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Funnelicious

Wow, snowing again. It’s making me really look forward to the flavors of summertime. One of my favorite summer treats happens to be…

Funnel Cakes

I’ve located this lovely recipe on the Taste of Home site for you.

♥ ♠ Sales Funnels ♦ ♣

While we’re on the topic of funnels, a friend of mine asked me to expand on the idea of sales funnels the other day and I totally dropped the ball (sorry, Brenda). So, here’s me expanding for you.

Put simply, a sales funnel is a journey you take with your prospect to share your knowledge for mutual benefit. ~Me

Simple funnels are seen as Lead Magnet > Front-End Offer > Upsell. There are a variety of tools and techniques that accommodate this simple structure, but the funnel is a lot more than this in reality. The lead magnet is usually there not only to attract someone to a related offer, but to get them on an email list so that you can continue to present content and offers. Depending on how mature your autoresponder sequence is, this aspect of the overall funnel can trail on for days, weeks or months. This has been a staple of information marketing for years now.

More complex funnels include upsells, downsells, bonuses, cross-sells, coupons and one-time offers. There are carrots and sticks to entice and prod people along the path. In fairness, I’ve thrown a bunch of jargon at you so it’s only fair we cover some definitions.

Lead Magnet

Picture the food court at the mall. The lady from Panda Express is walking around with a tray of General Tso’s Chicken and toothpicks for distribution of samples. Why is she doing this? Does the franchise owner get off on giving people free snacks? No. Well, maybe, but no the point of the chicken morsels are a free taste of what’s available at the storefront so you’ll want to have that for lunch.

Likewise, when you walk into the anchor store and the elegant women are just waiting to hose you down with scent. Are they trying to give you an asthma attack? No. Well, maybe some of them might have a sadistic streak, but no the point of the complimentary spritz of perfume is to let you know how it smells on you so you’ll want to buy a bottle of it.

As such, for information marketing, you’re going to give folks a piece of your mind. You want to give them something akin to a movie trailer that gives them a taste of what’s in the full priced product. You might want to give them a quick solution to a specific issue to prove to them that since you can solve simple one-offs, you can be trusted to give robust solutions to complex problems for a reasonable price.

You can provide value in a variety of ways, but the important bit is that you’re giving some kind of a free sample to entice people to your virtual storefront.

Front-End Offer

So, you managed to whet their appetite or spark their interest. Now, you’re making your initial pitch. Whatever it is you’re selling is best if it’s a quick solution to a key problem. Hungry? Here’s a burger. Want to impress that someone special? Here’s some cologne/perfume. Going somewhere? Here’s a suitcase.

Keep it simple and straightforward. Don’t try to be everything to everyone or you’ll wind up being nothing to noone. Solve a key problem and be done with. Making it super-complex will lead to overwhelm and even if you’re giving rock-solid information, the fact that they’re not willing or able to act on it means they’ll think it doesn’t work. That could lead to refund requests and bad reviews. Do one thing and do it well. That’s your front-end offer.

Upsell

Want fries with that? Can we interest you in the replacement insurance? Would you like a scratch-proof case for your phone? These are all examples of upsells that you typically run into. With information marketing, you are going to upgrade the experience for them. Over-the-shoulder videos, case studies, printable checklists, plenty of ways to improve the front-end offer without making it cumbersome.

Downsell

Did the grand total shock you into abandoning the cart? This is why they have meal deals at the burger place. Burger + Fries + Soda a la carte would be $10. Holy heck, I’m not going to pay that! Wait, we have a meal for $7.50 that includes the burger, fries and soda. That’s more like it.

Some people make the mistake of simply knocking down the price in order to save the sale. That’s a problem because it teaches your customers to dig for discounts. It’s also a problem because if you’ve trained people to think that they simply need to dodge the upsell in order to get the thing for the “don’t leave yet” pricing and they might find that they’ve lost the opportunity to have the upsell altogether. No, if you’re going to knock down the price you should also knock down the product a bit.

If I go to rent a car and I balk at the price, they’ll offer me an “economy car”. They don’t offer me the same car for a knock-down, they offer me a different car that doesn’t cost as much. You should do likewise. Whatever you offered in the upsell, you should take away some of the value-adds. It should still be more valuable than the front-end, but it shouldn’t be the exact same offer as the upsell.

Another way that some people do this is with extended rights. An upsell might be a product with Private Label Rights and the downsell might be to have Master Resell Rights. With the former, you can rebrand the product and make it your own. With the latter, you have to sell it as-is. It’s still a value-add but it’s not nearly as valuable as the upsell.

Cross-sell

Another way to offer value is to offer a front-end type of product on a related topic. If you want to buy a book on how to lose ten pounds in a week with HIIT exercises, you might also want a book on how to keep it off with a reduced-fat diet. It’s not an extension of the HIIT exercises and it’s not a video course demonstrating the exercises with beautiful fitness models in really tight outfits, but it is of value in and of itself. You see this on Amazon quite a lot. The entries for “Frequently bought together“, “Sponsored products related to this item” and “Customers who bought this item also bought” are right below whatever you’re looking at.

You can do this in your funnel just as easily. Some people also do this with affiliate marketing. You can offer someone else’s product along the way and get the affiliate commission. If they’re friends of yours, you might even be banking clicks to swap with them. In which case, in exchange for sending your customers to them, you’d be keeping a count and they’d be obliged to send the same number of customers over to you.

One-Time Offer

This was a scarcity tactic that was employed to great effect when people first started setting up automated sales funnels. The initial upsell after the front-end offer was on a page that was coded to only display the offer once. If forfeited, you’d (in theory) never be able to get back to it again.

In many cases, this was just power of suggestion. The assumption was that nobody would actually remember to come back and give it another try. People in the make money online market are typically in a bit of a hypersensitized mania when they first get started because they’re being promised so many get rich quick schemes. Think of Fred Flintstone’s gambling addiction.

As such, beleaguered customers looking for the magic button or Google loophole that was going to shower untold riches upon them with no effort on their part were entirely too addle-brained to think about doubling back and testing just how one-time that one-time offer was. Some people must have done, because some marketers actually came up with page coding that ensured that the one-time threat had teeth. Go back and the offer isn’t even made. You missed the boat. Suxx2BU. Whether they used cookies or actually kept your IP address in their database to prevent the one-time offer from ever being seen again, they actually made the thing a one-time deal.

Scarcity tactics like this are good when used sparingly. They were done to death by everybody and his mother for quite some time. It’s gone back into hibernation for a while, but it will probably come back in vogue as soon as some enterprising programmer comes up with a way to make it one-time for sure and an equally enterprising marketer (possibly the same person) comes up with a less cheesy way of including it in the funnel.

Coupon

In the long funnel that includes email marketing sequences, coupons have been used to good effect in bringing people back to the sales pages. When you offer a coupon of the month or a special deal to celebrate your birthday, anniversary or some random holiday, you can get people who have bought from you to return to the fountain for another drink.

Another coupon strategy I’ve seen is immediate coupons offered by niche merchandise sites. Superhero apparel and collectibles sites, gaming paraphernalia sites and other specialty stores have been offering coupons upon arrival. If you’re already shopping the site, the initial 15% discount on your first purchase seems a tempting reason to actually make it your first purchase. Likewise, since you’re only getting that one coupon (presumably, but will likely get one in a couple of weeks in order to get you back on the site) you might as well max it out by getting a bunch of stuff all at once for 15% off.

Bonus

Another entry in the carrot side of the carrot & stick approach to marketing is the bonus. Bonuses can be added to sweeten the deal or offered and systematically taken away to introduce an element of scarcity. I’ve seen people whose pitch includes fast-action bonuses that are limited in number. This leads to a buying frenzy among those who have already decided to buy whatever is being offered in order to also acquire the few bonus items offered.

This seems to work best with live sales environments such as selling from the stage or in webinars. Once you get to the end of the presentation and they start pushing for sign-ups, the fast-action bonuses are limited in number proportional to the number of people in the audience. If you’ve got 200 people in attendance, 25 slots for the fast-action bonuses is not out of hand. If you’ve only got 30 people in the room, only the most disinterested slackers are going to be left without the bonus that they probably don’t want anyway.

Bonuses can also be used in an automated environment by adding more and more as an incentive to buy for hold-outs or by starting with a couple of them and paring them down incrementally as an incentive not to delay. Bonuses are also commonly used to incentivize cross-sells and straight affiliate pitches.

Ideally, like the lead magnet, a bonus should be some minor item related to the offer in some way. It should add value without being a full upgrade of the product. Being that you’re getting it for free, it shouldn’t be worth the price of an upsell but it should definitely give value.

Self-Liquidating Offer

This is an evolutionary offspring of the one-time offer. Rather than depending exclusively on scarcity tactics, the self-liquidating offer is a one-off offer that supplements the content of the lead magnet and front-end offer. It is related but ancillary and is designed as a loss lead item to draw you into the funnel. Just as the holiday-themed items on the end caps at the department store draw you further into the store so that you’ll be led to the core offerings, a self-liquidating offer is designed to help offset the cost of ad spend. By offering this tangentially useful product, you can make your ad campaign self-funding while making the rest of your funnel products into pure profit.

Behavioral Dynamic Response Marketing

As a former programmer and as a gaming geek, this particular notion really captured my imagination. The idea of creating a programmatically responsive sales funnel is very appealing to me. Take a look at this presentation by Frank Kern.

Okay, I’ll grant that this was just a kind of advertorial to get you to take him up on his funnel setup service. Fair enough. He’s got bills to pay like the rest of us. That being said, the actual presentation leading up to the sales pitch is absolutely spell-binding. An introverted marketer’s dream come true. Setting all that up like a choose your own adventure book is enticing enough, but what he introduced was actually a bit less sophisticated than what he described.

While having yes/no trees in your funnel with individualized scarcity timers is still miles ahead of the typical Lead Magnet > Front-End Offer > Upsell > Downsell configuration, the idea of Behavioral Dynamic Response and an Individual Universe can be expanded upon. Adding elements of gamification, keeping track of items already purchased in order to intelligently steer them toward relevant subsequent offerings, having re-engagement contingencies in the product launch sequence and other ideas can enhance the magnificently complicated machine he described.

Certainly, this is not for the faint of heart and it’s not the end-all, be-all. It is, however, someplace I’d like to get to eventually. The big ol’ Rube Goldberg aspect of it just speaks to me. As one who was among the sleep-deprived, addle-brained, folks who are so often dizzied by the mad circus of internet marketing, I’d like to create something just as engaging but that leads to a positive outcome instead of a lot of wasted time. I’d like every step of my business to be something that enriches people rather than confusing them and ripping them off. I just don’t want to have to do it live. That’s what we have computers for, right?

Quote

Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is not found in finishing an activity but in doing it. ~Greg Anderson

One of the great things about a well-structured sales funnel, particularly the Behavioral Dynamic Response variety, is that it’s a journey for your audience rather than a destination. It’s a journey they take together with you as you share your expertise with them for mutual benefit.

That’s also a really good motto for living life. As much as we might look forward to warmer, sunnier days or our favorite holidays or our kids’ birthdays or whatever, there’s no point in pulling the string. Take time to enjoy where and when you are. Truth be told, one of the greatest miracles of modern society is the availability of goods from around the world. If you want a bit of summertime, you can mix up some funnel cakes turn on some Caribbean tunes and enjoy some tropical fruits at any time of year. You don’t have to wait. You can have Christmas in July. You can have pretty much whatever you want whenever you want if you’re creative. The important thing is that you find the luxury in the moment you’re inhabiting. In cat time, there is only now. As such, there’s no need to pine for summertime or wait for Pumpkin Spice season.

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Mix it up. Pour it out. Fry it up and serve it. Everybody wants some even if they don’t know it at first. Once you take your first bite, good luck walking away!