MBA1606 How To Create Your First Sales Funnel

Okay, does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy QPC, some McNuggets and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now so you do what you want.

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Framing it as a magic bullet now, sales funnels are effective. It's not the only thing you're gonna need in your business, but it'll definitely help bring in new customers Today. I wanna clear out the noise and give you a simple step by step guide on creating your first sales funnel. No hype, just easy to follow strategies. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. For those who are new to the term sales funnel, a sales funnel is a process that takes your customer by the hand, step by step, giving them the right information and education to make the decision to buy. Every sales funnel ends with a sale. Hopefully that's what you're looking for. You want the customer to actually buy. Not everybody that enters your sales funnel is going to buy, but presenting the process is important so you can get buyers. Now the reason why it's called a funnel. Think about a funnel that you use to, you know, change the oil in a car. It's quite wide at the top and it gets thinner at the bottom. So that means a lot of people will be joining the funnel from the beginning, but not so many will end up buying. And that's okay because it's a numbers game. You want to make sure that you increase your percentages. So Even if it's 10 or 15% of the people that join your funnel buy, that's a great percentage, and it's a formula you can use and optimize. The best way for me to illustrate the effectiveness of a sales funnel is to describe what it's like not to have one. Without a sales funnel, you're just telling people to go to your website, read the information there, maybe watch a video or two, and go ahead and buy. That's really it, just one step. Go to the website, buy. That's like asking somebody to marry you on the first date. It's not impossible. They'll say yes, but the likelihood is quite low. A sales funnel has many steps and allows you to nurture your audience and gradually sell them on why your products or services can help and benefit them and lead them to the sale. So what I want to do is to walk you through a very simple, step by step sales funnel that you can build today with very little expertise, with very little technical knowledge, something that you can really just build out in a weekend. Of course, you can buy a piece of software like ClickFunnels or LeadPages or some other website builders that will build sales funnels for you. You'll still need to modify them, write the copy, all that kind of stuff, so they can convert. But I'm here to tell you that what I'm gonna explain today is actually quite easy. And you may not need to invest in any new software. Your existing website might be able to do what I'm asking you to do today. So let's walk through the steps. The first step is we want to create a simple landing page. A landing page is basically a page that somebody will go to, and they only have one option, and that's to give their email address in exchange for something else. There's no header menu, meaning that they can't go and see other things or leave the page. And the page is actually maybe quite short, maybe very minimal. Scroll, maybe no scroll. The point here is that you want to offer somebody a compelling freemium product in exchange for their email address. Your whole job here is just to collect the email so that you can later give them more information and build that relationship and, you know, start communicating with them regularly. So step one is we're gonna build a Landing page, maybe your website already has this where you can just put an opt in box so they can give their email address. The point here is that you wanna make sure you're giving something of value. So if you tell people on Instagram, hey, go to this page and you're gonna get XYZ This XYZ needs to be something that people actually want. Whether it's a video course, which I found really optimizes conversions, really does well, whether it's a PDF guide. If the guide actually has information that people really want, it's worth it. If it's just generic, they're not gonna like it. Whether it's access to the freemium version of your software, whatever it is, you're giving them something of value for free. Technically it's not free because they're actually giving their email address, which is access to their inbox, which is valuable to you. So let's make sure we give them something great in exchange. So in that landing page, we're gonna say, hey, I'm gonna give you this. All you gotta do is sign up here, you give your name and email address and the next step is you're going to, of course, link that landing page with your email marketing software. Whatever email marketing software you have. This is very simple. Whether it's ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft or Mailchimp or SendinBlue or any of those, you can definitely use this. Just put that registration form, that opt in form, that sign up form right on the landing page. And then the next thing you're going to do is send them an email automatically when they sign up with your email marketing software saying, hey, thanks for signing up. Here is what I promised. Whether it's a downloadable, whether it's a link to the video you're talking about or a page that has a video, or access to the video course, or access to your software that you're offering for free. Now they're on the email list and you are done with step one of the sales funnel, which is a huge step. And this is really what you're trying to do here, is get them on the list with great value, of course, and you're gonna build on that value. So we're gonna give them great value, we're gonna build trust with that value, but it's not enough. We have to continue to build trust, we have to continue to add value. So we're gonna build a sequence of emails, we're gonna write three additional emails to that, you know, value delivery that Initial value delivery for the opt in email. The second email is going to be very simple. You're going to share with them your number one blog post, your most popular blog post. If you don't have a blog, Your most popular YouTube video, your most popular podcast episode, your most popular whatever, even if it's a guest post that you wrote, give them something valuable of content to chew on again for free. We're not asking for any sale right now. We're not asking them to buy anything. We're not asking them to do anything. The point here is we want to continue to build on a relationship, build trust and show them, hey, I can really help you. Here's some great information. Now, you obviously want to share and give them things that are aligned with your products and services, aligned with what they would be interested in buying with you later on. So that's email number two. Email number three, a short email with the subject line, quick question, right? And this email says, what are you currently struggling with when it comes to X? And X is your area of expertise, Health, fitness, business, whatever your business is about. Now, this is a very powerful email because it does a couple things. Number one, it creates engagement. They're going to read this email. It's very short and sweet. They're going to reply to it. And replying is like magic for email marketing because by replying to an email, you're telling your email marketing provider, you're telling the email services like Gmail and Yahoo that this email, your company, is legit. It's not spam, it's not even promo. It's actually a real email. So you're going back and forth, is going to go straight to the inbox if you reply. So they're going to reply. And yes, you're going to get some emails in your inbox, but that's okay. You can answer those really quickly on your phone, you can dictate, and you could just give some quick advice, or you can point them to great articles on your blog or resources that you have that that can help them with their struggles. And you know your industry, most people are struggling with the same three or four things and you can help them out with those great pieces of content that you've cultivated. All right, now, email number four, you're gonna invite them to a live webinar. This is a great, great, great opportunity. Cause you're gonna say, hey, I'm running a live webinar. Go ahead and register here. You can ask me many questions. We're gonna give a free workshop. We're gonna be covering xyz. This is why you don't wanna miss it. So that's the fourth email. Now let's move on to the next step. You're on the live webinar and you're going to give amazing value with this webinar, right? You're going to teach them something that's really going to help them. They're going to really change their mindset or change their habits or change the way they're doing something in their business incorrectly. You're going to get some clarity. They're going to build some real rapport and real trust because they're going back and forth. Webinars are a trust building machine. I'm a big fan of webinars, obviously. I'm the founder of Webinar Ninja and I've been doing it for over eight years. I've run over 500 webinars and it's for a reason, because they work. So I highly recommend you do this as your next step. And then of course, at the start of the webinar you could say, hey, thanks for joining the webinar. And when you tell them what you're going to be covering in today's workshop, mention at the end of the workshop I'll be giving a special offer, sharing with you one of my products, one of my services that can really help you take XYZ to the next level, allow you to implement XYZ with far greater ease and more accountability, whatever it is. And on the webinar this is when you make your offer. This is when the first time you're selling. So you could see how many touch points we had before we actually sold. We had the initial opt in, then we had the first email, then the second email, then the third email, then the webinar invite and then the actual webinar workshop. And then we say, hey, we've been through a few conversations, we've gone back and forth on email. I've given you great value. I think you're ready to take the next step and invest in this product or service that you're offering. After the webinar you can send the replay. In your replay email, you could definitely go ahead and offer them the offer that you mentioned on the webinar or a alternative offer or a secondary offer. And of course you can follow up with them with email sequences later on, even three days after the webinar and maybe give them a lower based offer. Maybe they're not ready to make that big commitment. Maybe they can make a smaller commitment. If you are wondering if this is complicated to run a webinar or if it's easy to create these email sequences that follow up with webinar attendees with the replays and all that kind of stuff. It's dead simple. You can take our free course over at webinar ninjas, a seven part course called your webinar blueprint. It's at webinar ninja.com course and there we walk you step by step how to create a webinar and our tool. Of course Webinar Ninja will take care of all the heavy lifting when it comes to all the technical things including sending out your replays and replay emails and follow up. So as you can see, this is a very simple thing you can do to set up your landing page, Give the opt in, deliver the opt in. Write four emails in sequence and you want to stagger these four emails over the course of I say 10 days. So give enough time for them to digest the information to get to know you. You don't want to hit them over the head too hard. Every day over 10 days, send them four emails. That way by two weeks they're attending the webinar and two weeks is a long enough time for them to build enough trust with you through your content, through your information, through your back and forth on email, through the engagement of the webinar for them to commit and say, hey, let me give these people a try. Let me buy their product or service. Okay?

Does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy cute PC, some McNuggets and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now so you do what you want.

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Today'S lesson, I wanted to outline a very simple sales funnel that works. Something that's basic, something that's going to make it easy for you to get the ball rolling. And to start with and say how can I optimize this, optimize that, Increase conversion rates here, there, make sure I get the right clients and get them on my webinars. You can get a whole lot more complicated. You can also research this to oblivion and beyond and never get a sales funnel under your belt. I did today's lesson so you can get started. You have something to go with to optimize, to improve instead of having nothing at all. It's very easy to go into research mode analysis, paralysis. There's no reason for that. Get started right now with something simple like I just laid out so that you can actually get the ball rolling. Start making sales and start building your user base, your customer base and start nurturing your customers. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, go ahead and follow us on instagram over@instagram.com the100nba. We share exclusive content there, share some exclusive audio clips and you'll be on the up and up on the latest on the 100 NBA. So go ahead and follow us on Instagram. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. A lot of people think that more complex is more sophisticated, is more effective, is more closer to perfection. No, I actually believe that the simpler the model is, the simpler the funnel is in this example, the the easier it is for you to identify what's going right and what's going wrong. But when you have so many moving parts and so many steps and so many things going on, it's hard to know what is causing it not to work or causing it to be successful. So you can double down on it. So starting simple allows you to perfect the model first and then add more pieces as you know what works and what doesn't. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check in tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

Dear McDonald's, your breakfast menu Fire tens across the board. I could be happy with anything even though I order the same thing every time. Thanks for not judging me. I'll try something new next time.

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