A funnel is a marketer’s best friend because it helps you to automate and scale your business to levels far beyond anything you could ever do manually by yourself.

 

 

What is Sale Funnel ?

In simple terms, a funnel is a system that you use to convert cold leads and prospects into paying customers. Usually it’s an automated sequence of pre-written follow up messages that start getting sent to a lead once they give you their email address.

 

These pre-written followup messages are carefully crafted using proven copywriting techniques and aim to build trust and win the prospect over, usually through giving a lot of free value over a period of time.

 

For example, you’d be given blog posts, case studies, videos and webinars that will help you solve the specific problem you are interested in, and there is always an option for a paid version of a service or product that will help automate your results or that will help get you better results even faster.

 

Once you have a funnel setup and converting, it’s only a matter of driving more leads to your funnel and then allowing the funnel to convert those leads into clients.

 

This means that when your funnel is up and running, you can concentrate more of your efforts and resources to driving leads from every possible source like paid traffic (PPC), organic traffic (SEO), Youtube, Social Media, Forums etc.

 

 

Benefits of Sales Funnels

There are lots of benefits when we talk about sales funnel , however we can filter out 3 main benefits

 

Upfront work, back-end automation

Initially it takes work to create and setup your funnel. You need to map it out, create the content, create the products or services that you want to sell and put it all together so that it is delivered 100% automatically after the lead opts in to your funnel.

 

Once you have your funnel setup, you can focus purely on driving traffic to the funnel. There is no need to create more products or content (unless you want to increase the value and revenue of your funnel) and it’s pretty much set and forget.

 

Knowing your lead value

The beautiful thing about a funnel is that you are able to calculate to the cent what a lead is worth to you. Let’s say that you have your entire funnel setup and you drive 1000 visitors through that funnel. You will have exact data that tells you the conversion rate,
the open rates, the average revenue you made per visitor etc. and then you can use that to grow your business.

 

For example, if you know that each lead you put through your funnel is worth $10, you know exactly how much you are able to spend on obtaining new leads and still be profitable.

 

You can go and spend $5, $8 or even $9 per lead (through paid traffic, solo ads or other traffic sources) and still be profitable. The more you are able to afford to pay per lead and still be profitable, the more of an edge you will have over your competition.

 

If you can spend $20 per lead and still make money, you’re going to be able to outbid competition who has a lower budget, and ultimately your business will be more successful than your competition because you are able to buy all their leads.

 

Another option when you know what your average lead is worth to you, is to spend even up to that exact amount to obtain leads.

 

This means that you can build an enormous list without paying a cent, and then eventually (if you nurture your list correctly) you can promote a service or product to that enormous list and make a huge amount of money from it.

 

If you don’t know the exact amount that a lead is worth to you, there is no way that you can efficiently grow and scale your business.

 

Sale Possibility

There are many people who make small fortunes doing affiliate marketing. They promote an offer with paid traffic and aim to make more from the offer than they pay for their ads.

 

This is then their profit. However, while they may make a lot of money in the short term, these kinds of campaigns have zero value to a potential buyer. The only money to be made is money from the actual campaign, and not from a possible sale at a multiple of profit.

 

When you have a profitable funnel and you own all the emails of everyone who has gone through that funnel, you make money from the funnel AND potentially from a sale if you ever wanted to get out of the business. Typical online businesses get sold anywhere from profit multiples of 12-36 months.

 

So, if your funnel is netting you $20k per month, you’re not just making $20k per month. You are making $20k per month and have an asset worth potentially $240k-$720k!

 

 

Tools For Building Sales Funnels

To be able to get leads into your automated funnel, you need to capture their email address so you can continue to communicate with them. This can be done through a lead capture form anywhere on your website, but typically a specific kind of page (a squeeze page) is used for this.

 

A squeeze page is designed for one purpose: to get the visitor to enter their email. Typically there are no distractions or links to click on the squeeze page and the only option the visitor has is to either enter their email or close the browser window and leave without giving their email.

 

If you are very good with design and coding, you can create your own squeeze pages. However, for most people this is very frustrating and time consuming.

 

The solution is to use a service that takes care of all the technical stuff for you. For a small monthly fee they allow you access to dozens and dozens of templates for different purposes (squeeze pages, webinar registration pages, thank you pages etc.).

 

This allows you to create beautiful and proven-to-convert squeeze pages in a matter of minutes without the hassle of coding or even owning your own website.

 

1. Leadpages

 

 

Leadpages is a good service for squeeze pages when you are starting out and don’t want to do anything too fancy. They have a decent amount of templates for different purposes and their squeeze pages are very easy to setup and edit.

 

There is very little technical skill required.

 

Pros:

• Inexpensive, starting as low as $37 per month (on the annual billing plan).
• Good split-testing possibilities.
• Very easy to use, no technical skills required

Cons:

• Limited templates and editing options

 

2. Clickfunnels

 

 

Clickfunnels goes beyond just being a simple service for lead page and squeeze page creation. It offers full funnel automation systems, webinar automation, memberships sites, launch funnels and more.

 

You have huge flexibility and the campaign editor makes it rather easy to create any sort of funnel you wish to create. However, due to the flexibility it has, Clickfunnels would be a better choice over Leadpages if you have the budget for it.

 

You will have more flexibility and control, and ultimately that will lead you to have a more automated funnel at the end of the day. Clickfunnels offer a 2 week free trial, so you have no risk when it comes to trying it out.

 

Pros:

• Lead capture pages.
• Full funnel automation.
• Webinar automation

Cons:

• Expensive – starting at $97 per month
• Requires more technical experience to setup

 

 

Emails Autoresponders For Your Sales Funnel

To be able to email your leads after they enter your funnel and to be able to create automated followup sequences you will need an autoresponder service.

 

This allows you to create different email lists for different purposes, schedule emails and content to go out on specific days or at specific times and even send email broadcasts whenever you want to send an email that is not part of your automatic followup sequence.

 

There are literally dozens of email autoresponder services that you can choose from, but to keep things simple we recommend choosing one of the following three:

 

1. Aweber

 

 

Aweber and Getresponse are rather similar. Aweber is slightly more expensive but has nicer templates. Aweber does have the advantage that it’s easier to integrate with many third party sites compared to Getresponse.

 

Before choosing Aweber as your autoresponder, we recommend you try it for a month ( free )

 

Pros:

• Easy user interface.
• High deliverability rates of emails.

Cons:

• Limited options for advanced list sequences.
• Relatively expensive after free 500 subscriber

 

2. Getresponse

 

 

Getresponse is a solid, easy to use email autoresponder that is very similar to Aweber. It’s slightly cheaper and in certain areas has an advantage over Aweber (Getresponse has a built-in landing page creator for example) but in other areas (like third party site integration) it comes out 2nd best compared to Aweber.

 

Either way, Getresponse or Aweber are perfectly suited for getting started at a reasonable price for your email autoresponder campaigns.

 

Again, we’d recommend you try out Getresponse before deciding to stick with it.

 

Pros:

• Free First 500 contacts
• Landing page creator.
• Good split-testing.

Cons:

• Slightly complicated for third party integration

 

3. Keap

 

 

Starting at $169 per month, Keap isn’t cheap. It’s designed to be used by small businesses and up, not necessarily for someone who is just getting started with internet marketing.

 

There are a lot of advantages that come with Keap like merchant account integration, the ability to make very complicated funnels based on actions that your subscribers make or don’t make, the fancy campaign builder, navigation and so on.

 

The disadvantage is that it’s complicated to learn. If you just have basic computer skills it will likely take you 6+ weeks to fully understand the software (and that is if you’re dedicated to going through the training and spending a lot of time with the software).

 

If you’re just starting out and you don’t have a lot of technical and marketing experience, we wouldn’t recommend Keap . If you have experience or you already have an established business and you are looking to improve conversions and take your automation to the next level, then Keap could be a very useful tool for you.

 

Pros:

• Very flexible.
• Good for highly complicated funnels.
• Merchant/shopping cart integration.

Cons:

• Expensive, starting at $169 per month.
• Technical to work with.

 

 

Webinars Automation For Your Funnel

Webinars are online seminars or training sessions designed to teach or give information about a topic while bonding with your audience, building trust and creating an opportunity to sell a high ticket item with ease.

 

Typically webinars are 45-90 minutes in length and follow a specific structure that gives value while continuously keeping the audiences attention until the very funnel end, at which point the remaining audience (a percentage of webinar attendees will not stay for the entire duration of the webinar for various reasons) is practically drooling and ready to buy whatever you have to offer (if you’ve presented the right webinar and have the right offer).

 

If you are selling any sort of high end or monthly recurring billing item, webinars are usually the best way to sell and get the highest conversions.

 

If you want to learn how to create killer webinars without spending a fortune on a product that teaches you how to make killer webinars, watch and study as many webinars as possible that are run by people who do millions of dollars per year in sales (for example Frank Kern, Ryan Deiss, Andy Jenkins and Mike Filsame,  Eban Paegan ).

 

1. GotoWebinar

 

 

GotoWebinar is currently the dominating webinar service. It gives you everything you need to be able to host your own webinars online and it does the job pretty well.

 

We recommend GotoWebinar as the service of choice when you start selling through webinars. There is little to be done about the cost which can run up to $399+ per month if you want to be able to get the maximum number of attendees.

 

However, if you are running webinars with the maximum numbers then you should easily be able to recover that cost from just a single webinar so the cost shouldn’t be much of a factor.

 

However, if cost is an issue you can look into other webinar options

 

Pros:

• Currently as good as it gets for webinars.

Cons:

• Expensive, going over $399 per month for 3000 attendees.

 

2. Webinar Jam

 

 

WebinarJam is a webinar solution that runs based on Google Hangouts. It does a fairly good job, and since it integrates with Google Hangouts, the price is similarly lower.

 

While we highly recommend running your initial webinars live multiple times (to be able to create your best and most naturally confident, flowing version), it is entirely possible to automate your webinars within your funnel.

 

You are even able to do it in such a way that it’s nearly impossible for the average attendee to tell that it’s a recording. If you think that it is sneaky, there is nothing wrong or bad about running automated webinars (only when you lie about it).

 

Even Frank Kern has used hybrid versions of automated webinars where the actual teaching part of the webinar is automated, and he just hops on live for the questions and answers after the teaching.

 

Automation saves time and it allows you to make money on autopilot, whether you are working, sleeping or on vacation.

 

Pros:

• Nice interface.
• Easy to use.

Cons:

• Can be buggy.

 

3. Stealth Seminar

 

 

Stealth Seminar is a webinar automation service that fully allows you to automate the entire process of getting leads to opt in to your webinar registration page (so it looks like a real registration page for a live webinar), automated email reminders, automated text message reminders, integration with Keap and Aweber, and automated webinar plays.

 

If you’ve created a webinar that converts highly when you ran it live, there is a good chance it will convert highly even when it’s fully automated.

 

This will save you time and give you the opportunity to run weekly or daily webinars without having to do them live every single time. You’d have to be pretty computer-savvy in order to identify that webinars are not live when they are running through Stealth Seminar.

 

Alternatively  Clickfunnels  also offers a webinar automation integration service.

 

Pros:

• Full webinar automation.
• Text message reminders.
• Fantastic support.

Cons:

• Monthly recurring fee.

 

 

Payment Processors For Your Funnel

The need of a payment processor is only relevant if you plan to sell your own products or services.

 

Paypal is one of the most common online payment processors you can use to sell your products and services, but there are various downsides to using Paypal like high fees, strict regulations and a lack of control over your funds (Paypal can freeze your account for an endless amount of reasons if they see fit to do so and it can be a huge hassle if you end up in this situation).

 

An alternative to Paypal is a service called Stripe which is growing in popularity. Another alternative is opening your own merchant account, allowing you to accept credit card payments directly into your bank account.

 

When your online business gets big enough and makes enough volume, it’s almost essential to get your own merchant account since there can be a huge saving on fees compared to using Paypal or Stripe.

 

However, when you are just starting out it’s fine to use Paypal and there is no need to spend money on setting up an official company and bank accounts.

 

Some useful platforms that you can use to facilitate the process of selling your products and services online are:

 

1. Nanacast

 

 

Nanacast allows you to easily sell products and services that integrate with various payment processing options like Paypal, but also with your own merchant account.

 

The nice thing about Nanacast is that if you are selling recurring billing items, you can create monthly subscriptions and easily change your merchant account information from the back end, unlike Paypal which requires you to cancel a subscription and re-sign up if you want to change the account.

 

This is very important if you ever wanted to sell your business in future because if you have to cancel all your subscriptions and ask them to sign up with the new buyer, you will lose a percentage of your subscriptions (which devalues the worth of your business).

 

Nanacast allows you to easily have affiliates promote your products and services. They will get unique links to promote the products and services you are selling and you have access to detailed reporting and stats of your affiliates and the sales they are making for you. It is a little pricy at $97 per month but worth every penny if you’re doing large volume sales.

 

Pros:

• Easy to use.
• Good reporting.
• Affiliate integration.
• Third party integration.

Cons:

• Monthly recurring fee.
• Bad checkout templates.

 

2. JVzoo

 

 

JVzoo is mostly a marketplace for digital products and recurring billing items. It integrates with Paypal and easily allows you to have affiliates with an instant payment option (meaning that the affiliate is automatically paid as soon as they make a sale).

 

It has better features than Paypal in terms of reporting and checkout processes, with options for one-click upsells, product deliver- bility and so forth.

 

There are no monthly fees so that is a benefit compared to Nanacast. The only downside is that due to the popularity of JVZoo in the internet marketing community, there are a lot of low quality products that are sold through the platform. This doesn’t have to affect you but there is a chance that people associate JVZoo with low quality products.

 

That being said, you can use JVZoo successfully with no problem at all

 

Pro:

• Integrates with Paypal.
• Automatic dimesale setting.
• Instant affiliate payouts.

Cons:

• Could be associated with low quality internet marketing products.

 

 

 

Check more article:

10 Best Digital Marketing Courses 2021 [ Updated ]

How Do I Start A Dropshipping Business In 2022

Email Marketing For ECommerce: The Definitive Guide

8 Tips For Writing A Copy That Make People To Take Action

 

 

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