Leigh Burke's Blog – make money online

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “Sales Funnel”, then strap yourself in, as this post is going to be a revelation to you and your online business.

If you’re trying to sell medium to high ticket items in the range of $200 – $3000 to your customers without a sales funnel, then this information is going to be especially pertinent.

The concept of a sales funnel is having very low priced or free products available at the top of your so called funnel to attract prospects.  Some companies will go as far as losing money with their initial product sale to attract a customer, because the know that they will be able to sell higher priced items to them on the back-end.  For that reason, these initial product sales are sometimes called loss-leaders.

In respect to losing money or offering free product on the front-end or initial sale, you need to know the potential lifetime value of each customer.  The only way to know this is to track and test your conversion rates for up-sells, cross-sells and all product sales on the back-end.

So firstly, you need to look at creating a low priced item that you can use as your loss leader on the front-end, or at the very top of your sales funnel.  The top of a funnel is the widest part, and therefore will attract the largest amount of customers to your offers.

The types of products you should look at creating are an ebook, a video series or an audio on the topic that your products relate to.  So for example if you specialise in selling golf clubs, you could offer a free ebook on how to improve your golf swing.  This would attract the right type of people to your offer.  The reason we go for ebooks, videos and audio is that they can be freely and automatically distributed via email and the web.

The psychology behind giving away a cheap or free product at the top of the sales funnel is that people will get a chance to do business with you.  They can essentially dip their toe in the water and test it out with little or no risk.  This is your chance to wow them, to show that you can offer high quality products and exemplary service.

This is the start of your relationship with this customer, so first impressions count.  After this first transaction, you will have built some good-will and your customer will start to trust you.  They will also be familiar with you and your company.  Remember – people buy from people they know and trust.

After your first transaction with your customer, you should always get their email address, and opt them into your auto-responder series.  If you don’t have an auto-responder, don’t worry for now, I’ll be showing you how to set this up in a detailed blog post in a couple of weeks. Make sure you stipulate that when the customer gives you their email you will be adding them to your list and sending them some more great information over the coming weeks and months.  Most people are okay with this.  After all, they’re interested in what you have to say and offer.  They can always opt-out of your email list any time by simply clicking a link at the bottom of the emails you send them.

Now be sure to have 1-2 emails pre-loaded on your auto-responder to go out immediately and every week thereafter.  This way you will be able to maintain the relationship with your customer and to continue to build trust and good will.  Your list is going to become your most valuable tool in the coming months and years as you build the number of people o your list and the relationship you have with them.  These people will become your customers, friends, advocates and affiliates as you launch new products in the future.

You need to treat your list with the utmost respect.  Don’t go spamming them with sales offer the day after they sign up.  They’ll unsubscribe faster than you can say “Wha…”.  Remember, keep the lifetime value of your customer in mind, and that you have to demonstrate that you can offer quality products and exemplary service before they put their hand in their pocket to pay you anything.

The next level down within your sales funnel is normally a $50 – $200 priced product.  This could be another bigger ebook with more information that builds on the original product.  It could be a longer video series, or an audio recording of interviews with experts in your chosen niche.  If at the higher end, it may be a physical product like a DVD, MP3 player pre-loaded with content or a physical book or manuscript that is sent to your customers home.  Shortly I’ll be doing a blog post showing you exactly how to create high quality products from scratch in less than a week (often way less).

The final layer down within your sales funnel are your very high priced ticket items.  These could be entire DVD courses ranging in price anywhere from $500 – $3000.  This category also includes seminars and boot-camps.  These are events where your customers attend a physical training course and learn directly from you and other experts.  These higher ticket items require a lot more effort and coordination to pull off successfully, but obviously the rewards are there when you do.  Over the next month, I will be recommending some resources to help you get started with setting up these kinds of events or creating these high end courses.

Finally, worth a special mention are recurring ticket items.  These are often called continuity programs because your customers pay a monthly fee to participate.  These products almost exclusively relate to membership sites where your monthly fee will open up new content.  These are great for training where you cover a new topic every month.  But really a membership site could be for anything.  As long as being a member for that month provides value above and beyond what the customer is paying, they will continue to subscribe.

Inherently, people will drop out of your continuity programs, so the name of the game for these is RETENTION.  You need to do all that is humanly possible to retain the customers that you have.  You do this by providing outstanding quality in your products and exemplary service.  Having a successful membership site can provide the lifeblood for your business and the all important cash-flow to pay wages, and invest in other projects.  Check out my post on how to setup a butterfly marketing script, and grab a free copy of Mike Filsaime’s butterfly marketing script to setup your membership site.

That’s it for today.  I hope you got something out of this.  If you haven’t got your sales funnel in place, start getting it setup today and watch your base of satisfied customers expand and grow.

Leigh.