With your landing page in place, what’s next?
With your landing page in place, it is time to construct the rest of your
initial product sales funnel in a way that is going to convince the
maximum number of visitor prospects to subscribe to your list.
This simple expedient of minimizing the number of fresh new prospects
who escape your sales funnel is probably the quickest and easiest way
of doubling or tripling the profits of your business without having to do
anything else whatsoever in terms of marketing or promotion.
In effect, you reduce the ‘leakage’ from your sales funnel, thereby
generating considerably more subscribers and ultimately customers.
From here on in, I will walk you step-by-step through the initial sales
and order process before highlighting several steps they can take on the
back-end of this initial transaction to maximize your revenues.
Finally, having gone through this step-by-step, explaining each
individual step along the way, I will bring the whole thing together into
one integrated package so that you can see how the whole thing fits
together.
Step 1 – Keep as many prospects in your funnel as possible…
When a new visitor comes to your landing page, a proportion are going
to sign up in order to get the free gift (or gifts) being offered without
any further necessity for persuasion.
Obviously, the more valuable the gift or gifts that you are giving away
are perceived to be, the more successful you are likely to be convincing
people to sign up. Thus, it is important that you offer quality gifts and
that you add a specific monetary figure to your landing page as a way
of emphasizing how valuable the gift is.
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Anyone who signs up straight away in this manner should automatically
be added to your prospect mailing list, after which, you automatically
set your autoresponder to immediately redirect them to your initial
product sales page.
However, anyone who tries to click the back button or to close the page
should be hit with a pop-up that offers another bonus gift in addition to
the original one if they subscribe now.
I know that many people do not like pop-up windows but the fact is,
this visitor is leaving your site anyway, so you have absolutely nothing
to lose by doing this.
On the other hand, experience indicates that you have plenty to gain
because a significant number of people will take the additional ‘bait’ of
the extra free gift, adding many more names to your list without you
having to do any more work.
This is what I was referring to when I mentioned minimizing
unnecessary ‘leakage’ earlier – hit them with another free gift offer in a
pop-up, and your subscriber numbers will increase significantly.
When they take the bait, they go into your autoresponder sequence in
exactly the same way as they would have done had they subscribed
originally and are redirected to the initial product sales letter in exactly
the same way too.
Step 2 – The initial product sales process…
When your prospect is presented with your initial product sales page,
they once again have an obvious ‘yes’ or ‘no’ choice to make.
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If they decide that they want to purchase the product by clicking on the
‘Buy Now’ button on your sales page, all well and good, your system
should automatically transfer them to the order page.
If however they decide they don’t want to buy the product and try to
leave the sales page, you should again set your system to present them
with a pop-up window offering the product again, but with an additional
discount attached.
If this manages to convince them to buy a product, then redirect them
immediately to the product order page. If on the other hand they are
still not convinced, try presenting them with a brief survey or
questionnaire asking them why they have decided not to proceed with
the purchase.
Not everyone will complete this survey but those that do will provide
extremely valuable information, information which might enable you to
improve your systems (or perhaps your product) in the future.
Similarly, whilst the majority of people who land on the order page are
likely to complete the ordering process and buy your product, there will
be a few people who ‘dip out’ even at this late stage.
Again, do not be scared of presenting them with a short survey or
questionnaire to find out what prompted their decision to pull out of the
deal at such a late stage in the day.
Quite clearly, this nearly-customer was 98% convinced to make a
purchase but something made them change their mind right at the last
minute. Knowing what this ‘something’ is or was once again provides
you with the kind of information that enables you to improve things.
Your system should be set so that anyone who complete the purchase is
automatically added to your ‘first level’ customer autoresponder mailing
list.
But it doesn’t stop there! In fact, we are only just getting warmed up…
Step 3 – Offer an upgraded version…
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As well as adding the new customer to your autoresponder mailing list,
you should immediately present them with an upgraded version of the
original product that they have just bought that will cost them a few
dollars extra.
This does not have to be anything particularly smart or fancy, because
you can create an upgraded ‘Gold’ or ‘Platinum’ version by adding video
materials if your initial product is an e-book as an example.
Alternatively, you might add additional bonuses which will improve the
usability or effectiveness of the product that your new customer just
bought.
The crucial thing to understand is that at this point, the customer has
just completed their initial purchase, so there is absolutely nothing to
lose by offering an upgrade in this way, and once again, you are
seeking to increase their level of commitment to your business.
They still have their credit card in hand and they are in ‘buying mode’,
so the chances that they will invest a few more dollars in the ‘Gold’ or
‘Platinum’ version of your product are very good.
In this way, you will instantly increase the profits of your business by
setting up your sales funnel system properly from the outset. In effect,
you do the work once but you put extra money into your account time
after time in return for that one-off effort.
There is another less tangible benefit as well.
By having a thoroughly professional sales funnel system in place, you
emphasize to the customer that not only are they dealing with a
professional organization (you may well be running a one-man
operation, but the customer doesn’t know that) but you also make it
very clear that you are running a business that is focused on selling, not
on providing charity or ‘freebies’.
In many ways, this is another aspect of the qualification process in
action.
As you will see in a moment, you have not finished with your sales
efforts yet, and there may well be some customers who become upset
or annoyed by what they might consider to be an overly aggressive
sales attitude.
If this is what they believe, I would suggest that they are wrong
because all you are doing is maximizing the potential of your business,
which is what any professional business person would do. Nevertheless,
there may be some people who become upset and choose to
unsubscribe from your mailing list.
Don’t view this as a negative.
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In fact, view it as very much the opposite, because the fact that they
have chosen to remove themselves from your list in this way indicates
that they would never have purchased from you again in the future in
any event. Keeping them on your mailing list would therefore have been
a complete and utter waste of time and wasting time is not something
that you should be doing.
Step 4 - Making a one-time offer…
Whether the customer decides to accept the upgrade or not, the next
thing to present to them is a one-time offer, a complementary product
or service on which you can make a very attractive offer, usually a
significant discount off the original product price.
However, the reason it is called a one-time offer is that the customer is
only going to be presented with this ‘special offer’ this one time. In this
situation, it is most common for the sales page to indicate that the
customer cannot under any circumstances access this sales page ever
again and that if they need or want to buy this product in the future,
they will have to pay the original (significantly higher) price.
You must therefore ensure that the customer cannot access this page
again in the future, because if they could, it would destroy your
credibility in one fell swoop.
On the other hand, if your one time offer is sufficiently well targeted
and complementary to the product that they bought a few moments
ago, you should again generate plenty of additional sales at this ‘level’
of your sales funnel.
If the customer decides to buy this initial OTO, you should immediately
transfer them to another one time offer the page.
Do not try to collect payment from them at this stage, because having
finalized the payment for the initial product, you do not want to
inconvenience the customer by asking them for another payment every
time they buy an additional product. The worst thing that can happen if
they decide to bail out of this continued process is that you’ll be left
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with nothing more than the original sale and their name on your
customer mailing list, which is a tremendous result in any case, so relax
about payment at this stage.
If the customer accepts the ‘Gold’ upgrade plus an OTO (or two) all of
these products should be invoiced during the final checkout process
rather than on a product-byproduct basis.
If on the other hand the customer decides that they do not want to buy
your initial one time product offer, transfer them to a page where you
offer the same product with a further discount included.
If they accept at this stage, fine, take them to the same (second) one
time offer page that you would have transferred them to had they
accepted this product in the first place.
If on the other hand they still are not interested, you should probably
let it be, because you still have their mailing information and they have
not unsubscribed from your list.
Consequently, whilst you didn’t manage to convince them on this
occasion, you will have many more opportunities of doing so in the
future.
Step 5 - Make another one time offer…
If your customer has accepted the first one time offer that you
presented to them, there is absolutely no reason at all why you should
not offer them yet another complementary product on a one-time offer
basis.
Remember that what you are doing here is twofold.
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Firstly and most obviously, you’re maximizing the income that you are
generating from every individual customer who you are feeding through
this initial sales funnel.
Secondly however, you are pushing the qualifying process along very
rapidly, because with each additional sale, individual customers are
moving themselves downwards through your sales funnel to the point
where they become one of your most valuable customers.
Quite obviously, it is the people that are willing to spend most money
with you that represent your best customers. Hence, by structuring
your initial front-end sales process in the way I am suggesting, you are
automatically fitting your customers into various different layers or
areas of your sales funnel.
So, you present the customer with one final OTO which he (or she)
either takes or leaves.
If they decide to buy this product as well, then you immediately transfer
them to the credit card payment processing page where you collect the
payment for all of the additional products that they have purchased.
If on the other hand they decide not to buy, you make them another
offer of the same product at a cheaper price in the same way as you did
with the first one time offer product.
Here again, they either say ‘yes’, so that you transfer them to the
payment processing page, or ‘no’, in which case, you take one step
back and start sending promotional e-mail messages to them.
However, there is one ‘final sting in the tail’.
After you have processed the final payment, you redirect the customer
to a thank you page where you offer them a premium priced product
such as a $2000 training course or a $5000 residential training boot
camp.
By throwing this into the equation right at the end of the initial sales
trail, you are trying to qualify whether this particular customer is one of
the top 20% on whom you should be lavishing most of your care and
attention.
By following this initial sales funnel model step-by-step, you are
effectively compressing the whole sales funnel idea into this one
transaction chain.
Of course, this compressed initial sales funnel is not meant to replace
the traditional ‘longer term’ idea of building a sales funnel. There will
undoubtedly be people who choose not to buy additional products who
thereby remove themselves from this ‘compressed’ process whilst
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remaining in your longer term sales funnel who you will service by email
and generate additional income from a little further down the line.
So, how does this ‘compressed’ sales funnel model appear in its
entirety?
Like this:
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