How can a Sales Funnel Help Your Business?
Instead of telling you for myself how great sales funnels can be for your business, I reached out to some amazing and influential entrepreneurs who use sales funnels, to tell you fro themselves why they use Funnels.
Here are some quotes from some of the Most Influential Entrepreneurs who Rock Sales Funnels in their Businesses.
Jessica Rodriguez – Daydream Achievers
“Sales funnels allow me to consistently and passively generate multiple streams of income in my business. Because of this, I can spend more time enjoying the life I’ve created, knowing my business is still growing – on autopilot.”
Jennifer Lehner Posner – The Front Row
“The single most impactful things that sales funnels have done for my business is anchor all the content I create. By that I mean that when I spend a lot of time creating a thoughtful, well-researched and designed piece of content, I never have to feel that it is in vain. That is because while it may sit on my blog, it’s also part of a bigger picture…a funnel that in the end, leads to more customers and more sales.”
Shannon Tice Lavenia – ShannonLavenia.com
Sales funnels enabled me to reach a broader audience, 10x’d my lead flow and increased my sales by over 50%. They also helped me reduce the amount of time I spend in my business because I’m able to sort more.
Trivinia Barber – Priority VA
“My business, at the start was largely based on referrals, which was great. Four years into it, and we’re still getting them, however, what I’ve realized is that having a sales funnel takes the control from the referrer and puts it in your hands. I can scale, or slow down my business as I’d like. I’m also able to prequalify only the right client for sales calls with our team. I can nurture my team, my clients and my followers to get them to the finish line that is right for them, even if it means that’s not us. Not having a sales funnel is like trying to cross the Atlantic in a canoe. You may get somewhere, but it’s going to take a long time, and your journey will be rough.”
Jenn Scalia – Visibility Strategist at Jenn Scalia
Having a working and profitable sales funnel in place has allowed me to create predictable revenue in my business, specifically for my recurring monthly membership. I know exactly how much I can spend on advertising to acquire new members and we have new members rolling in each week with the funnel. This allows me to have more free time to actually serve my paying customers and clients because the nurturing of new leads is pretty much on autopilot.
Erin Chase – $5 Dinners & FreezEasy
“Having our own products and memberships with traditional sales funnel and personalization has allowed us to connect with our interested customers where they are and help meet their needs and solve their problems. They have allowed us to further diversify our revenue streams and have become a core part of our business systems and processes. Being able to automate the funnels and track people as they move through them has helped us accomplish more and earn more revenue.”
Michelle Ellis – Organic Copywriting
“The most impact I’ve received in my business has been the connections that derived from the sales funnels I created for my business. In my funnels, I make sure to nurture my subscribers, and I always offer a way to connect either through my Facebook group or through a free session to get clear on the support they need for their business. By adding funnels, it’s helped to simplify this process for me, so that I’m not having to take the time to reach out to hundreds of potential clients at a time, and it makes my personal follow up that much easier. The potential clients who seek me out are the ones I’m meant to work with. Funnels have also helped to automate my selling by adding low-end tripwires, and having passive income is a real relief.”
James Smiley – 7-8 Fig. Growth Advisor
“Online sales funnels have allowed me to grow multi-million dollar revenue streams for various $10M to $100M companies and one Fortune10 company. Online is the future of sales…”
The first step – Keep it Easy.
Don’t try to go all buck wild and build a big complicated funnel with a million steps and try to tie in all 10 of your products (if you have that many).
Start with one simple and easy funnel. Do not over complicate it. Get fancy later as Amy Porterfield would say.
Let’s get started on an easy to build funnel.
Product/Opt-in
Create a lead magnet to get people on your email list. You likely have one of these if not, think of what you can offer your customers/clients that would be a quick helpful win for them. Create your opt-in using Canva, Word, Powerpoint or outline it and have a VA help you design it. Decide how to deliver the opt-in to your list. From hosting the opt-in on Google Drive to setting up Leadpages for them to deliver it for you. These are my favorite two. Some other options are Amazon S3 or other cloud storage options that you can share with others. You don’t want to send your opt-ins as an attachment to your email since a lot of the email services will block emails with attachments, especially from emails that have not interacted before. Send links!
Landing Page w/sign up
Set up a Landing Page. This is a webpage that people will land on, and sign up for the opt-in on. Usually a webpage you make with your website (WordPress), Wix has some landing page templates to use, some email CRMs have landing page templates, Leadpages and Clickfunnels are another place you can create landing pages. The link to this page is going to be plastered all over your website, on social media accounts, in bios, within your blog posts at least 3x and on all your website pages – from the header to the footer. Provide so many options for people to sign up, so they see it often and eventually take you up on the offer.
Thank You Page
Set up a Thank You page, and tell your readers what to expect: Look for the email with the freebie in your inbox, Check out our Social Media pages (give them links). Bonus Points: Make a Welcome Video! Videos are a nice touch. Don’t make it long, brief, hello and thank you for joining us. You’ll hear from me X number of times in your email inbox, for now look for the email with {Insert Your Freebie Name}, add us to your safe senders/white list to ensure you get all of our updates and news.
Add a link to the Opt-in everywhere:
- Sidebar on website pages/blog pages.
- Think Top, Middle and Bottom of all your blog posts going forward and go back and update any of your cornerstone or pillar content posts currently on your blog.
- FB Pinned Post (on your biz page and in your group, if you have one)
- Create a FB Cover image that promotes your opt-in.
This will ensure it is easy for people to sign up to get your opt-in. Now we can move along to the email sequences that really do all the hard work.
Email Sequence: the 5 golden emails to warm up your audience and end with your offer.
This is the true magic of the subscriber funnel. This is where you really must make an impression and start engaging with subscribers. These emails are responsible for fast tracking your sales and lead your audience on the journey to discovering who you are and how you are going to help them.
Welcome and Delivery Email
Storytelling to connect with subscribers
Asking for feedback to engage
Leave them coming back for more
And talk about your offer.
Regular emails/follow-up (80% Value only; 20% pitches).
Regular communication with your audience is vital to keep top of mind and make sure your audience thinks about you regularly. Whether you call it a weekly email or newsletter. The more you pitch and try to sell to this audience the less engaged your audience will remain. Pack your communication with free value, and they’ll not only stick around, but they’ll look forward to what you have to say.
This basic sales funnel does most of the footwork to get your new audience engaged. It’s easy to start with and get up and running. Take one step at a time when you are setting it up, so you are not overwhelmed and trying to do all the pieces at once. That will bog you down. Download the checklist to help you through the process.
Grab the Free List Building Funnel Blueprint and get your Golden Emails set up and sent out.
I also created a Simple Funnel Checklist to help you build your own! Click here for the Checklist
