You likely know that you’re not going to get make a good living selling just one product. And if this is your first time hearing this, I'm not going to apologize, I'm going to show you the way to make a better living. In order to have a successful business, you need to sell additional products to your existing customers. In other words, you need to set up a sales funnel with a variety of offers at different products, and then promote these offers to your prospects and customers.
Here’s a crash course in how to do it…
Step 1: Design Your Funnel
The first thing to do is decide what products you’re going to give away and sell. A “funnel” is simply your process for making sales in your business.
Digital assets that might be in your sales funnel include:
- A free lead magnet to attract people into your sales funnel.
- A low-cost, high-value tripwire offer to turn your prospects into buyers. I personally hate the term tripwire, so henceforth I will refer to these as “expansion packs” as that fits better.
- Your main business offer aka your core offer.
- Upsell offers.
- A variety of products and services at a variety of price points to sell throughout your funnel. While these may vary widely in pricing, be sure to include premium offers here.
For example, let’s suppose you’re selling weight-loss information. Your funnel might look like this:
- Lead magnet: a set of meal plans and recipes.
- Expansion pack offer: A weight-loss report with 101 dieting tips.
- Core offer: a weight-loss membership site.
- Upsell/cross-sell on the order form: personal nutrition consulting.
- Funnel offers: recipe books, additional meal plans., exercise videos, reports about supplements, personalized diet and exercise coaching/consulting.
If you'd like to learn more about this I recommend this training here and to get the upsell product as well. This will help you focus on your sales funnel and plan it all out with ease.
Now let’s walk through the steps of promoting these offers throughout your sales funnel…
Step 2: Insert Order-Form Offers
Order form offers are also known as “order bumps”. The key here is to offer products and services that will make it even faster, easier and better for customers to get the benefits of the main product. For example, if the main product is a copywriting guide, then a related order bump might be a set of copywriting swipes.
We use and recommend this tool for your sales funnel and order bumps. Not only is it easy to use, it's currently on a lifetime deal, which means you pay for it once. Hurrah! One less subscription each month.
Step 3: Promote Offers in Emails
Be sure to segment your list so that you can send highly targeted content and offers. For example, if someone purchased your copywriting guide, then you can promote a sales page critique via your emails. A lot of business owners get stuck here, so if you need a hand with this book a call and we can talk about how I can help you.
Step 4: Cross-Promote Within Products
Here’s where you insert your offers into your guides, membership sites, and other products. For example, you might have a “Recommended Resources” section inside an ebook that features some of your related products. You might link to your resources page on your blog. You may link to videos where you talk about the resources.
Some business owners feel this is tacky, however, as a busy business owner I'm grateful when someone takes the time to recommend things to me; it saves me time researching tools and products.
Step 5: Promote Wherever You Communicate
Finally, think about other places you communicate with your prospects and customers and promote offers there as well. Examples include:
- Thank you pages.
- Download pages.
- Private customer-only/member-only groups and forums.
- Social media.
- Your blog
You can increase response rates by giving people a good reason to take advantage of an offer, such as offering a limited-time coupon.
One of the keys to a profitable business is to create multiple highly related products and services to sell throughout your sales funnel to existing customers. You can start selling these offers right from the order bump as well as everywhere else where you communicate with your prospects and customers.
For best results, be sure each piece of your sales funnel solves a part of your audience’s problem, because if it doesn't… You won't make any money at all!
