A sales funnel is a series of web pages that converts traffic into customers. It often starts on a sales page for a product or service but can even begin straight to the order form page. A sales funnel often has a series of upsells after the initial purchase.

Whereas marketing funnel starts with an optin page to convert traffic into leads and then educates them to the point of a sale.

First it requires strategic knowledge in terms of how to structure the funnel to capture emails through a lead magnet and lead people through a series of products to purchase your core offering and maximise revenue.

Second it requires the ability to design the pages in a way that will convert the highest, as well as use sales copywriting to convince people to take the action to opt in and ultimately purchase.

Third it also requires technical knowledge in terms of building the funnel and integrating with your payment gateway and your site.

In this post we lead you through how to create your first product or services sales funnel from optin to tripwire through to upselling your core offering.

Now that we know what we're talking about, lets look at how to structure a sales funnel. It all starts with the lead.

A sales funnel typically starts with an optin offer or "squeeze page".

The squeeze page offers a lead magnet is a “free” product where the transaction is someone giving their email address.

A lead magnet can be a free ebook or can be cheat sheets, a guide, a video or a list of resources or tools and swipe files such as facebook ad copy. 

You can take someone to a separate landing page or you can utilize content upgrades.

A content upgrade is a free resource that’s related to the blog post that someone came in on that gives additional information or value, such as a checklist that summarises how to implement what’s in the post. The content upgrade should be short and easy to consume such as a 1-2 page PDF to give someone a quick win for consuming it.

The blog post should "bridge" the knowledge gap that people have in order to appreciate the opt-in offer. Blog content needs to "pre-frame" a lead magnet offer such as tutorials, case studies or ultimate guides or list posts and can even be used as the landing page for paid traffic (vs an ad straight to the optin page).

The next page after someone opt ins is traditionally the "thank you page". However if you're using a thank you page that looks like this you're burning money:

This page is why I struggled to make a money online for years. There is no $ symbol on this page or a buy button.

You can only make money online by having something to sell and leading people to the sale.

By leading traffic to a buy now button.

This is what a sales funnel does. It captures a lead and then immediately shows the first product to the maximum number of people (i.e. everyone).

Digital Marketer in it's visionary "Customer Value Optimization" post states that there are only three ways to grow a business"

Increase the number of customers

Increase the average transaction value per customer

Increase the number of transactions per customer

A sales funnel aims to do all three and the autoresponder sequences are designed to push people further and further through the funnel if they dropped off at any stage.

A tripwire is a low cost product or service that links the email bait to the core offer.

The price is relative to the core offer and is typically 1-10% of the main offer. If the core offer is $497 the tripwire would typically be between $5-$50.

The goal is not to profit from just the tripwire but to lead into upselling higher priced products or your core offer and to change the relationship from a subscriber to a customer. Someone who has already bought is far more likely to buy again and even straight away. Indeed typically 10-25% of people who buy an introductory offer purchase the next (core) offer in a funnel.

By showing a low priced "tripwire" offer straight away after the optin you increases the number of customers buying your core offer you sell directly afterwards (on the very next page).

The tripwire is designed to solve one specific problem really well and like every great offer you need to get across what the before and after state will look and feel like for your prospect. 

Tripwires that do well are online courses (related to the core issue in the lead magnet), one off services such as audits or specific coaching calls, full length books, standalone software (i.e. wordpress plugin) or physical products (such as ski wax…).

The price of the tripwire needs to be so low that there cannot be any rational objection and that the value to price ratio is off the charts. This means that you’re not going to make money with the tripwire itself but it can cover a chunk of your ad spend to get someone into your funnel who is way more likely to buy your core offering.

As you can see it’s ok to sell straight away. As long as the paid offer is congruent with what the subscriber just opted in for then it’s actually helpful to show them something that will create value for them.

You could even go so far as to say that if a product solves a problem someone has then you kinda have a moral obligation to present it rather than holding it back.

People like to be sold when it’s relevant to be sold. If I walk into a Porsche dealership, trust me I want to be sold! I want the full on experience!

Here’s an example of indirect selling on the post optin page:

This is from Entrepreneur On Fire who invites you to a workshop that then pitches their core offer.

What if you don’t have a tripwire?

Alright – you may be thinking “that’s great but I don’t have a tripwire product”

Well you don’t actually have to create any new products or services to do this. Your tripwire and even upsell can actually come out of your existing product or service. We’ve done this several times for customers who came to us with just one product.

For example someone had an ebook plus 2 bonuses in the financial niche. We stripped out the main problem the ebook was selling and turned that into a PDF guide for the tripwire. We then positioned the ebook as the core offer and then the previous bonuses as an upsell.

The result was that average revenue per visitor through the funnel tripled because they weren’t being hit directly with a full priced core offer.

To get a working sales funnel doesn’t have to be a huge amount of product development. It’s more about how you structure a sequence of problem solving offers.

Can you see how this would work for your own business?

The core offer is a product or service that is THE solution to the majority of issues that your customers face.

The price point is 10-20x higher than the introductory offer (tripwire) and the core offer is where you will make the majority of your revenue. 

Typical core offers are monthly or annual membership sites or communities such as the 7 Day Startup Pro community we built a funnel for, online courses (where you can package your intro offers together) or productized services

The core offer is the thing you mention and link to everywhere (blog posts, podcasts, webinars).

If people reach the sales page of the core offer but do not click through to the shopping cart to purchase, you want your autoresponder series to follow up and also retarget them on places such as Facebook to bring them back to the page to purchase.

By stacking two or more products together in a funnel you increase the average transaction value per customer. Within Clickfunnels (the software we use to build all our sales funnels for ourselves and customers) you can create “one click upsells” so that after you get someone’s credit card details (from the first, low priced product) that person can purchase your next product with just one click without entering their details again.

This changes everything!

Our upsell is a monthly support & optimization package for clickfunnels customers

Then finally after all purchases, on the order confirmation page you can even include a button to go immediately into a different, relevant funnel which therefore increases the number of transactions per customer.

You don’t need more traffic to make any of this work and traffic is certainly not hard to get (even though there are 313 million search results for “how do I get more traffic to my website”).

A sales funnel doesn’t care how much traffic you have. It just does it’s job of converting traffic into dollars.

For every 1000 people that visit your site, HOW the funnel is structured will decide whether you make $10 or $10,000, not the traffic.

The key is creating a sequence that enables you to invest $1 in ad spend on the front end and create $2 on the backend.

And once you do this you don’t have to generate “free” traffic by creating blog posts and SEO.

Is your audience on instagram? Hit them up with an ad. Is your product visual? Buy ads on Pinterest. Know those high traffic blogs that your audience also visits? Great, you can now run a banner ad.

What would it be like to be able to invest in advertising? What would it do for your business? How quickly could you scale?