How to Create an Effective Online Sales Funnel for Your Business in 7 Easy Steps.

2. Before I jump into this month’s topic, let me start my saying,
“You’re invited!”
On Friday, September 12th, I will host a webinar related to
this month’s column: How to Create an Effective Online Sales
Funnel for Your Business in 7 Easy Steps. PBN readers can
join the webinar free of charge. Sign up here:
http://goo.gl/IoJlfZ

3. Incidentally, I typically use GoToWebinar for online presentations.
GoToWebinar is to de facto standard for such things. But recently I saw
someone use Google Hangouts for their webinar and it went really well
– despite some 500+ people attending. We can save $99/month by
moving to Hangouts and enjoy added benefits along the way. Perhaps
we will visit that topic in a subsequent column.
For now, let’s focus on how to use the web for lead generation. In last
month’s column, we took at look at services like LeadPages.net and
how we can rapidly build squeeze pages, or landing pages, to
encourage the user to provide their name and email in exchange for
something, like a free download.

4. If you think about, we spend a lot of time opening and reading email.
So although social media is sexy and new, good old-fashioned email
marketing still rocks. Regardless of your market space, you should
invest the time and energy to harvest those emails and curate your
email lists. The goal is use the emails to generate even more sales.
For example, you should have email lists for employees, former
employees, people who want to work for you, current customers,
customers who haven’t purchased from you in a while, prospects,
leads, vendors, etc. Each list deserves a different email message and
each message requires it’s own list. Don’t send generic emails to
generic email lists. That’s a waste of resources.

5. Over the last few weeks I’ve been testing lead generation techniques
and I have learned a few very interestings things. And I want to share
them with in this month’s column.
Squeeze pages are effective. You should definitely start playing with
that tactic. The problem is not all prospects are equal. Some are better
potential clients than others. To ensure the best return on your
investment, you should focus on the “A” prospects. We can save the
“B’s” for later. And we won’t worry at all about the “C’s.”

6. The other problem with generic squeeze pages is people aren’t stupid.
If you’re like me, you probably have 2-3 different email accounts. One is
for work, one is for home, and the other is a throwaway. So when I am
prompted for a bribe in exchange for an email, I usually don’t provide
my work nor home email addresses. Those are coveted. Instead, I use
the throwaway – which I seldom open.

7. As you can imagine, a prospect’s throwaway email is useless for email
marketing. You want the home or work email. You want the email
address that is opened daily because you have something important to
share. Note: Many businesses are shy about email marketing. They
don’t want to annoy their base. I agree. We don’t want to send spam.
But if you offer a good product or service, doesn’t it help your
customers live a better life? Don’t you want your customers to have a
better life? The key is positioning – to give your customers what they
need in a way that’s genuine and sincere. The goal is sales; and the
mission is to be helpful. There’s nothing spammy about that.
So how do you create an effective sales funnel for your business?
Well, it requires some masterminding and a bunch of testing to get it
right, but here’s what you do:

8. 1.Determine which space you want to dominate. Don’t try to be all
things to all people. The first impulse for most marketers is to chose a
hugely popular search phrase. The problem with high volume search
terms is they tend to be too broad and too competitive. Instead, run a
campaign based on a highly specific search phrase with far less
competition. The best place to start is listing the types of questions
prospects usually ask you when considering your products and services.
So in my industry, instead of targeting an ultra competitive search
phrase like ‘web design companies’ I might instead focus my campaign
on ‘how much does a new web site cost.’ Fewer competitors, higher
conversions, and higher ROI.

9. 2.Think about how you can segment your prospects. This is the part
where you reverse engineer the sales process. You probably sell a range
of products and services. You may want to select the higher margin
ones for now, but you still need to get the right sales message to the
right prospect. If I capture someone in my funnel who is asking ‘how
much a does a new web site cost’, I need to map the sales cycle
backwards based on the types of websites we sell. A new e-commerce
site is a different product and requires a different sales cycle than a
simple brochure-type site.

10. 3.Create a landing page with an explainer video that encourages the
prospect to take a survey. This step is critical. The point is not to say
something like, “To serve you better, take the survey below.” You have
to be much more persuasive than that. Basically, the prospect needs to
realize that he/she runs the risk of making the wrong the decision
and/or missing a valuable opportunity by NOT answering the self-discovery
questions. Motivate the prospect to take a few micro
commitments. Once they have taken a few small steps, it’s easier for
them to take bigger action. You also want to be sure the overall
message is convincing enough for prospects to relinquish their real
email addresses, not the throwaways. In the example ‘how much does a
new website cost’, the info I need to collect and thus engineer into the
survey includes: name, email, type of site they want, number of
products (if e-commerce site), samples of sites they like, and budget.

11. For other industries, e.g. health care, you can imagine gender and age
may be important capture fields since healthcare is different for men
versus women and young versus old.
4.Integrate the survey with merge fields. Essentially what you are
doing is gathering intelligence. You are using pay-per-click advertising,
social, search engine optimization, etc to drive qualified traffic to your
landing page and then you are motivating the user to complete the
survey. The info you collect with the survey is extremely valuable for
two reasons. One, you can serve the product or service based on the
prospect’s answers. Two, you are now building a database of warm
leads with real data attached to them.

12. 5.Setup auto-responders for each segment. Using email platforms
like AWeber and MailChimp, you can set up an automated stream of
sales pitches with each message custom- tailored for each prospect.
The auto response sequence needs to be thoughtfully engineered so
the user feels like, “Holy moly! This is perfect for me.”

13. If you stop and think about it, online sales funnels make a lot of sense.
Based on our experiences in the brick-and-mortar world, we know
selling to a group of people is more efficient than selling one-to-one.
We also know we need to send the right salesperson for the right job
since one salesperson may be more qualified to sell a particular product
or service than another. We know the sales cycle may require several
“touches” in order to seal the deal. And finally, we know it’s more
profitable to sell a current customer more products and services than to
go find a new customer to sell.

14. Online sales funnels can help us do all this by providing a low-cost,
highly effective way to generate sales without working so hard.
To learn more about how you can create online sales funnels for your
business, join our webinar on the Friday, September 12th. It’s free for
PBN readers: http://goo.gl/IoJlfZ

15. Call Us: 1-800-385-3635