this page is not to have already closed the buying attitude by saying thank you for your order. We need to keep the loop open. So instead, you might want to say something like, ‘Wait, your order is not yet complete…”
The key, I think, to the OTO is not to sell more of the same thing, as this can create a feeling of confusion. If I sell my book on the success framework, I do not want to add a different success framework to create the same outcome differently. So if I was selling the 7C’s program and would not add to this another similar program, but I might add to it the Funnels Mastery, which takes one area of the 7C’s and deep-dives that subject. Now that would be valued.
Although not shown in this illustration, you should add a no thank you button for the OTO. This will help prevent those who do not want this part of the order from coming out of the page without taking the action that will take them to the thank you page and allow them to download what they have already agreed to purchase. It would be my preference to place the button just under the “Upgrade My Order’ button and not just to say No Thank you, but something more notable like this:
Downsell (Optional)
If your OTO is declined, you may want to add the opportunity to downsell; this will either make the price cheaper, if that is practical or offer some payment plan; this will often sweeten the deal, and you will find a few will take you up on this offer. When making it cheaper, do this by taking elements away; you do not want to disadvantage those taking the original offer that would be stupid.
The Thank You Page
On the final page of your funnel, you thank them and give them access to what they have just agreed to purchase. This could be a download, a link or access to a member area where they will find what you have just sold them. You can also use this page to elevate them to the next level of your funnels with an invitation to view something else.
Cart Funnel
When it comes to those of you who are selling a range of physical products which you can add to your cart, they tend to use a system where you go to a page filled with various offers. In many cases, this can confuse the person looking to make a purchase. This has certainly been my own experience, and on more than one occasion, I have left without making any purchase due to this confusion. There is another option that is called the Cart Funnel, and it works along these lines:
Rather than giving your buyer a page packed with a variety of offers, we create one special offer that we know they are looking for (we know that because our content, hooks and lead magnets are attracting those that we know will be interested) and then build into the funnel the bump and upsell items. It is common for lesser known or unknown brands to suffer from a low uptake on items listed on their traditional e-commerice sites and this option is both viable and successful for those styles of business.
The Sales Page
It has been proven tome and again, the best way to sell your physical product is through an offer with a demo of some description.