Have you ever wondered why people are not buying something from you?
You might think that you’re doing everything you can to promote your products – whether your own products or any affiliate products.
You’re promoting them in your blog posts, sidebar, email newsletters, and let’s not forget about social media.
But, do you really believe you’re doing enough?
Let me tell you, you’re doing MORE than you need to be doing and you’re getting results less than you expect to be getting.
The only reason is that you don’t know how to automate and you’re afraid to try different things.
Whether you’re a blogger, online biz owner or an e-commerce store owner you need to automate your sales in order to make more money by spending less time.
Wasn’t that the whole point of doing everything?
That’s where a sales funnel comes into play.
Evergreen sales funnels can help you automate your sales and get you more freedom to do what you actually want to do.
In this post, I’m going to show you what a sales funnel really is & how you can build one in just 5 simple steps.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is just a process comprised of a set of steps from the beginning of getting traffic to a landing page to the end till a part of that traffic makes a purchase.
Its name “funnel” comes from the way of representing it through a diagram.
Your sales page solely is often not enough to convince your website visitors to buy your products.
That is why, we create sales funnels in order to engage those visitors and influence them in a proper way to buy the product.
It often gets overwhelming and exhausting for most of the bloggers and online biz owners when it comes to the sales funnels because they have a lot different moving steps.
But it doesn’t always have to be complex and I’m going to show you how.
The very simplest funnel looks like this and comprises of the 5 steps that we’re going to discuss in detail.
Let us build your own evergreen funnel in just 5 easy steps.
Step 1: Start at the end of the sales funnel
I know this might sound controversial to many people out there but this is how a great funnel is built – by starting at the end i.e. the RESULT.
Ask yourself – What is the result that you want to deliver to your customers?
And I’m not talking about just delivering the product but the FINAL RESULT.
For example, let’s assume you’re selling a course called “get your first 1000 subscribers”, then your result would be getting those 1000 subscribers for your customers and not just delivering the course.
You need to figure out what your final result would be and how you’re going to deliver it…
After that only you can move on to the next step.
Step 2: Knowing Your Audience
For your sales funnel to be really effective, you need to understand your audience really well.
For that, you need to figure out –
- What are their pain points?
- What are their interests and expectations?
- Which social media(s) do they spend their most time on?
- What do they hate about shopping online or paying for a service online.
The list of questions may or may not vary according to the result you want to deliver.
But the more you know about your audience the better it will be.
Knowing your audience better will help you to understand:
- How to position your brand + product in a unique way
- Where can you find your audience
- How to address their pain points in an effective way
Creating Buyer Personas
We all know that not every customer is the same.
Their buying journeys and motivations for buying something may differ from customer to customer.
You can further create different and accurate buyer personas based on:
- Why do they want to buy your product?
- How are they going to use your product?
- What motivates them to buy a product?
Looking at the details is what differs a successful marketer from the unsuccessful ones.
You can easily personalize and enhance every customer’s experience by grouping them into a relevant user persona.
Step 3: Create a free + shorter version of the product
Once you know your audience and what they actually want, you’ll need something to attract them into your funnel.
This is what we call a freebie – a free and shorter version of the product that promises to deliver a part of the final result.
Read that again, each and every word…
The freebie should be valuable and MUST deliver a part of the final result in order for the sales funnel to be successful.
Now it can be anything from a simple ebook to en email course, as long as it provides value and delivers what it promised to deliver.
Till now, all the backend parts of the funnel are ready and now we’ll move on to frontend parts.
Step 4: Set up a Landing page
A landing page is a specific page of your website where your target audience will land after clicking on the link that you’ll be promoting for your free product.
It is one of the most important parts of your sales funnel and hence you have to make sure that it looks great.
Keep these few things in mind while creating your landing page –
- It has a catchy headline
- It describes all the benefits of your free product effectively, especially the main result they’ll be getting
- It must have a clear call-to-action
- The sign-up button should be large and bold enough
- It should be simple yet attractive
- There should not be any sort of distraction on the page
- The sole purpose of the page should be signing up for the free product and all the links should link to that source only
Creating a good landing page takes time + testing stuff and you should not settle for a conversion rate of less than 20%.
Means that, if 100 people visit your landing page then at least 20 should sign-up for the free product.
Step 5: Attracting your ideal customers to your landing pages
Since you already know who your target audience is and where they hang out online, you can easily promote your free product to them.
There are many ways to do that & they might differ with the niche.
One of the best ways is to write a blog post around the topic and include your landing page’s link in it. Then, promote your blog post on social media platforms.
You need to attract the right kind of traffic to the landing page and you need to attract a lot of it to keep your funnel going.
Some other common methods of generating traffic are –
- Blogs
- Collaborations
- Social media platforms
- Search engine results
- Videos – Youtube
- Pay-per-click ads
Once you start getting a consistent amount of traffic, you’ll notice the movement in your sales funnel and you’ll start making a significant amount of sales.
Keep this one thing in mind
While doing everything mentioned above is kind of easy, but what is really difficult is – writing convincing emails after delivering the free product.
If your email copy is not good enough to convince people to click on your link and go to those sales pages then what’s the point of doing all this work?
Right?
For that, you can hire a copywriter to write your emails and pay them hundreds of dollars to write your email copy.
I know a copywriter who charges $1000 per email copy. Trust me, she does!
Or you can take the easy path and grab these fill-in-the-blank email templates from here for as low as a price of coffee and start using them in your funnels for promoting your own products or any affiliate products.
These are the exact templates that are used by me and many of the successful bloggers & online biz owners to create an evergreen sales funnel.
Final words
Sales funnels don’t have to be complex. Keeping it simple but effective works well enough.
Never forget that you need to keep the momentum of your funnel going.
This will not only bring you sales but will also build your email list for your future launches and promotions.
Also, read – How to build a responsive email list
Remember that, you have to work in order to make your funnel work.
It’s not like “CREATE AND FORGET”.
You have to constantly work hard to improve your conversion rates by tweaking one or the other thing.
With this in mind, have you created your first sales funnel yet?
AUTHOR BIO
Rahul Choudhary is an Indian blogger & creator of yourblogmentor.com. He is known for his obsession to help fellow bloggers & online biz owners in making their passions profitable and popular. He is also known as their online buddy cum mentor.